Beck, Bormann and the American Restoration Fantasy

There are a number of ways to analyze Glenn Beck’s recent rally on the National Mall. Each explanation offers different insights into different elements, and taken together all of the analysis can provide a complete picture of the ‘what’ and ‘so what’ of the event.

One way to view the event is to rely on Ernest Bormann’s work, The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream(Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. It is almost as if Beck read Bormann one night and came to work the next day saying “I have a great idea…”

Bormann writes:
“The rhetorical fantasy type of purification through rebirth and restoration was central to the Puritan persuasion of the founders of New England, was the key to the rise of the evangelical persuasion of the New Lights of the Great Awakening, was the basis for the restoration movement of the Disciples of Christ, and was the foundation of the vision of the evangelical agents of abolition. The fact that the restoration fantasy type was the central rhetorical form of Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address in 1980 provides further evidence for its longevity and staying power.”

Bormann’s analysis of Lincoln’s rhetoric is especially explanatory (an analysis for Beck’s rhetoric made awkwardly more appropriate by the location of the speech):

“Lincoln’s archetypical fantasy was that of restoration [emphasis in original]. Lincoln’s drama of restoration portrayed a nation fallen on evil times, a nation which needed to restore itself, to return to the purity of the time of its founders, to renew the basic value and ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and to restore the Union to the original foundations of the constitution to show that the great experiment in self-government could work and that ‘the last best hope of mankind’ would be lost forever if it failed.”

Even Beck’s persona is one that Bormann suggests is part of the American narrative: the former sinner turned savior who leads a revival.

Bormann argues that the world is “chaotic and confusing”, and that shared rhetorical fantasies are “coherent accounts of experience in the past or envisioned in the future that simplify and form the social reality of participants.” By offering coherent explanations speakers give their audiences a ground on which to stand. By relying on the shared restoration fantasy, one that has appeared again and again in American history, a speaker is able to locate a person in a story with which they are already familiar.

Our economy remains in trouble, we’re fighting two wars, technology is changing a light speed, and ‘the other’ is here (gay marriage, an African American president, a higher profile for Muslims in America, etc. – things that make some people very uncomfortable, in part because the phenomena fall outside their explanation of the world, outside of their rhetorical fantasy). Beck relies on an American trope to explain the change and to explain the role of the audience in that change. Seen in this light, Beck’s rally is fundamentally American in both form and substance.