The Authoritarian Bobo

By waiting to comment on this remarkable piece of work from Brooks, I’m able to outsource most of my incredulity. Start with Corey Robin on the literal Stalinism of Brooks’s thinking. Then proceed to Amy Davidson’s comprehensive demolition of Brooks’s strange assertions about American society and constitutionalism. I especially liked this part:

That comes across in another item on his list of Snowden’s offenses: “He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.” Or maybe they will realize that they can’t lie with impunity; maybe the next time James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, is asked a direct question in a Senate hearing, he will wonder, before offering a blatant falsehood in response, if he might get caught.

Clapper said “no” when Senator Ron Wyden asked him whether the N.S.A. was collecting data of any kind from Americans. (“Not wittingly,” he added, as though one could unwittingly seek a secret court order.) When Andrea Mitchell, of NBC, asked him about his response after the leaks, Clapper said that he’d thought it was a “ ‘When are you going to start—stop beating your wife’ kind of question”—that is, somehow cheap. Actually, if you are beating your wife, it is a perfectly fair question. Clapper conceded that his answer might have been “too cute by half,” relying on a separate “semantic” understanding of certain words: “when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.” (“Collection” is not what you’d think of as a terribly technical term.)

The failure of the Senate hearings, despite Wyden’s best efforts, brings us back to the issue of what, exactly, Snowden was supposed to do. Brooks says he “self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability,” and wonders if what he knew was really “so grave” as to be worth contributing to “the corrosive spread of cynicism.” Snowden, he said, “is making everything worse.” His choices only make sense, according to Brooks, “if you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society.”

Brooks’s argument that Snowden should have continued to trust checks and balances that were transparently failing to work reminds me of one of the most specious arguments in the United States Reports: Felix Frankfurter’s argument that the only appropriate remedy for citizens disenfranchised by malapportionment is for the disenfranchised to seek redress from the legislatures in which they aren’t represented (Brooks must regret not having been around to attack the rootless cosmopolitanism of Baker v. Carr.)

On a related note, see Shafer and Pareene on the fundamental silliness (and irrelevance) of speculating about Snowden’s motives. This point from Shafer is particularly good:

Yet even as the insults pile up and the amateur psychoanalysis intensifies, keep in mind that Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty.