Me the People: A Roundup on the Rally

Paul Harvey

Our contributor and uber-blogger over at The Way of Improvement Leads Home, John Fea, has a great op-ed piece in today's New York Daily News. He concludes:

What we saw on Saturday was a group of anti-big government Tea Party libertarians trying to reclaim the civil rights movement - an initiative whose success ultimately required one of the most forceful and moral acts of federal power in American history.

In the On Faith section of the Washington Post, a reporter analyzes the varied reactions to Beck from conservative Christians. Richard Land, the well-known conservative Southern Baptist leader and (evidently) an enthusiastic participant in the picnic on the Mall (even though he finds Beck's Mormonism to be, at best, a "fourth Abrahamic faith" rather than Christianity), gives some interesting commentary on this issue in an interview on NPR.

Finally, Joanna Brooks synthesizes all the commentary on Beck and the march and concludes that Beck is America's first Mormon televangelist, while Alex McNeill's " 'Me' the People" gives his very charitable and sympathetic impressions after wandering among the crowd at the Mall Saturday, and analyzes how and why the individualism of the "me" became defined as Christian (just as Richard Land does in his NPR interview) while the "we" is somehow defined outside the fold.

After all this, Colbert had it right from the start: this was all about restoring the civil rights movement to its white, conservative roots.