This reads almost like an existential crisis. Glenn Beck is an interesting mixture of honest self-reflection and partisan blindness. He both praises Silicon Valley for sharing values of business innovation and self determination and at the same time wonders how anyone who values those things could be liberal, even says they're certainly not Progressive.
The whole Progressive movement is based on the philosophy of improving business conditions by balancing power. It sees conflicts coming from monopolies and consolidations of power and tries to minimize those through strategic government intervention. Lots of people believe in small businesses but think that some government intervention is needed to allow them to compete. Theodore Roosevelt considered himself a Progressive Conservative. I can easily accept that Glenn Beck doesn't think that this kind of intervention is effective, but I can't believe he isn't even aware that this opinion exists when he spends every day of his life talking about it.
Maybe he's just pretending not to understand to relate to his audience who generally like straw man arguments. Maybe it's a brilliant strategy to slowly introduce people to the idea that the other side might have some things in common with them. If it is, I hope it works.
Can you really make much of a statement about the modern "progressive movement" by talking about Theodore Roosevelt? While they both used the "progressive" label and perhaps one descended from the other, there's about 100 years of significant social and political change between them.
I think you understand my point. I was talking about the roots. Roosevelt was already distinct from the mainstream Progressives, but he wasn't afraid to say he thought they had some good ideas because he understood he had a lot of the same goals and that they could find common ground. Most Republicans and Democrats in the USA could be part of the same political party in other countries, but here they hardly even talk to each other.
Glenn Beck is acting as if Progressives would naturally be anti-business, but the movement, even the modern movement, is based on improving business conditions. Of course other areas too, but it has a big focus on people's jobs because that's where they spend their time.
It started out to address the concerns of the left while also standing against socialist ideas. You could say it's like the Open Source movement that saw the Free Software movement as a little too anti-business and wanted to pursue a similar agenda while not coming out too hard against business as usual.
Conservatives and Progressive have a lot more in common that I could get into here, but that's not the point. It's that Glenn Beck knows a lot of Democrats are pro business and pro tech and acts as if he doesn't understand how it could be possible. He's just playing dumb.
Which is the last thing I'd expect out of Glenn Beck. I'm off to go read it now.
(EDIT: comes back from reading the article...)
Were you to have read it to me out loud and then later tell me Beck wrote it, I'd say you were lying. Thoughtful it was indeed (a bit thick on the disclaimers, but whatever). But it raises the question in my head: Has Beck recently backed off his whack-a-doodle persona to something reasonable? To me it was like reading an article authored by Jim Cramer telling you to buy S&P 500 index funds, roll credits.
OTOH, perhaps it is the crisis others theorized. Because it came across in some ways as, "oh, so this is how it must look from the other side?"
The whole Progressive movement is based on the philosophy of improving business conditions by balancing power. It sees conflicts coming from monopolies and consolidations of power and tries to minimize those through strategic government intervention. Lots of people believe in small businesses but think that some government intervention is needed to allow them to compete. Theodore Roosevelt considered himself a Progressive Conservative. I can easily accept that Glenn Beck doesn't think that this kind of intervention is effective, but I can't believe he isn't even aware that this opinion exists when he spends every day of his life talking about it.
Maybe he's just pretending not to understand to relate to his audience who generally like straw man arguments. Maybe it's a brilliant strategy to slowly introduce people to the idea that the other side might have some things in common with them. If it is, I hope it works.