Mainstream liberal media is totally ok with repressive policies coming from the White House so long as a Democrat is the occupant. They defend Obama for doing what they attacked Bush for, and are terribly, terribly upset by what those scalawags Greenwald and Snowden are doing, with exposing state secrets and making the government look like thugs. Like Bob Dylan once said, “You just want to be on the side that’s winning.”
Yet this does not disconcert much of the liberal media elite. Many writers who used to focus on bashing Bush for his transgressions now direct their energies against those who are sounding alarms about the pervasiveness of the national-security state. Others, despite their liberal affectations, have perhaps always been enthusiasts for a strong security state.
Criticize the government in any meaningful sense and you become an enemy of the state, say these mainstream liberals, who appear to favor Stasi-like surveillance and a docile, cowed populace. With them holding positions of power, or course.
Wilentz apparently sees Greenwald and Snowden, quite literally, as enemies of the state. By attacking the NSA, they are undermining faith in the federal government and hence, Wilentz intimates, in liberalism itself.
Mainstream liberals just can’t fathom a world where their tedious divisions between left and right are meaningless. The real split is between authoritarian and non-authoritarian, and such liberals are sharply on the authoritarian side. They know what is best for you and criticism of the national security state undermines democracy just, because.
Nonetheless, Snowden’s “distrust of institutions and hostility to any intrusion on personal autonomy place him beyond the sphere in American politics where left and right are relevant categories.”
Kinsley is even worse, saying our government should have final say on what journalists publish, a view which is anti-freedom and anti-democratic at core.
Kinsley argues that not only can we not trust Glenn Greenwald with decisions over the disclosure of information, but we shouldn’t trust journalists or publishers either. While Kinsley acknowledges that the Snowden revelations were a “legitimate scoop,” which revealed criminal behavior by the NSA, he argues that governments have to have the “final say” over which information gets published in democracies.
Drat these troublesome upstarts from the lower classes who clearly do not know their place.
Kinsley’s objection concerns what a member of the British ruling classes might describe as Greenwald’s and Snowden’s lack of soundness. He clearly believes that neither Greenwald nor Snowden has the right disposition to make good choices in ticklish situations.
Their worst fears sound great to me.
Wilentz intimates that Greenwald is plotting to create a United Front of anti-imperialist left-wingers, libertarians and isolationist paleoconservatives.
The white liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative.
Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor; and by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political “football game” that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.
Liberal duplicity hasn’t changed much since 1963.