Future Star, Dead Giant

On the GOP Nova tip: today's NYT has a piece on a massive rise in viewership for Glenn Beck. This would be scary, if it mattered. NYT paints Beck as a Utah cryptofascist, hyping his talk of "surrounding" his "enemies," usw, which is not even the scariest genre of Beckism. That would go to his cri-de-coeur to the Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 2007: "God stalked me! He had a baptismal rifle!"

Q: What's a baptismal rifle?

Anyway, NYT quotes David Frum on Beck's success: "a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

This is nice and succinct. It's not news. Check David Foster Wallace's Host for a chronicle of the rise of "cultural" conservatism on the radio. Beck is one in a never-ending stream of, put kindly, popularizers of the Goldwater movement. If I were a movement conservative, I'd be pissed too.

This officially conceded difference between "cultural" and "ideological" conservatism is phony, to my mind. Reagan was never so ideological as to totally sacrifice the welfare of the country: right after his tax cuts, he issued the largest tax increase in American history. The need to draw votes, or eyeballs, thereby cultivating a "sensibility," is just another way of saying "democracy."

So Q: How does Mitt Romney deal with it? What star emerges from the current cloud of gas and dust?