Rabid Right is the flip side of yesterday's far Left coin

From this morning's Oz: Like all good populist anxiety-mongers, Beck has a lively, engaging and clear-as-daylight personality. He has a light tenor voice with an intimate delivery; eyes that sparkle boyishly; a mouth turned down self-deprecatingly at the edges. There are teary moments, self-revelatory glimpses and instances of genuine indecision. And yet, for all this, there is a calculated recklessness and wantonness of opinion that takes the breath away. Beck is that most disturbing of figures: likably human and sincerely scary, all at once. The model of the pure partisan. There's an old saw to the effect that every grand political movement starts on the Left, only sooner or later to reappear on the Right. And in point of fact, if Beck resembles anyone, it is some charismatic beret-wearer of the 1960s far Left, digging up the Paris paving stones to find the beach, with the small difference that while every impulse and posture is the same, every cause and slogan has been turned, quite simply, on its head. In Beck's universe, like that of the old New Left, every institution is an enemy and every political party corrupt: only grassroots movements, in their elemental purity, can live up to the pristine promise of the people. Because he speaks only from the heart, he demonstrates that virtue comes from within. With his well-told tales of an out-of-control counter-culture mother who killed herself, leaving him to rebuild himself out of the traditional moral verities, Beck is a paragon of identity politics, radical-conservative style. Even his invocation of the Obama White House as a cabal of white-haters is nothing more than Black Pantherism gone into reverse. He is the living incarnation of that old warning to political demagogues everywhere: be careful what you put out there, because in time it is certain to return.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous