July 29, 2011

A Tip of the Hat to Glenn Beck on His Way off the Air

By Tim Gordon
On his way out the door from Fox News Network, Glenn Beck deserves a round of applause from conservatives.  Yes, I know that he is more inclined to waterworks than a utilities/railroads fiend in Monopoly, but I have a policy: I tip my hat to any man who singlehandedly puts F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom on the New York Times' bestseller list, as Beck did last summer. Like many younger conservatives who have spent a healthy portion of their years exiled in the academy, I feel a profounder admiration for, say, William F. Buckley -- a different stripe of conservative, to say the least.  Glenn Beck, on the other hand, has not been the object of my admiration...or in his own now-famous phraseology: "not so much."  Should I hear another conservative echo a similarly binary taste regarding these two figures, it would not surprise me, given the sentiment's near-ubiquity among so-called "academic cons." Yet in Stephen F. Hayward's "Reading Up on the Right" in the Claremont...(Read Full Article)