Washington Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

The mass demonstration at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial wasn’t nourished solely by reactionaries frustrated with Obama. The conservative camp is far more complex than that.

It was almost absurd and cynical that far-right TV personality Glenn Beck bemoaned the hatred in American politics during his mass demonstration on Saturday in Washington. Of all people, it would have to be Beck, the rabble-rouser who constantly criticizes Barack Obama as an “unpatriotic socialist.”

But on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where exactly 47 years earlier the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech, Glenn Beck, in the presence of perhaps more than 100,000 white people, suddenly longed for “love, faith and hope.”

Beck and Sarah Palin, the other right-wing icon, showed up there and ate the chalk.* They made a big issue of claiming their demonstration would be apolitical out of respect for this particular date and locale. They gathered to praise God and invited all Americans to help restore America’s honor, strengthen their beliefs and live their lives in individual liberty.

Barack Obama, the enemy, went unmentioned. Almost painfully, every speaker avoided the descent into politics. Nevertheless, of course they constantly brandished their conservative messages. Those attending also left no doubt as to why they were in Washington: To express their anger against too much government, too many taxes and too much gun control, against health care reform and a federal government that meddled too much in their schools, and finally against Obama’s overly-respectful attitude toward other countries and the United Nations.

It was natural for America’s right wing to want to leave the impression that America’s first black president was leading the country in a wrong and even fatal direction. However, Glenn Beck had forbidden political placards. This was to be a day of sermons, hymns and praise.

That’s why the demonstration looked more like a gigantic church picnic than a mass demonstration against Barack Obama. Some, like John and Eva from South Carolina or Mark and Debbie from Texas, made the journey to the nation’s capital purely because they wanted to pray for the country, not get into political arguments.

It would be a great over-simplification to say this was a congregation of right-wing hardliners, ultraconservatives and stubborn diehards. There were certainly those among them, but the reservoir of American conservatives is much more complex than Europeans may sometimes think.

Among them is a diverse group of people who are dissatisfied with their country, but for differing reasons. They didn’t appear just since Obama took office; they’ve been there for a long time. They are dissatisfied because government is getting too big, because people are losing their religious faith, because decency and civility are disappearing, and so on.

Though difficult for outsiders to realize, it’s nonetheless true. The demonstrators saw themselves as being in the right place at the right time. There, where the monument honoring George Washington stretches heavenward, where prisoners of many wars are remembered on memorial plaques and on the site of the monument honoring Abraham Lincoln, who preserved the Union. There, where Martin Luther King demanded freedom and equality for all races.

This conservative melting pot also sees itself as a civil rights movement, a movement stepping up for basic American rights as defined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution: the rights to liberty, justice and the pursuit of happiness.

For these demonstrators from across the nation it’s a given: They see no contradiction in celebrating Martin Luther King’s historic dream speech one minute and then wildly applauding Glenn Beck’s warnings against being enslaved by their own government the next.

*The idiom “to eat chalk” derives from the Grimm fairy tale of the wolf and the seven little goats. The wolf ate chalk in order to sound more like the little goats’ kindly mother and lure them into being devoured.