Hating on the Establishment

Glenn Greenwald, whose stuff is often excellent, has unleashed a breathtakingly misguided attack at The New Republic today. As one would expect, it's getting many a link, and those who long ago decided The New Republic a festering tumor attached to our body politic are excitedly congratulating Glenn for his bit of amateur surgery. But while the operation is technically impressive (no one disputes Greenwald's ability to turn a phrase), we're dealing with some serious malpractice here:

many establishment journalists have raging contempt for the blogosphere. It is a contempt grounded in the fallacy of credentialism and a pseudo-elitist belief that only the approved and admitted members of their little elite journalist club can be trusted to enlighten the masses. Many of them see blogs as a distasteful and anarchic sewer, where uncredentialed and irresponsible people who are totally unqualified to articulate opinions are running around spewing all sorts of uninformed trash. And these jouranlistic gate-keepers become especially angry when blogospheric criticism is directed towards other establishment journalists, who previously were immune from any real public accountability.

"Many." Here's a media critic's first lesson: "many" is a warning flag, a dodge, the most obvious and troubling sign of a trend piece. Many is not a percentage and it's not a list of names, it's an assumption masked as a measurement. And the next step for "many" is to become one: a singular (or single digit) example touted as an oft-replicated template. In this case, the lucky winner is TNR's Jason Zengerle (who, to be clear, I've never met, spoken to, or otherwise communicated with), who furnishes Greenwald's exhibit A:

This post from The Plank's Jason Zengerle – in which he opines with regard to the NSA scandal that "some of the outrage is in fact outrageous" -- illustrates the problem perfectly:

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who both worked as lawyers in the Reagan and Bush I Justice Departments, take to The New York Times op-ed page today to argue that President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program is legal. "The program's existence has now become public, and howls of outrage have ensued," they write. "But in fact, the only thing outrageous about this policy is the outrage itself."

I don't know enough about the law to know whether Rivkin and Casey are technically correct (although the fact that Cass Sunstein, as honest a broker as you're likely to find among law professors, thinks that Bush may well have been within his legal rights makes me think that some of the outrage is in fact outrageous).

Zengerle says that he is incapable of reaching his own conclusion as to whether the President broke the law, but is nonetheless willing to dismiss the outrage over this scandal – and even label the outrage itself "outrageous" - based on nothing other than the say-so of Cass Sunstein. Without mentioning a single argument of Sunstein’s that he finds persuasive (indeed, without even indicating that he read any of Sunstein’s arguments), Zengerle turns up his nose at all of the protests over Bush's law-breaking as nothing more than the ignorant, base anger of the masses. After all, Cass Sunstein is an Approved, Credentialed and Important Person at TNR, so when he expresses an opinion, one can assume that it is likely correct.

Here's what follows the end of Greenwald's excerpt:

But, as a practical matter, I find Rivkin and Casey's argument utterly unconvincing.

The post, as you can read for yourself, then segues into a systematic excoriation of the Rivkin and Casey's case. There was no dismissal of outrage, only a tossed-off aside that some of it may be exaggerated. And the piece, in total, is of course an expression of outrage against fatuous attempts to defend the program. Some traitor.

What's most troubling about Glenn's attack is that the concept of expertise comes in as collateral damage. Zengerle's sin is to hold open the possibility that Cass Sunstein, one of the nation's top constitutional professors and a fairly consistent, if occasionally contrarian, liberal, may be better placed to evaluate the constitutionality of the NSA program than, say, Jason Zengerle. Quite the transgression. But compounding Greenwald's overreaction is that Zengerle neither condemns any particular parties nor draws a definitive conclusion. He took on an op-ed proclaiming the operation's legality, demolished its shoddy thinking, proclaimed himself open to further evidence, and closed the piece. This is the violation of Greenwald's bete noire?

Greenwald's a smart dude who thinks book learning laudable, so rather than accuse him of anti-intellectualism, I'm going to park this post a few blocks back, assuming an overly energetic populism that accidentally dips into the uglier, more Gingrichian elements of anti-establishmentism. As example, Greenwald, who repeatedly barks at Zengerle for simply dismissing, rather than disproving, opposing arguments, never explains why Zengerle shouldn't give Sunstein's opinion weight, preferring to simply diminish him as some establishment figure too intrinsically compromised to emerge on the side of the light. The reader is left to imagine the precise pointiness of Sunstein's head and the exact number of "Georgetown dinner parties" he's attended.

Now, Sunstein may have been (and in fact, was) wrong on the NSA, but the reason we all know that Sunstein was wrong on the NSA is because he's a smart enough, honest enough guy that the whole blogosphere felt compelled to methodically deconstruct his opinions. No one, as I recall, simply dismissed him as a hack and ignored the argument. That sort of contempt for recognized experts, which Greenwald toes here, has long been a favored tactic of the right. Examples of it make up the meat of Chris Mooney's much-beloved The Republican War on Science. The strategy is to diminish or degrade the opinions of recognized authorities by undermining the very idea of a recognized authority, often by simply mocking the concept as elitist and out-of-touch. It's been deployed, to great success, against biologists, climatologists, the media, and every other empirically-oriented institution with the audacity to compare rightwing spin to testable fact. if the leftwing blogosphere, in a fit self-inflating populism, begins making the same arguments, the resulting environment, what Digby likes to call the land of Focaultian competing discourses, will not be much to our liking.

TNR has many faults. A reflexive, often unthinking support for the Likud (or now, Kadima), an unwavering affection for interventionism, and an obsession with writing articles that serve no purpose than to tweak putative allies among them. But Zengerle, here, committed no transgression save asserting an openness to further evidence. And indeed, the entire foundation of Greenwald's argument, that TNR and other "gatekeepers" despise the blogosphere, is shredded by the simple fact that his post is populated with excerpts from The Plank, TNR's entry into the blogosphere, and thus admission of its importance. I've heard of (and been called) the self-hating Jew, but the self-hating blogger?

None of this is to hold TNR as above criticism, but Greenwald picked a strategy that panders to the worst, most easily accessible prejudices of his (or my, or any) readership. Decontextualized anti-elitism will net you a bestseller, a top-rated cable show, or a highly-linked blog post, but the long-term costs always, always, always outweigh the immediate adulation. Greenwald's a helluva writer and a smart guy, he can do better than this.