Greg Grandin: "Glenn Beck, America’s Historian Laureate" @ Tom's Dispatch

[Excerpt] ...

Progressives, he typically says, "started a hundred-year time bomb. They planted it in the early 1900s." Beck has compared himself to "Israeli Nazi hunters," promising, with language more easily associated with the Nazis than those who pursued them, to track down the progressive "vampires" who are "sucking the blood out of the republic."

As Michael Lind pointed out in a recent essay at Salon.com, behind such Sturm-und-Drang language lurks a small group of relatively obscure historians, teaching in peaceful, leafy liberal arts colleges, many of them influenced by the late University of Chicago political theorist Leo Strauss. They argue that the early twentieth-century progressive movement betrayed the very idea of universal natural rights invested in the individual, embracing instead a relativist "cult of the state." As a result, a quest for "social justice" was elevated above the defense of "liberty" -- a path which led straight to the gulag and the 1040 short form. From there, it was an easy leap to History's terminus: the Obamacare Death Panels.

These historians and their popular interpreters, especially Beck and Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, naturally ignore the real threats to individualism that the turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressive movement was responding to -- namely a massive concentration of corporate political and economic power and Gilded Era "wage slavery."...

Read more at Tom's Dispatch.