Paging Glenn Beck: Norquist hung a portrait of Lenin in his Washington living room

In recent days, Glenn Beck has turned his neo-McCarthyite crusade against communism and "czars" against Anita Dunn after Dunn said of Fox News: "As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave." Beck devoted most of his October 15 Fox News show to claiming that Dunn "worships" and "idolizes" "her hero" Mao Zedong. Dunn had once commented that Mao and Mother Teresa were two of her "favorite political philosophers."

Of course, Beck excels at turning molehills into mountains of misinformation.  If Beck were to actually turn his specious spotlight on conservatives who have cited or praised influential communist figures, he would have at least a week's worth of shows. That list includes fellow Fox News friend Newt Gingrich; former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed; Stephen Shadegg, adviser and "alter ego" of Sen. Barry Goldwater (Beck has repeatedly called on Republicans to "get back to the conservative roots of Barry Goldwater"); Peter Germanis, who served as a senior policy analyst in the Reagan administration; and even President Bush, who encouraged Karl Rove to read a Mao biography and whose Social Security reform strategy was reportedly influenced by Lenin.

Beck's crack research staff could fill in the details and no doubt find even more tenuous communist connections among conservatives. But there's one conservative that would provide Beck with endless material if his anti-communist witch hunt was actually anything more than a shtick to smear the Obama administration and play to his conservative base.

Grover Norquist.

In Blinded by the Right, Media Matters founder David Brock wrote of the Americans for Tax Reform president:

There was nothing traditionally conservative in Grover's approach. As I conformed myself to the movement, I was being inculcated into a radical cult that bore none of the positive attributes of classical conservatism-a sense of limits, fair play, Tory civility, and respect for individual freedom. On the contrary, Grover admired the iron dedication of Lenin, whose dictum "Probe with bayonets, looking for weakness" he often quoted, and whose majestic portrait hung in Grover's Washington living room. Grover kept a pet boa constrictor, named after the turn-of-the-century anarchist Lysander Spooner. He fed the snake mice, all of them named David Bonior, the outspoken liberal House whip.

It's not hard to imagine the weeks of mock outrage that would ensue if Beck -- or Hannity -- discovered that a prominent progressive had -- or had ever had -- a portrait of Lenin hanging in his Washington living room.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov! In his living room!

But not only did Norquist entertain guests under a portrait of the first head of state of the Soviet Union, he also studied the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the most famous Italian Communist, best known for his concept of cultural hegemony.

From Blinded:

Despite his promise as an academic, Gramsci became active in the Socialist Party and launched a career as a fierce pamphleteer, making himself a voice to be reckoned with throughout Italian political circles. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, Gramsci sided with the Communist minority within the Socialist Party and built up the Italian Communist Party at the dawn of the Italian fascist movement. After serving as Italy's delegate in Moscow to the communist International, he was elected general secretary of the Communist Party in Italy. Soon thereafter, Gramsci was arrested by the government in Rome and spent ten years in prison producing his most influential revolutionary writings, in the form of notebooks and letters, before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1937. Two decades later, his writings were studied carefully by the radical left throughout the world, particularly by leaders of revolutionary movements in the Third World -- and by the anti-Communist Grover Norquist.

Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony was sprung out of his quest to understand why the working classes weren't more willing to rise up and overthrow the ruling classes. Gramsci posited that culture must be investigated to see what norms contributed to reinforcing (or dismantling) of the larger social structure.

Given his populist framing of his anti-tax group and its efforts, Norquist seems to understand what Gramsci was getting at, albeit with a much different goal.

And given Beck's populist framing of his own partisan attacks against progressives and progressive causes, he also seems to grasp what Gramsci was getting at.

(Uh-oh. Better not let Beck find out.)