I probably just do not possess the sensitivity to discern what it is about this guy that makes him what he is and has become. I flat out do not understand it.
I give anyone, any time, credit for amassing a fortune so long as they have not stolen it, never mind having built up a media empire. I consider most in the televangelist realm thieves and profiteers; Beck is sort of akin to that genre, though not predatory at all as I think of him. But his religion is mediocrity. That’s an observation not a criticism.
I absolutely don’t understand what makes him entertaining or enlightening or informative or interesting, I really don’t. I don’t have an understanding of how one targets the fattest part of the bell curve, but that expresses how I conceive of his appeal. It is a mathematical exercise: Get 20% of the middle and it’s more than 70% of the tail. Maybe he drags the ill-informed a little higher on the intellect scale and maybe he drags those with a conservative bent a little more towards the middle on the back of their desire to be liked by not expressing harsh conservative views and he does precisely the same with some number of traditional Kennedy-type democrats & Reagan democrats——not today’s liberals. Under the flag of “Can’t we all get together?” “Just give up your convictions, ALL your strongly-held political opinions, keep your morality-lite, and place the notion of ‘getting along’ with each other better on a higher plane” and I guess he has decent success at this. It’s milquetoast mush, to me; but I am trying to understand the phenom past my own opinion.
Somehow he has constructed this amalgam of very mild conservatism, very mild anti-evil-Americanism, *slightly* mild pro-Americanism, very mild intellect, very mild evangelism, very mild stupidity and banality, and turned it into an average of utterly everything. And I guess that is his creed: Averageism. He appeals, I guess and can only guess, to a swath of people non-confident in their own ability to form a strong opinion but *basically good* who are offended by having strong opinions on *anything whatsoever* and fortifies that sensibility with his insistence that he values and is speaking the truth (which of course everyone does)
He is successful at it, that I can’t deny. It’s mush, it isn’t animal, vegetable or mineral, black or white. It is a ratification of averagism.
Well put. GB has perfected the art of making mediocrity pay.