For several weeks, Glenn Beck has relentlessly demonized CUNY Political Science professor Frances Fox Piven. His attacks have inspired death threats and been met with widespread condemnation. Below, Frances Fox Piven responds to Beck. His paranoid rants, she says, pose a greater danger to American democracy than to her personal safety.

From a February 8 column published on the website of The Guardian:

When the process of governing is incomprehensible, manipulation and propaganda thrives. The strange stories that Glenn Beck creates with his chalkboard gain traction with Americans, who are made anxious by the large changes that have overtaken the United States, including the election of a black president and the increasing racial diversity of the population, deindustrialisation and the decline of American power abroad, as well as cultural changes in sexual and family norms.

By telling simple fairy tales that trace these big and complex changes to the machinations of particular people, Beck makes the changes comprehensible in a way, and also makes the people who are presumably responsible the targets of his listeners' frustration and outrage. Partly because it is utterly irrational, and partly because it is an effort to bully and intimidate his political opponents, this is dangerous for democratic politics.