Beck a PoMo Conservative— and It's Working Well for Him

By Harry Kimball,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 23, 2009 9:54 AM CDT
Beck a PoMo Conservative— and It's Working Well for Him
Glenn Beck.   (AP Photo)

Glenn Beck’s popularity as compared to the more “traditional American conservatism” of, say, Rush Limbaugh heralds the advent of a new archetype, Nate Silver writes on FiveThirtyEight: “Beck is a PoMoCon—a postmodern conservative.” A recent poll shows Beck and Limbaugh equally popular while Limbaugh’s negatives dwarf Beck’s. Silver sees Beck’s anti-establishment leanings as a plus in a country that “seems to be becoming more anti-establishment, too.”

Beck’s anti-establishment rhetoric, which reserves equal distrust for big government, non-governmental institutions, elites, and political parties, seems to have struck a nerve. And it is blissfully unconcerned with history or a continuum. PoMoCons are “skeptical (sometimes to the point of paranoid),” and their movement a “relatively spontaneous reaction to the here-and-now,” Silver writes. “There is no future, no past—there is only today. And today is a pretty good day to be Glenn Beck.” (More Glenn Beck stories.)

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