Glenn Beck: The Fears of a Clown

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• Q&A: Glenn Beck

This meant one thing: it was time for Glenn Beck to break out the Jenga set.

The new populist superstar of Fox News has made a refrain of predicting that government policies are leading to disaster — dark, ruinous, blood-in-the-streets kind of disaster. Pausing for a 17-minute speech rebutting his critics for calling him "dangerous" and "crazy," he took out the block-tower game. On opposite sides of the tower were written the words solution and problem, taxpayer and children. Then he spent much of the hour critiquing the plan, all the while pulling pieces from the wobbling tower and stacking them on top. (Read an interview with Glenn Beck.)

For Beck, Jenga is a metaphor for the plan's risk. But it is also a metaphor for Beck's show, which teeters from humor to predictions of apocalypse to self-esteem sermons to fits of weeping. ("I'm sorry. I just love my country. And I fear for it.") This is what makes it so compelling: the breathless feeling that at any moment, everything could spectacularly collapse.

A year ago, with Fox News in an election-year ratings slump, some TV observers (like me) wondered if its conservative commentators could thrive in an Obama era. The answer is yes, and how. Fox roared back and has more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.

It's succeeded partly because of its veteran stars Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. But to Hannity's tax-cut Republicanism and O'Reilly's grumpy social conservatism, Beck adds an au courant strain of grievance. Beck had a similar program on Headline News (which I appeared on once), on which he at one point asked a Muslim Congressman to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies." After he moved to Fox in January, his audience exploded to 2 million-plus viewers — unheard of at 5 p.m. His hook, for the age of economic anxiety: whereas O'Reilly embodies anger and Hannity brashness, Beck embraces fear. (See pictures of Bill O'Reilly's career in journalism.)

Fear of what? Take your pick. Fear that the U.S. is on a long march to fascism. (As evidence, Beck cited — on April Fools' Day but apparently seriously — the inclusion of fasces on the Mercury dime in 1916.) That fat cats and bureaucratic "bloodsuckers" are plundering your future. That Mexico will collapse and chaos will pour over the border. That America believes too little in God and too much in global warming. That "they" — Big Government, Big Business, Big Media — are against you. Above all, that you, small-town, small-business America — Palinville — have been forgotten. Dismissed. Laughed at. Just like him. (See the top 10 TV feuds.)

It's hard to identify a Beck ideology so much as a set of attitudes, sometimes contradictory ones. He channels anger against Wall Street but defends the bonuses for AIG executives. He devoted a segment to debunking a conspiracy theory about FEMA "concentration camps" but has warned that the AmeriCorps program "indoctrinates your child into community service."

What unites Beck's disparate themes is a sense of siege. On March 13, he served up a kind of fear combo platter — war, chaos, totalitarianism, financial ruin — with the 9/12 Project, a tearful call to viewers to rediscover the common purpose they felt after 9/11. In 2001, that common purpose involved cable-news talkers' dialing down the us-vs.-them shtick for a day or two; now Beck urged viewers to reject the notion that "they" have all the power. "They don't surround us," he declared. "We surround them."

Beck's surround sound plays like a mix of colonial pamphleteering, Great Depression demagoguery and the movie Red Dawn. But is he serious? He describes himself as a "rodeo clown," and he is a talented TV showman — joking and self-effacing, with a gift for big visuals and low-tech explainer stunts like his Jenga bit. Unlike O'Reilly et al., he's not a shouter. He calls his program "the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment."

Then again, he recently devoted a "War Room" episode to gaming out an American economic collapse in 2014 — the result of debt and high taxes — including the rise of "Mad Max" militias and civil unrest. Because if anything spells laff riot, it's the breakdown of lawful society! Whether Beck is stirring up frightening social currents or just playing in them, his material and its resonance are deadly serious.

Of course, I'm a "them." And if there's one thing we thems love, it's tarring dissenters as scary. As he played with his Jenga tower, Beck made just that point, introducing his next guest, former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. "Remember," Beck said sarcastically, "he is a dangerous militia member!"

Then a wooden piece gave way, and the whole toy edifice came crashing down.

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