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Wrong if Republican, Right if Democrat

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Using the Bafflermatic Calculating Index™, we
have determined that domestic spying is a-ok under
a Democrat, but EEEEVIL under a Republican.
/Sbyrnes321

Sean Wilentz contains multitudes.

Back in 2006, in a cover story that has since vanished from the Rolling Stone website, the Princeton University historian took up the cudgel against George W. Bush. “The Worst President in History,” the headline of Wilentz’s diatribe declared. Among Bush’s unforgivable acts were his assaults on civil liberties in the name of national security:

Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees . . . The president’s defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush’s actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps . . . Lincoln’s exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush’s could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

A prominent liberal scholar reasonably and appropriately criticizing a Republican president, Wilentz laid out a tough argument against presidents who endanger the constitutional rights of citizens with excessive domestic surveillance. Which leads us to an unmistakable conclusion:

Sean Wilentz probably talked about sex as a teenager, so Bush did nothing wrong.

If that conclusion doesn’t make any sense, you haven’t read Wilentz’s latest cover story, a blast of bile splashed across the pages of The New Republic. Princeton’s relentlessly snippy political warrior declares that recent whistleblower leaks from the NSA, and the reporting on those leaks, should be LOOK OVER THERE SHINY OBJECT, don’t pay any attention to what Edward Snowden says.

Why? Because Snowden, Julian Assange, and Glenn Greenwald emanate a political “impulse” that “might be described, to borrow from the historian Richard Hofstadter, as paranoid libertarianism.”

Officially, as of about 1980, casual references to Hofstadter and the “paranoid style” became archaic and vaguely sad. If you accept the premise that all politics outside the dead center of the American social consensus are essentially manifestations of mental illness, feel free to keep waving that particular book around. And check out this paranoid anti-government lunatic right here. A stone-cold tinfoil hat Bircher, that one.

Wilentz continues:

Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that’s hardly their goal. In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.

Leaking documents about the scope of the NSA’s domestic surveillance, Edward Snowden is attacking modernity and liberalism; he hates government itself, and wants to live in a cave with Lew Rockwell. COINTELPRO is Medicare; the national security state is simply and entirely the welfare state, one entity indivisible. This is not at all what Wilentz thought during the Bush years, when criticizing particular government abuses was just, you know, criticizing particular government abuses, and didn’t imply disdain for the entire project of liberal modernity. Eight years after he blasted George Bush for domestic spying, Sean Wilentz is somehow absolutely sure that “Let’s limit domestic spying” means “Let’s privatize Social Security.” Actually, funny that you mention it, there are people who do believe exactly the premise that the state is the state, one entity indivisible. Surprising to find a Princeton liberal in their company.

Making his case for the paranoid libertarianism of Snowden and Co., Wilentz reaches spectacular heights of what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-aboutness. Here’s why you should protect your mind against perceiving the information that the paranoid libertarian Edward Snowden leaks about the NSA:

By 1999, a 16-year-old Snowden had moved with his family from North Carolina to Maryland. He had dropped out of high school in his sophomore year and become enamored with computers. Snowden spent increasingly large swaths of his time on Ars Technica, a technology news and information website for self-described ‘alpha geeks.’ Soon, he was posting regularly in the site’s public chat rooms under the user name ‘TheTrueHOOHA.’ Snowden, it seems, mostly engaged in postadolescent banter about sex and Internet gaming—and occasionally mused about firearms.

Case closed—the NSA obviously needs to spy on Americans. A teenager talked about sex and video games, two chillingly bizarre and patently libertarian obsessions. He mused about firearms during what would have been his junior year of high school; therefore, please store my phone records in your Utah database.

Many hands have taken apart Wilentz’s article, this example taking pride of place for thoroughness and calm reasoning.

But it seems unlikely that Wilentz will allow any of it to pierce his armor. The critical responses to his absence of reason assume that he’s engaged in a political object, in an argument about political means and political ends. He’s not. He’s engaged in a personality-centered diatribe about teams and sides, protecting his team’s banner against the other team’s banner-grabbers. There are no politics to Sean Wilentz’s politics, no ideology, no sense of right and wrong. He’s a courtier aligning with his court: Republican administration domestic spying bad, Democratic administration domestic spying . . . uh, not domestic spying, so shut up. Hofstadter!