My two cents on the Snowden leak: Of course, I'm among those who admire his courage, and I am temperamentally inclined to side with whoever takes it upon himself to subvert the technocracy. But it seems a quixotic gesture, and one that is not likely to change anything.
It's too bad that the Tea Party can't get as worked up about violations of the Fourth Amendment as they do the Second Amendment. Then (maybe) we'd see some change. But I guess it's hard to get worked up about something that is so abstract. We don't feel violated by telecommunications searches as we would if the police broke down our doors and ransacked our homes. We are now a surveillance state and that's not going to change. The ship has long ago left the dock when any kind of resistance to that could have been meaningful. Americans don't care that they've become that, and there is no power faction to push back against it. There will be no debate--nobody really wants to have it. We will go back to sleep in a few days, and be stirred awake again if Snowden is caught or brought to trial. But it won't be OJ or whoever people were all obsessed with down in Arizona a couple of weeks ago. We won't care.
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I was reading Jeff Toobin's piece in the New Yorker, and then David Brook's piece in the NYT this morning, both of which are critical of Snowden. I don't know why, because I should be used to it, but it still surprises me when people like Brooks and Toobin instinctively react negatively to what Snowden did. I guess the difference lies in that they are embedded in a system that they see as flawed but basically good, and I see the same system as in a process of degradation toward deeper levels of corruption and unfreedom. I am not a utopian, I don't expect to live in a social system without flaws and corruption, but it's the direction that bothers me, and our direction is not on a positive track. And anyone who recognizes that and wants to do something about it deserves our respect, not the kind of treatment he received from both.
Toobin, writes that Snowden is "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison", and he seems to think that he should have been a boy scout and used legal channels to make his concerns public. A blog post perhaps? An op ed? "What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did?" writes Toobin. "Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications." Why, in other words, did he choose to work for a spy agency if he's against what spies do?
But of course this is not the issue. The NSA surveillance activities might be legal, but there is good reason to believe these activities are in violation of the Fourth Amendment. But no one can ever challenge it in court, because any one who might undertake such a challenge does not have access to the evidence because it is classified.
The issue is the degree to which the government can invade our lives, a government that after the Military Commissions Act can call us a terrorist (even if we're not), arrest us, never bring us to trial, put us in prison, and throw away the key. And you don't raise concerns about a government that can do that by going through channels. It would be like working for the mafia and raising questions about the legality of what it is doing. Unfair analogy? The NSA is legal and the Mafia isn't. But surely you see that there is a mafia or rather there are several mafias who own enough lawmakers who make the laws that legalize their violations. And while in theory we can vote those corrupt pols out of office, in practice we tend not to.
And then there's David Brooks's take. I've always kind of liked David Brooks's nerdy decency. I accept him as a sincere advocate for a kind of conservatism that I sympathize with in theory, but for which I see precious few places to apply it in the world in which we live. Brooks's approach is not to put Snowden on the shrink's couch as Toobin wants to do, but to put on his sociologist's mortar board. His argument, nevertheless, is basically the same as Toobin's, i.e., Snowden is an isolated (disembedded) loner who doesn't understand the concept loyalty or care about the common good and rule of law:
If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.
This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did.
This is consistent with Brooks's longstanding Burkean view about how societies ought to work, and I'm sympathetic to it--in the abstract. I'm a conservative regarding things in our lived social life that are worth fighting to conserve, but the surveillance state and the plutocracy it protects are not among them.
I agree with Brooks to this extent. Loners like Snowden tilt at windmills and don't accomplish much. Nothing changes until "mediating institutions" (like political movements) start demanding significant changes. I think these will emerge in time, but they simply don't exist now in any way that is commensurate to the need. And that's why Toobin and Brooks otherwise seems so clueless. So meanwhile we have alienated Millennials like Snowden and Manning, who in their acts of conscience are lonely voices crying in the wilderness. Let us hope their sacrifices are not in vain, and that they a preparing a way for more potent political and cultural movements to come.
P.S. Here is Corey Robin's take on Brooks's piece. Yes and No. Yes, he's right about the bromides deployed to delegitimize Snowden; No to the aspersions he casts on communitarianism.