W. Cleon Skousen, Glenn Beck’s Guy

Photo:  skousen2000.com

Quick, name a dead Mormon crank who’s driving American politics.  Wait, I’ve got one:  W. Cleon Skousen, (1913 – 2006) a lawyer and former low-level FBI administrative drone who went on to teach ancient scripture at Brigham Young University and ultimately write the definitive work behind…Glenn Beck! Skousen’s thought is an amalgam of a lawyer’s take on Mormon Biblical theory, twisted anthropology, the John Birch Society, and conspiracy theory.  Once he was mentor to Senator Orrin Hatch; today he is mentor to generation of conservative “ultras,” to borrow a term from Skousen’s heyday.  And they are converging on Washington as we speak.

            Skousen’s 1981 book, “The 5,000 Year Leap,” was rescued from the dustbin of history by Beck, through whose good offices the work has now sold 1.5 million copies.  It forms an ideological lynchpin for a converging cabal of Tea Partiers, Christian Identity types, Alaskan militias, and hard-right Mormons.  If you’ve paid any attention to Beck’s 912 Project, you’re seeing Skousen’s ideas in action.  If you’ve followed Tea Party Senators like Mike Lee (R-Utah), you’re seeing Skousen in action.  Lee has achieved sufficient notoriety to merit a feature article in the New York Times Magazine.   The piece, “Radical Constitutionalism,” appeared in the November 28^th issue.

Another Skousen Guy, Sen. Mike Lee, (R-UT)

Photo:  politico.com 

            What are the touchstones of Skousen’s thought?  While there are literally scores sprinkled through this prolific writer’s works, a few that have been in the headlines, and have been recently touted by the likes of Mike Lee include:

• Abolishing the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development
• Repealing the 16th Amendment (income tax) and 17^th Amendment (direct election of Senators)
• Advocacy of “nullification,” the right of states to ignore federal law
• No federal powers other than those explicitly recognized in the Constitution
• Nullifying federal control of public wilderness lands.

            These are just a few of the more than 101 talking points articulated in articles like “101 Constitutional Questions To Ask Candidates.”  From this, Skousen’s more practical political line, he descends into a thicket that gets darker.  A few ideas paraphrased from a recent Mother Jones article offer a glimpse:

• The descendents of the Visigoths, Anglo Saxons, Whatever, (Us) are God’s Chosen People
• Jamestown Colonist were commies
• Many slaves preferred slavery to freedom (with the added benefit of “temporary marriages”)
• Citing Fred Albert Shannon, a fave Skousen source: Slavery not so bad because "pickaninnies” had the freedom to run around naked
• The forced removal of the Cherokees on the “Trail of Tears” was okay because they were relocated to the oil fields of Oklahoma
• The robber barons were capitalism at its best:  “"Trust-busting often hurt, rather than helped, the consumer."

Gary Nelson, writing for the Arizona Republic, offers a succinct description of, if I may, Skousenism:

“Skousen's primary premise is that the Constitution owes its basic structure to the governing principles of ancient Israel. The United States must therefore be regarded as a direct creation of God, as the Bible says Israel was. Subservience to the national aims and subjection to what Skousen calls "the religion of America" thus become divinely ordained individual duties.”

            The import of this is further underscored by a lovely passage in the Mother Jones article:

“According to Skousen, the Anglo-Saxons—and by extension our own WASPy Founding Fathers—were descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, in effect making them a divine people. This easily debunked assertion is the foundation of the white supremacist "Christian Identity" movement.”

Lost Tribes, Kings, Birchers…and Eisenhower?

            Meet Hengist and Horsa, Fifth Century Anglo-Saxon kings that Skousen identified as the lost link to the “Lost Ten Tribes” of ancient Israel.  Skousen engaged in a form of Biblical exegesis designed to “prove” the Mormons as a chosen people, one of those Ten Tribes, and to link their mythical history directly to the U.S. Constitution.  As such, as a professor at BYU, he was of some value to the leadership of the LDS church, but, unfortunately, he went rogue, and began to splice fantastical conspiracy theories into his "scholarship."  One example:  Dwight D. Eisenhower is a communist.

            Skousen’s conspiratorial thinking was derived directly from the ideas of Robert W. Welch, Jr. the iconic 60s leader of the John Birch Society—and Skousen loved Birchian smear tactics.  He went so far with his “professional anti-communism” (Hoover’s term) that even J. Edgar Hoover refudiated him.

Skousen Verbatim

            Here are a few passages direct from the horse’s mouth, to give you a sense of the man:

“The most damaging aspect of the Sixteenth Amendment is the fact that it vitiated the unalienable rights provided in the 4th Amendment. This is the amendment which protects privacy–privacy of the home, business, personal papers and personal affairs of the private citizen. None of these are disturbed by a poll (head or capitation) tax because it is so much per person regardless of the circumstances, but when the tax is based on income, the IRS is assigned the most unpleasant task of making certain that everyone pays his fair share.”

            And,

“Although most Americans are not generally aware of it, U.S. foreign policy has been guided for a number of years by a special government study known as the Phoenix Papers. A strategy of developing an “interdependence with the Soviet Union” in space, science, industry, food, arms, economics and culture has been a continuing dream of globalist master planners of the collectivist left. …

It was immediately apparent from these documents that the creation of a world socialist society was the ultimate goal of the authors of these papers (which cost the tax-payers of the country $78,600.00. to prepare!).”

            Finally, from “101 Constitutional Questions To Ask Candidates”:

62. Would it ever be possible to repeal the Federal Income Tax?

Yes. By phasing out governmental activities which are clearly outside the Constitution, the cost of government would be greatly reduced and the income tax could be safely eliminated.

What’s a Nut Job Like You Doing in a Rotunda Like This?

            So how did a Mormon Bible-twisting nutcase with a 2,000 page FBI file on him get the keys to Congress?  And what does it say about us that literally scores of the most paranoid ideas about government that have been amassed in the last 50 years are now driving the intelligentsia on the right?  In Skousen’s John Birch salad days, Time Magazine dismissed his ideas as those of an “ultra,” as in, ultra-right.  Today, with a major assist from Glenn Beck, he’s practically in the driver’s seat.

            It’s hard to overemphasize the seismic shift such thinking represents—and how its tentacles permeate every soundbyte of our present discourse.  Taxing the rich?  Skousen covered it.  “Death” tax?  Check.  Starve government?  Check.  Divine inspiration of free-market principles?  Check and double check.  The list goes on and on.  You can even find Christine O’Donnell’s reading of the First Amendment in Skousen.  To quote the Times, the First Amendment to Skousen “wasn’t intended to separate church and state but to prevent the federal government from disestablishing religion in the seven states that had officially established denominations during the founding era.” 

            The origins of Skousen’s thought are deeply embedded in Mormon tradition.  Here is Lorenzo Snow (1814 – 1901), fifth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on some of the same turf:

“We trace the hand of the Almighty in framing the constitution of our land, and believe that the Lord raised up men purposely for the accomplishment of this object, raised them up and inspired them to frame the constitution of the United States. (JD 14:301; also in Brown 359)”

You know, there is no inherent reason why Joe McCarthy can’t happen again.  A secular society based on individual liberty and freedom from fundamentalist coercion is not guaranteed by the Constitution if you read the Constitution the way these guys read the Constitution.  And “these guys” include, to varying degrees, Clarence Thomas, Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch, and a host of others considered by many to be “mainstream.” (For more context on this, and a rich account of Skousen’s life, deeds and misdeeds, check out Alexander Zaitchik’s September 2009 piece at Salon, “Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s Life.”)

Despite moments of apparent lucidity, Skousen’s work is nothing but divination, magical thinking and fantastical exegesis of Biblical fragments, all offered up in a political gloss. There is a fundamental underlying this form of thought:  Constitutional theocracy.  It’s weird, but the notion has long informed the Mormon right—and now it’s coming to a Glenn Beck event near you.  Or better, keep an eye on your judicial system.   Disavowed by Hoover, the Mormon church, William F. Buckley, Jr., and a host of others from his own team, you are forced to acknowledge, “He's Baaack!”