Don’t ridicule Beck’s tribute to MLK. Celebrate it.

The resemblance doesn’t mean that Beck wants to take us back to the days of segregation. It means the opposite. Crying “socialism” is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It’s a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn’t end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That’s because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it’s a really slow bus.

But it’s moving forward. King, once spurned as a communist, is now canonized as a peer of the Founding Fathers. (“We haven’t carved him in marble yet,” said Beck, adding the “yet” as tribute and prediction.) And in Beck’s closing speech, you can see where the bus is headed next. Four years ago, Beck, on live TV, told the country’s first Muslim congressman: “What I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel.” On Saturday, however, Beck told his followers: “Our churches, our synagogues, our mosques—we must stand for the things that we know are true. … Go to your synagogues, your churches, your mosques—anyone that is not preaching hate and division, anyone that is not teaching to kill another man.”