Big Brother’s Liberal Friends
11/14/14
Henry Farrell
Domestic Politics, Security, United States
Sean Wilentz, George Packer and Michael Kinsley are a dismal advertisement for the current state of mainstream liberal thought in America. They have systematically misrepresented and misunderstood Edward Snowden and the NSA.
IT
IS strange that the Obama administration has so avidly continued many
of the national-security policies that the George W. Bush administration
endorsed. The White House has sidelined the key recommendations of its
own advisers about how to curtail the overreach of the National Security
Agency (NSA). It has failed to prosecute those responsible for torture,
on the principle that bygones should be bygones, extending a courtesy
to high officials that it has notably declined to provide to leakers
like Chelsea Manning. The result is a remarkable degree of continuity
between the two administrations.
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. Over the last fifteen months, the columns and op-ed
pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post
have bulged with the compressed flatulence of commentators intent on
dismissing warnings about encroachments on civil liberties. Indeed, in
recent months soi-disant liberal intellectuals such as Sean Wilentz,
George Packer and Michael Kinsley have employed the Edward Snowden
affair to mount a fresh series of attacks. They claim that Snowden,
Glenn Greenwald and those associated with them neither respect democracy
nor understand political responsibility.
These
claims rest on willful misreading, quote clipping and the systematic
evasion of crucial questions. Yet their problems go deeper than sloppy
practice and shoddy logic. For one thing, Wilentz, Packer and Kinsley
are all veterans of the Clinton-era battles between liberals and the
Left. Wilentz in particular poses as a latter-day Arthur Schlesinger,
shuttling backwards and forwards between his academic duties and his
political fealties. As for Packer, he has championed a muscular
liberalism, pugnacious in the fight against moral purists at home and
political Islam abroad. And Kinsley, a veteran of the wars over
neoliberalism, has always been a contrarian with a talent for
repackaging the common wisdom of the establishment as something edgy and
counterintuitive.
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/big-brother%E2%80%99s-liberal-friends-11515
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