Glenn Beck and his crazy 5,000 Year Leap

If you read nothing else today, make sure it's Alexander Zaitchik's exploration of the late W. Cleon Skousen, a far-right Mormon nutter who has become Glenn Beck's intellectual guru, and whose conspiracy-nut worldview Beck is avidly mainstreaming. I have urged readers before to look deeper than the surface chatter of Islamic extremist ideologues, and examine the sources of their ideas; this is why I think Paul Berman's long 2003 piece on Sayyid Qutb is so important to understanding the roots of radical thought.

Zaitchik's piece on Skousen isn't in Berman's league, but it isn't meant to be. Still, it's a fascinating look at an obscure radical rightist who is enjoying a startling posthumous revival because his book, "The 5,000 Year Leap," won a convert in a gifted communicator with a national TV and radio audience.

Who was Skousen, and what did he believe? Zaitchik shows that he was a reactionary Mormon and anti-communist zealot so extreme in his views (e.g, he thought Eisenhower was a closet commie) that even the conservative Mormon church distanced themselves from him, and exiled him to the margins. In 1981, Skousen published "Leap," a work of ideological pseudo-history. Here's Zaitchik:

"Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

In 2007, somebody introduced Beck to Skousen's work and philosophy, which apparently conquered his mind. Zaitchik again:

The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck's radio program and received the same question. "Are you familiar with Skousen?" asked Beck. When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. "He's fantastic," he said. "I went back and I read 'The Naked Communist' and at the end of that Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won't be able to find the truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won't be in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It's an idea I read from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, 'The Naked Communist,' and where he talked about someday the history of this country's going to be lost because it's going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we're there."

Beck continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before Obama's inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a "September twelfth person."

"The first thing you could do," he said, "is get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' Over my book or anything else, get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. 'The 5,000 Year Leap' is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise ... Make that dedication of becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year."

Beck has been pushing "Leap" hard. If you've never seen Beck, and you dismiss him as a mere TV talking head, you're underestimating him. Here he is in a clip from his program announcing his 912 Project. This guy is good. This is effective propaganda:

Since Beck has been pushing the book, it's become a huge seller. And guess who has been reading it? Wild-eyed Tea Partiers? Yes. But also, according to the Wall Street Journal, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recommends it:

Naturally, the governor is concerned about what is happening in Washington. When I ask him if Mr. Obama's policies would send this country down the same path as California, Mr. Perry lunges forward, "If you want to know what this guy's policies are doing, it's been written about before."

"Read that book. Read this book," he says, gesturing toward the nearby table. I see something from Weight Watchers and a Harry Potter paperback--but the governor is referring to the "The Road to Serfdom" by Frederick Hayek and "The 5000 Year Leap" by W. Cleon Skousen. "Read Amity Shlaes's 'The Forgotten Man.' Amity's book is very eye-opening--scary--for me."

Glenn Beck, a gifted propagandist, is mainstreaming a dead right-wing paranoid radical. This is not a joke.

UPDATE: I'm still troubled by Skousen on the whole, but I read "Leap" last night, and I've changed my mind about it. Read about that here.