Talkin’ ‘Bout My Glenn-eration: TPM Endures Week Three Of Beck University

TV host Glenn Beck (logo of Glenn Beck University inset)
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They say you can never go back, but if there’s one thing TPM has learned over the years, it’s that Glenn Beck doesn’t adhere to conventional wisdom. Which is why we cooked up some Easy Mac, cracked open a Keystone Light, and revisited TPM: The College Years by enrolling in the online lecture series known as “Beck University.”

In the latest installment Wednesday night, called “Charity 101,” we learned what charity has to do with federalism. (Hint: Nothing.)

Once again, the lecture began with a message from Beck himself, explaining that this week’s class “is not going to teach you how to give, who to give to.” Instead, it will “teach you how our federal government is set up” because “right now [the federal government is] teaching you that they’ll be charitable in your name.”

“You pay your tax,” Beck said, “and they’ll give it to somebody that they deem” worthy of the charity.

This week’s illustrious professor was, amazingly, an actual professor. James R. Stoner, Jr., is a political science professor at Louisiana State University, and was appointed by George W. Bush to the National Council on Humanities in 2002.

But don’t let his academic credentials fool you. He also boasts the sort of right-wing cred critical to Beck University professors. For example, in 1996, Stoner wrote a paper called “Amending the School Prayer Amendment,” in which he argued that public schools should be allowed to lead students in religious activities: “The purpose of the amendment would be to restore the original understanding of the Founding generation, which has been misconstrued by several generations of justices on the Supreme Court.”

Which brings us to Stoner’s Beck University class Wednesday night. He called it “Whose Constitution Is It Anyway?” (Get it? Just like the improv TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but without the comically oversized props.)

Stoner, who said he keeps a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, professed surprise last night at (and even some disdain for) people who “speak as though the Supreme Court owns the Constitution.”

“The Constitution belongs to us all,” he said, and “the individual conscious is the anchor of the Constitution.” Stoner was then duly surprised when a poll of the students after class found that the majority trusted the Court to interpret the Constitution:

WOW! That’s what everybody told me people would say. I never fail a class on the first exam, but I had hoped people would answer “other,” namely, THE PEOPLE! Is that too abstract? Do you trust the Court more than the people?

Stoner also explained that describing the Constitution as a “living document” has a meaning that was distorted during the Progressive Era. Now, he explained, the term “living document” really implies that the Constitution is more like a “tumor” that “changes and metastasizes” and “turns into something different than it was.”

Stoner said that instead we should think of the Constitution as “something that comes and fulfills its potential,” that “grows up to become mature, and an adult as it were, from a child in whom is the pattern of what the adult will be.”

“It’s up to us to make it more fully what it was at the outset, or what we’ve chosen to adapt it to become,” he explained.

In other words, the Constitution is now becoming an adult, but we have to Benjamin Button it back to childhood so it can once again become what the Founders originally intended.

Stoner also emphasized that the state is the “locus of American democracy,” and described how the principle of a sovereign within a sovereign, the state within the federal government, was initially thought to be impossible by many.

He noted that “if someone had recorded [the Founders’] thoughts at the time, they would have been thought crazy.” I bet Glenn Beck’s ears are ringing!

Stoner also drew a diagram of how the “complex form” of federalism works, but got tripped up when one class clown asked: “Does Glenn know you are using his blackboard?” Stoner replied: “I think his producers gave me permission….”

This is like Whose Line Is It Anyway!

Full coverage of Beck’s foray into the Ivory Tower can be found here.

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