Kaye weighs in on Paine references by Beck

Prof. Harvey Kaye appeared recently in Playboy magazine. His words, that is.

The Social Change and Development faculty member has his web-monitoring software set to ring whenever “Thomas Paine” is the topic; Kaye is an internationally renowned scholar on the influential Revolutionary War Era thinker and activist. In this instance, however, Playboy didn’t wait to see if Kaye took notice of “The Triumph of the Conservative Underground,” an article in which author Thomas Frank took media personality Glenn Beck to task for embracing the Paine legacy. The magazine, aware of the UW-Green Bay professor’s prominent reputation as a Paine scholar, invited him to respond. Kaye’s brief and tightly written letter, printed in a recent edition, agreed the conservative talker’s professed affection for Paine seems contradictory given the latter’s advocacy 250 years ago for a publicly funded welfare system and strict separation of church and state, among other things. Beck did, however, correctly understand that Paine turned America into a nation of radicals, Kaye observes. The full text is as follows:

The Age of Beck

“In The Triumph of the Conservative Underground (December), Thomas Frank highlights the paradox of the pro-capitalist, anti-tax, anti-redistributionist and anti-progressive Glenn Beck laying claim to the legacy of American patriot Thomas Paine. As Frank notes, it seems inconceivable that Beck would embrace the radical and social democrat Paine, who in Common Sense calls for a nation that would prosper in its diversity and pluralism and guarantee the separation of church and state, in Rights of Man lays out plans for a publicly funded welfare system, in The Age of Reason attacks the power and authority of religious leaders and in Agrarian Justice proposes taxing the rich to provide grants to the young and pensions for the elderly as a way of countering the exploitation and oppression of the nascent industrial-capitalist world. Although Beck cites Paine to attack the liberals and progressives with whom Paine would identify, the talk-show host apparently recognizes in the pamphleteer what many Americans have lost sight of: Paine turned us into radicals, and we have remained radicals at heart ever since.

Harvey Kaye
Green Bay, Wisconsin