One of the most confusing things for the lib-left about the heroic Edward Snowden is that he supported Ron Paul in the last election year and appears to come out of the libertarian right. Paul, a former Texas Congress member who ran for president, and his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, are, of course, both Republicans. And both have praised Snowden for an act of civil disobedience– which makes it easier for partisan Democrat Chris Matthews to dismiss Snowden. And god knows when I was praising Ron Paul last year, I got a lot of flak for it from the left.
It’s time to end this division, or resolve it politically, anyway. The left ought to begin by acknowledging that two of the greatest blows against the national security state in recent months have come from the libertarian right. Snowden’s flight. And Rand Paul’s heroic filibuster in the Senate. I remember watching Rand Paul’s filibuster and wondering how much I could praise him for it, because I worried how the left would land on me for it. Well, Rand Paul started a national debate on drones that forced Obama to retrench, somewhat. Paul moved the discourse. And now Edward Snowden has started a national debate on privacy that is forcing even Obama to hypocritically call for more open discussion of the program.
The great news about Snowden’s leaks is that he is plainly talking to the American mainstream. (Even National Public Radio apologized yesterday for suggesting he has a personality disorder.)
What does the left have to compare with those achievements?
A lot, actually. We can claim Jeremy Scahill’s new movie and book against drones, Dirty Wars, which began with his work at The Nation. We can maybe claim the heroic Private Bradley Manning, too, who cared about the human rights of Iraqis under occupation. (His motivation, like Snowden’s, is a bit opaque, I admit; but it won’t stop me from speculating.)
And we can certainly claim Glenn Greenwald, who played such a crucial role in breaking Snowden’s disclosures. Greenwald comes out of a firm left-wing tradition.
As I did myself, before I got in with the national interest crowd after the Iraq War. I got in with that crowd because of another heroic act, the publication of The Israel Lobby by Walt and Mearsheimer. That paper and book did more to break open the discussion of the special relationship and Palestinian human rights, which were a central piece of Walt and Mearsheimer’s work, than any mainstream Democratic politician or publication was doing. No, the Dems were all bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. And the Israel lobby analysis came out of the Americanist right and was published by a leftwing English publication, the London Review of Books, in a similar transnational manner to the ways that Snowden and Greenwald have operated.
In the years since The Israel Lobby, I owe as much for my personal education and engagement to leftwing groups like the International Solidarity Movement and Rachel Corrie, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Electronic Intifada, the American Friends Service Committee, WesPac, Jews Say No, Jews Against Islamophobia, American Jews for a Just Peace, the Center for Constitutional Rights, as I do to the right. But as I have pointed out here before, the right wing in the U.S. was publicizing the fate of Palestinian refugees as an American issue longer and more effectively than the left was doing. Of course, you can point to Elmer Berger and the anti-Zionist Jewish left. But I can point to Evan Wilson and James Forrestal and Chas Freeman and other so-called “Arabists,” the term used by Zionists to attempt to discredit support for Palestinians in the American establishment.
This pissing match is pointless. We need to understand this new moment in American politics, in which the liberal center (liberal internationalists) and the right center (neocons) are unified on national security issues, and they’re both wrong, and they’ve owned the New York Times and the Washington Post and both political parties since before the Iraq war, and the only movement for reform comes from the alleged margins on left and right.
Of course, in order for this alliance to work– in order for our issues to become mainstreamed and the left and right to cease to be marginalized– the two sides have to forge a working agreement. The left needs to forgive the right its history of nativism; and the right needs to walk away from that tradition. And the right needs to forgive the left its history of political correctness; and the left has to give up its righteous snobbery.
Steve Walt and Glenn Greenwald are both good role models here. Walt comes out of the realist school but is in many ways an old-fashioned liberal, and Greenwald comes out of the left but knows how to work with the libertarian right. These are issues of political culture, and we need a new one for the exciting work that lies ahead: nothing less than ending the misbegotten warmaking U.S. policy in the Middle East. Together, we can be enormously powerful in the American discourse and gain an echo chamber from the international discourse (Turkey, Egypt, Palestine!), too, if we can overcome our differences.
Most Americans looked on and did nothing when the rights of Muslims were being trashed by our government which fit perfectly with our media’s 24/7 trashing of Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims. When their rights were lost so too were the rights of the rest of us. Why is this so difficult to understand?
great article phil.
Phil, Manning’s motives are not opaque at all. He’s on record as motivated by a desire to give data to the American public to force a public discussion of US foreign policy in the Middle East:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/03/12/in-leaked-courtroom-audio-the-world-hears-bradley-manning-explain-his-actions/
I don’t see why anyone has to own certain politicians or personalities, groups on the left or right can come together on various important issues and can agree to differ on the details. For instance, I can agree with antiwar politicians like Ron Paul or Patrick J Buchanan on some issues, similarly when I see a broken clock, I know it’s right twice a day.
Nice, but I dont think the left and right are going to come together to acheive anything—-because where they are similar they are too similar (both have masters of the universe complex) and where they are different they are too different.
Just look at this crap on Snowden:
”Dianne Feinstein denounced his “act of treason” and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called for his prosecution. Republican House Speaker John Boehner bluntly called Snowden a “traitor.”
Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, told reporters Tuesday: “He’s no hero. He put people’s lives at risk.” His Republican colleague, Susan Collins, lambasted Snowden as “a high-school drop-out who had little maturity [and] had not successfully completed anything he had undertaken.”
If the attacks on Snowden seem a little overheated – and if some are aimed a little too obviously below the belt – that has everything to do with the larger context of his disclosures.
The backdrop for the Snowden leaks is steadily declining trust in public power. Gallup’s “Confidence in Institutions” poll found last year that only 37 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency. That number was 21 percent for banks and big business and 13 percent for Congress. The military was an outlier, with 75 percent of respondents expressing high confidence in the armed forces
Snowden’s leaked material strikes at that gold-plated Beltway brand, tearing at the image of one of the few major American entities that still commands the public’s trust.
That’s profoundly alarming to the community of elites in and outside of Washington who believe that the nation’s public and private institutions basically deserve our collective confidence. They see no compensating light at the end of the tunnel into which Snowden has dragged the country”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-washington-reaction-92614_Page2.html#ixzz2W3tSfvN7
If I had a 13% approval rating from the US public I’d shut my mouth and do something about my own “treason. There aren’t words to describe these pond scum morons.
If there were an election tomorrow between Paul and Hillary I’d vote for Paul.