Glenn Beck in the Shadow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. – “Social Justice” and the Marketplace of Ideas

Yesterday, August 28, 2010 marked the 47th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, which took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

 Dr. King, as most people know, built upon the traditions of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as his own religious and moral education, to develop and implement methods of nonviolent protest and social and political action that advanced social and political justice for many African Americans as well as poor people of all backgrounds.

Yesterday, on the very same steps of the Lincoln Memorial Glenn Beck, who considers himself an heir to the MLK tradition and a torch-bearer of the civil rights movement as it applies to our current time, held a “non-political” event called the “Restoring Honor Rally” which focused on helping America “return to God.”

Despite Mr. Beck’s insistence that he is in some sort of genealogical relationship with past civil rights leaders, there are significant ideological differences between Mr. Beck and those who follow in the tradition of Dr. King.

For Dr. King social justice was, in many respects, the focus of his life work. (See e.g., "Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)).

For Mr. Beck, “social justice” is a conceptual anathema; it is a feel good idea that embodies a sinister meaning. Within Beck’s political framework “social justice” is a code word by which the State, at the direction of “progressives,” can force itself into the private lives of citizens to actively manipulate and limit individual choices and freedoms – freedoms such as: what you can teach your children and what you can do with your privately accumulated wealth and other privately accumulated property. More generally, “social justice” handcuffs the individual to the greater good of the group (e.g. “entitlement programs”) when instead “our Founders believed it was the power of the state that was to be cuffed…” (See generally Glenn Beck’s Common Sense and see specifically pg 68). [In an upcoming post I will provide a more thorough analysis of Mr. Beck’s political philosophy as a partial answer to the question of what people mean when the cry out at Tea-Party rallies, “I want my country back!”].

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That Mr. Beck can locate himself squarely in the civil rights tradition while simultaneously decry one of the core tenants of civil rights, i.e., social justice, seems to me to be a perfect illustration of how the framework of the political and social conversation in this country has gone completely off the rails. Vigorous debate and opposing viewpoints are an integral part of political dialogue, but those viewpoints (of whatever political stripe) must be grounded in some sort of reality. And as was recently pointed out in a NY Times op-ed and a recent Pew Research Study (noting one-in-five Americans (18%) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11% in March 2009) so many of the first principles that people start from when engaging in such debates are literally untethered from reality.

It’s almost as if a specific desire to hold certain beliefs in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence has infected out citizenry – a willful ignorance that refuses to flinch. I wonder what has caused this, whether the reader perceives this as well, and whether the reader has any thoughts or suggestions about why this is the case?

I have a hypothesis about a cause (in fact there is more than one and I will address others in a later post) but have no idea about how to find the cure. In general as I alluded in an earlier post, I think this has to do with the way opinions get tested in the marketplace of ideas these days. The concept of the marketplace of ideas, articulated in part by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, is simply that more speech is always preferred and that, similar to how market forces play out in the economic world, the “truth” or validity of an idea will be tested through market force competition with other ideas and the best and strongest ideas will survive. I think that the marketplace no longer works (if it ever did) for a variety of reasons.

First, with the proliferation of the internet and online blogs (mine included) there are literally thousands of different marketplaces, and to extend a metaphor, a merchant of ideas can pick a marketplace where her ideas will always be accepted because consumers can simultaneously pick markets that offer only the ideas they want to hear, regardless of whether the ideas are true at all. As a result there is no cross-pollination of ideas between the different market places – no dialogue really exists. A Tea-Party supporter can get all the information they need about a particular event from their biased sources and a Progressive Movement supporter can get entirely different information about the same particular event from their biased sources. They are both looking for the “truth” about the same thing but both come away with widely divergent explanations – neither party is willing to subject their information to the market forces that exist where their counter part “shops.” As a result we have people who are living on the same planet but are actually on two different worlds; those worlds are so far apart that they look nothing alike.

Another part of the problem, also a result of our hyper fast culture, is that our attention spans are so short [I will be surprised if anyone actually gets this far in my post] that we have trouble thinking past 140 character sound bytes. The exchange of ideas in the marketplace occurs so quickly now and the “truth value” of a particular exchange has such a short half-life that the merchandise (i.e., the idea) becomes replaced so quickly that there is no time for corrective forces or competitive forces to take hold. The valuation of the currency of ideas has qualitatively changed; value is now place more upon the speed of the exchange and the amount of information exchanged – “truth” if it ever existed, has flown out the window. Idea Merchants now focus on getting new products on and off the table as quickly as possible in spite of or despite the issue of truth, because this is what the consumer demands. This means that when someone finally is able to debunk or shed light on a falsely believed idea (e.g., that president Obama is a Muslim) the general public has moved on to a new topic and no longer cares. It also means that a person like Glenn Beck can unflinchingly present himself as a standard bearer of civil rights when his core political and social beliefs (which of course he is absolutely entitled to have) run counter to the core values that were espoused by the leaders of the civil rights movement – and few people even bat an eye.

So, dear reader what then is to be done?