Don't Underestimate Glenn Beck, as He Calls Government Spending an 'Economic Holocaust'

In a speech peppered with the jargon of Alcoholics Anonymous, Glenn Beck brought thousands of right-wingers attending the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to their feet by promising them that economic hardship was good for them, and that the progressive movement was “a cancer” that is “designed to eat the Constitution.” Government spending, he said, is creating an “economic holocaust.”

While dazzling the crowd with dizzying dynamic swings and a confessional narrative about his life as a recovering alcoholic, Beck handily played his role as community organizer to one of the greediest men in the world: his uberboss, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, the parent company of Fox NewsChannel, where Beck nightly plies his trade.

The problem with America right now is progressives’ attempt to “deprive you of your right to struggle,” Beck said. But failure is a character-building exercise, he said, using as an example his own battle with alcohol. Until you know the shame of having done wrong, he essentially said, you’ll never do right.

“If drinking wasn’t causing me a problem in my life, I’d be drunk right now,” Beck told the roaring crowd, which packed one of the largest hotel ballrooms in Washington, D.C.

His ire wasn’t reserved solely for Democrats; he took repeated swings at the Republicans as well, comparing their propensity for government spending to his own addiction.

“I’m a recovering alcoholic and I screwed up my life six ways to Sunday; I believe in redemption,” Beck said. But the first step to getting redemption is, you gotta admit you’ve got a problem. I’ve not heard people in the Republican Party yet admit that they’ve got a problem…I don’t know what they even stand for anymore. ‘Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I’ve got a problem. I’m addicted to spending and big government…I’m addicted to spending and I just don’t want to spend today.’ Good — keep comin’ back.”

“Keep coming back” is one of the signature slogans of AA — a recovery program laced with slogans. But “keep coming back” at times acquires a tone of derision when said to a member who has just shared a thought or two that seems “off the AA beam,” to quote the program literature.

“We have a right to fail. Without failure, there is no growth,” Beck said. “Fifteen years ago, I was completely broke. I was completely out of control. I had no answers in my life — none. I was living in a little one-room apartment; I had lost my family — everything. My whole life was spiraling out of control. I was [sic] on the fetal position [sic] of my apartment. Am I going to die — or figure it out and live?”

He continued: “Because no one was there — if somebody would have been there to hold me up, I wouldn’t have been down here enough” — here he dropped to his knees — “to dust myself off and say, ‘No, I’m not going to spend my life here, I’m going to stand up on my own two feet, figure it out and because of that failure, I can stand here today.” The crowd rose to its feet, applauding wildly.

“What we don’t have a right to is health care, housing or hand-outs,” he said.

Earlier in the program he seemed to accuse liberals of whining about their childhoods. “Don’t talk to me about your childhood,” he said. “You want to hear me go on about my childhood? No!”

Then he proceeded to go on about his childhood. He told of how, from the age of seven, he worked in his father’s bakery, cleaning pots and pans in the back with his father, while his sisters “worked the front of the store” with his mother. Then, he said, the town his family lived in went bust, and the bakery went out of business.