If you read this to Glenn Beck, his head will explode
Salon.com posts a brilliant history of the Pledge of Allegiance by Michael Lind, which explains why it’s so darned un-American:
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel “Looking Backward: 2007-1887,” which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an “industrial army” and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with “the Bellamy salute,” a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
In the course of the 20th century, support for the pledge migrated from the collectivist left to the reactionary right. The original Bellamy pledge read: “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In 1923 WASP nativists prevailed in having “my flag” replaced by “the flag of the United States of America,” to make sure that young Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others, knew they weren’t pledging allegiance to the old country. In 1954, Congress inserted the words “under God,” following an influential sermon by a Protestant pastor who argued that the model for the United States in the Cold War should be ancient Sparta.
Could anything be more foreign to America’s enlightened 18th-century liberal and republican traditions than this toxic compound of collectivism, nativism, Spartan militarism and theocracy?
Actually, no.
I have to admit, I’ve always found the idea of pledging allegiance to a flag to be weirdly authoritarian. Even as a kid, the idea of standing their in a group, like little drones, assuming the pose and staring at the flag with rapt attention, and then pledging allegiance to it, struck me as somewhere between silly and scary. But the idea does work for people like Beck, who are obsessed with militaristic, Stalinite societies, in which they’d gladly live, as long as the Supreme Leader is a Republican. This crowd ate it up when Dubya and Dick stripped Americans of the right to make a private phone call to an overseas relative or to send an email without the NSA scanning it, or to use the library without Big Brother watching. They are weirdly drawn to things like torture and indefinite detention, and they think the idea of summary executions without trial, which Bill Kristol called for in the Fort Hood massacre, is very much in keeping with the Founding Fathers’ ideas (though ironically, such things are just what the founders were declaring independence from in the regime of “mad” King George III…)
What’s really fascinating is how the idea of “pledging allegiance” to the state fits in with the right’s supposed views on individualism. The two would seem to be contradictory, except when you consider a little thing called “feudalism”:
The very idea of a pledge of allegiance, in any form, is completely at odds with what is often called “the American Creed,” inspired by the 17th-century philosopher John Locke’s theory of natural rights and government by popular consent. The concept of “allegiance” is feudal. In medieval Europe, the liegeman, or subject, pledged allegiance to his liege lord.
And therein lies the point. People like Beck, and Limbaugh, and the neocons, like Kristol, want Americans to believe that they should give their unquestioning allegiance to the state when the head of state is a Republican, but that the real allegiance is to the moneyed elite — or more to the point, to what you might call the Gospel of Unrestrained Wealth. These people basically believe in the concept of feudal lords: in this case, corporations who should be free to act without government restraint, ruling over workers who don’t — or can’t — resist. Think about it (especially if you consider yourself a “conservative…”) What does Glenn Beck actually preach? What is at the core of his conspiracy theories and crazy talk? The notion that the “left” — the “socialists” and “Marxists,” are trying to steal people’s wealth. And while they pawn it off as some threat to the ordinary guy’s wealth, what they really mean is corporate wealth and personal riches. In other words: these guys are using a lot of fluff, pizazz and showbiz, to preach the gospel of feudalism — the gospel of unrestrained capital. (Another term for it is “rich man’s populism“.)
Broken down simply: people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don’t want to pay taxes. They don’t just represent the rich — they ARE the rich. And they are using every convoluted argument and conspiracy theory to get you to want to strip government of the power to tax them. They believe the government shouldn’t regulate pollution, or asbestos, or tainted baby formula or razor blades and fingertips in your food. They believe in multi-theater war and megabanks and drilling the hell out of our coastlines, and a world without unions. Because those things are profitable. They believe in a “state” controlled by corporate wealth, where the elected representatives are merely conduits for the channeling of more wealth into the hands of people like them. And they wish the feudal lords to rule over a population — by populism if possible, but by fear if necessary — that is not just at the mercy of the elite, but that is even worshipful of it. And to achieve that, they find ways to get people to ignore their fundamental arguments, either by celebrating ignorance and “plainness” (think George W. Bush and Sarah Palin,) or by providing endless distractions (Islam is out to get you! … gay marriage! abortion! … czars…! that are like shiny keys to the ill-informed and easily seduced. It’s a pretty warped concept when you think about it. The author makes one other point that shouldn’t be missed:
In a republic, the people should not pledge allegiance to the government; the government should pledge allegiance to the people.
Amen. Now the righties will tell you, there are people on the other side who believe in “socialism” — in the flattening out of outcomes, and the “spreading around of wealth” in a way that punishes success, strips the “haves” to give to the lazy, useless “have nots,” and seeks to impose a Marxist order on America. Well, there are people on the extreme left who believe that. They are Socialist Workers Party types out there, handing out leaflets on the street corner. But what the right does that’s so fundamentally dishonest, is to conflate ordinary Democratic politics, as well as things like organized labor and the barest worker or investor protections, with those extremes. In fact, the right has been very aggressive about painting ANY opposition to totally unrestrained capital as “socialism.” (And Democrats have been too timid about pushing back against the Free Wall Street mentality on the other side.) And yet, the fundamental internal struggle in this country is no different today than it was during slavery, in the 1890s, in the 1920s, or in the years after World War II, when industrialists discovered that wars could be more profitable than building widgets, washing machines and cars. It’s a fundamental tension between capital, which wants unrestrained profits; and labor, which wants a measure of compensation, protection, and wealth participation. In some ways, it’s also a struggle between an ideology that uses things like the Pledge to tamp down opposition to the idea of unrestrained wealth, and one (more Lockean ideology) that prefers that as a society, we pledge even some small measure of allegiance to each other.
Read the whole Salon piece here.
UPDATE: Vice President Joe Biden puts it another way: “Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.”
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