Glenn Beck on his missing the point of communitarianism

A couple years ago Tim (my camp host who watches a lot of TV) told me he saw "what you write about" on a TV talk show. I said, "Wow, what show?" and he replied, "I forget, maybe it was Lou Dobbs." "Did they say the word communitarianism?" I asked. Tim wasn't sure, but he thought "they" did. I completely forgot about it until today, when Kevin Eggers sent this:

November 10, 2008

GLENN: Prime Minister Brown has said the international financial crisis has given world leaders a unique opportunity. Oh, it usually does, doesn't it? To create a truly global society, a speech that Gordon Brown is going to give today. The alliance between Britain and the U.S. and more broadly between Europe and the U.S. can and must provide leadership, not in order to make the rules for ourselves but to lead the global effort to bring a stronger and more just international order. He says we are living in a uniquely global age and it is now in our power to come together so 2008 is not remembered just for the failure of the financial crisis that engulfed the world but for resilience and optimism when we face the storm and gird it and prevailed.

You know what, it's funny that he would use that language because that is the language of the Sweater story that I am telling Mao but it is about facing your own storm. But your storm is your storm and that's what these globalists don't understand. It's your storm. It's my storm. It's America's storm. We must work together. We must stay together. We must listen to our neighbors. We must work together as a planet, but we must not ever lose our individuality. And that's what these collectivists want. That's what these communitarians want.

You You know, when I first sobered up and I went back to school, I mean, Joe Lieberman and I had a close relationship, believe it or not, at one point and he actually spoke to me then and I didn't mean to but I usually do end up, because I'm so brutally honest, I insulted him, and we've only -- you'll notice if Joe Lieberman is ever on this program, he will always say things like, "I remember when... but..." he'll also say, "I'm very proud of you because I remember you when... but..." he's never on except for extraordinarily crucial days. Election days usually. And that's okay. But Joe Lieberman and I used to go back and forth. This is right after I sobered up. We would go back and forth and he would say, "You're a Democrat." And I would say, "You're a conservative." But I started reading everything and when I first sobered up, I decided I was going to take absolutely everything out of me. I wasn't going to believe in anything, even God. And I took everything out of me and I only put it back in after I had examined it. I realized it, what was I, 30 something years old, 32 years old? I didn't really believe in anything other than what people had told me, you know? I was the average Schmo that, you know, you're busy, you got life going on and you're like, "Yeah, I think that one makes sense." But you haven't really done your homework on it. And there's a lot of reasons why. I mean, it's tough stuff, man. You really want to look at abortion? You really want to look at all of this stuff? And if you do, then it means you have to live within the parameters if you want to try to be consistent. And so I went to the library and I went to the bookstores and I bought everybody who would disagree with each other. Then I started reading on communitarianism and collectivism. And I'll never forget, I think it was Michael Lerner I was reading and I happened to see Joe Lieberman and I said, "Have you ever read Michael Lerner?" And he said, why, what do you think of him? And I said, I don't know, I like -- I think this is the way that we should be. And he smiled and he said, "I told you." And I said, "Told me what?" And he said, "You're a Democrat. Do you know that Michael Lerner is one of Hillary Clinton's favorite people." And I said, "Really?" I think it was Michael Lerner. If it's not, Michael, my apologies. And he said, yeah, she really believes in that, the "It takes a village." Because I had just started to really kind of investigate and it really started to -- I went back home and I started reading it again but, you know, with fresh eyes, with the eyes of, "It takes a village." And not that it takes a village, because it does. It takes all of us working together. It does. And this is where people are going to get lost. When you hear the rhetoric of "It takes a village, guys, we have to watch out for each other, we've got to work together, we're in this together," you think to yourself, yes, that's true. Why do you want to be such a hate monger and say we're not? But the secret is that village is forced to work together. It takes a village and it takes a village to tell that parent how to raise that child, to police that child. Somebody's at the top of the food chain and it's no longer the parent. It's no longer the individual. It's the community. And that's what people -- that's what I missed the first time I took glance at this and that's what's coming our way. Compassion. Community compassion. That's a lie. That's communism. That's Naziism. That's fascism, statism. It's not the most important ism and that is individualism.
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/17999/

A keyword search for this quote brought up some interesting articles, like this:

The Rise of Collectivist Conservatives
by Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of Cato Unbound. Added to cato.org on May 20, 2009. This article appeared in The Week on May 20, 2009.