poulos on beck

Prompted by Nate Silver's (inaccurate) characterization of Glenn Beck as a "post-modern conservative", based upon, I think, the belief that anyone who has a slippery and unstable set of convictions must be post-modern, and vice-versa, a belief which is one of the leading indicators that one is not even a hyper-modernist, but an unreconstructed modernist, James Poulos talks briefly about the difference between Beck and post-modern conservativism, which leads him to this excellent encapsulation of the problem with Glenn Beck:

A word about Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the worst. But why? Not so much because of who he distrusts or why. From where I'm standing, Beck is so awful because he theatrically combines and conflates performances of ultimate sincerity with performances of ultimate sarcasm. I think this is a telltale sign of a soul disordered by a confusion of love, power, and resentment. It becomes impossible, in such a person, to tell quite where their selfless solidarity, their egotism, and their hatred borne of weakness begin or end. And the titillating quality of this unstable charisma is precisely what they latch onto and exploit to become less a famous person than a famous happening. Their individual being becomes incidental to the phenomenon they represent. They actually corrode or dissolve their own identity in order to experience some hugeness that seems impossible to experience as a normal, integral human being.