Michael's Essay: W. Cleon Skousen, Glenn Beck, the Tea Party and the U.S. government shutdown
The Tea Party, the political organization formerly known as the Republican Party, shut down the US government this week, paving the way for the party's mass electoral suicide in 2014....
The Tea Party, the political organization formerly known as the Republican Party, shut down the US government this week, paving the way for the party's mass electoral suicide in 2014.
The Tea Party's leading paladin in the shutdown fiasco was the reluctant Canadian, Ted Cruz of Texas.
Senator Cruz was born in Alberta. He has spent the better part of the last two months trying to calm down Donald Trump and the other overheated birthers that control his party.
What's a "Canada"? No, I'm definitely not Canadian and YES, I can run for president in 2016.
There is no longer any doubt that Cruz and his merry band of Tea Party pranksters now control and determine the fate of the Grand Old Party.
Tea Party folk like to trace their origins back to the populist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But actually they spring from the febrile imaginings of right wing talk radio and television hosts, especially Glenn Beck.
And the wellspring of Glenn Beck's mutterings is yet another American, Alberta-born, right wing fantasist.
Meet Willard Cleon Skousen, second of nine children born to a Mormon family in Rayland, Alberta in 1913.
In the pantheon of right-wing thinkers and propagandists, he is one of the most interesting and most influential.
Among his accomplishments; he worked for a time as a jockey, spent 11 years as an administrator in the FBI, travelled the length of Great Britain as a Mormon missionary and served as a crime-busting police chief in Salt Lake City, Utah, until he was fired by a crooked mayor.
His successor dismantled his anti-crime programs and the crime rate in Salt Lake went up 22 per cent.
When he lost his day job, Skousen turned to politics. He started a group called the All-American Society, which was almost to the right of the John Birch Society which proclaimed that Eisenhower was a Communist.
Over the years, his views became more and more radically right and more than a little nutty.
He wanted to repeal the income tax, abolish trade unions, sell off public lands and get rid of the Fed.
In 1958, he wrote The Naked Communist, which outlined the world-wide threat of Communists to destroy capitalism and the USA. He hinted that there were hordes of political zombies, strategically placed throughout the US, waiting to be triggered by their Soviet masters to attack America.
Incidentally, a year later Richard Condon wrote The Manchurian Candidate.
Skousen's major work came in 1991. The 5,000 Year Leap was an attack on every leftist notion. And he was able to capture Beck and other right wing commentators.
Beck was persuaded that Skousen's work was divinely inspired, and written "by someone much more intelligent than myself."
The 5,000 Year Leap became an instant best seller.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is one of the book's staunchest promoters.
For some reason, American politics has always been vulnerable to the paranoid right. For most of this century and the last, it has been largely marginalized. But, lately, for the former Republican Party, paranoia is now mainstream.
Willard Cleon Skousen was 92 when he died in 2006.