Glenn Beck and Bill Clinton Share An Intellectual Godfather

No, seriously.

At least, that’s how it seems if this excellent piece in Salon is to be believed. The writer, Alex Zaitchick, dives into the fever swamps of the right to uncover the influence of someone named Cleon Skousen on the Glenn Beck crowd. Skousen, who died in 2006 at the age of 92,  was a paranoid and racist crank whose screed, The 5,000 Year Leap, is now the subject of a popular revival on the right. Salon describes the book thusly:

“Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology…”Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University…

According to the piece, Beck has repeatedly exhorted his listeners to buy the book; it was, in turn, catapulted up the best-seller lists, even achieving the top spot on Amazon for a while. Apparently, Beck wrote a new introduction for the book and has Skousen’s children on his show regularly. Beck has turned Skousen–who was once deemed to crazy and out-there even for the extreme Goldwater right of the 1960’s–into a household name (in some households).

While examining Skousen’s career, the article writes that a book called Tragedy and Hope influenced him deeply:

“Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO)…the book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene…

Now, here’s where things get truly strange. Tragedy and Hope was written by a not particularly well known Georgetown professor named Carroll Quigley. Quigley’s most famous student was Bill Clinton. The former president later mentioned Quigley in his 1992 speech to the Democratic National Convention. “As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship,” thundered Clinton to the crowd. “And then, as a student at Georgetown, I head that call clarified by a professor name Carol Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things- that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.”

In his memoirs, Clinton writes that, during his presidency, he “quoted Quigley often.” He goes on to mention Quigley favorably several times throughout the book. David Maraniss, a Clinton biographer, calls Quigley Clinton’s “favorite professor.”

And yet Quigley went on to influence the most paranoid aspects of the right wing.

Of course, I think that Bill Clinton was a fine president, and Glenn Beck is many cards short of a full deck.  But it’s an interesting lesson in historical coincidence nonetheless.