Pundit Glenn Beck is accusing President Barack Obama of “intentionally spending us into oblivion”. Beck made the remarks on his radio show September 14, 2011, and also the evening before on Glenn Beck TV.
Beck argues that this is the only possible explanation for Obama’s economic policies. Since these policies, Beck says, have failed by all objective evidence, Obama can’t be implementing them in the belief that he’s doing the right thing. And Obama isn’t stupid (or insane), either, so Beck says he’s forced to conclude that Obama is intentionally doing what he knows is wrong for the country.
This follows the standard protocol for demonizing your political opponents: You either say that they are evil or stupid. Beck has ruled out stupid, so he lands on evil.
And, also as is typical, Beck’s caricature runs along the same lines that Democrats, progressives, and liberals follow when they caricature conservatives (such as Beck). That is, they say that all objective evidence demonstrates that conservative economic policies have failed (i.e., the Bush tax cuts, etc., were followed by the financial crisis), so it can’t be that conservatives are advocating these policies in the name of doing good. Conservatives must be either selfish or stupid in espousing their economic policies. Those that aren’t stupid, therefore, must be evil.
Now, conservatives would rebut this reasoning by saying that it’s not a straight line from conservative economic policies to the financial crisis, just like liberals and progressives will say that it’s not straightforwardly true that their economic policies have failed. Economics is complicated, and people are going to have reasonable disagreements about what policies have resulted in good or bad consequences, or what policies have kept things from being better or worse than they might otherwise be. Democrats, for instance, say that Obama’s policies have kept us from going into an even worse situation, and so haven’t been a failure. Republicans, on the other hand, say that — even if it’s true that Obama’s policies prevented a second Great Depression — they have also prevented us from having a robust recovery.
Again, these are reasonable disagreements about complicated issues. As is all too often the case, however, people don’t conduct these debates in a reasonable manner. Instead, they try to depict the conflict as being between the rational and the irrational, or between the virtuous and the vicious.
That’s what Beck is doing. He’s frequently a victim of this sort of invective, but (just like Obama himself) he’s also a perpetrator of it.