The War Between Liberals and Neo-Liberals

My two favorite bloggers are Glenn Greenwald and Matthew Yglesias. Over the last couple of weeks, both of them have been engaged in a long-running critique of the Mainstream Media's proclivity for treating support for the Iraq War or willingness to consider support for the war as "serious" and opposition to the war as "immature," "irrational," and "emotional." Today's post by Greenwald takes special aim at The New Republic (TNR) for publishing a justification for the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping as "too complex" for war opponents to understand and criticize justifiably. Greenwald takes the argument apart by simply pointing out that the warrantless wiretapping violates the FISA law of 1978 and is therefore a crime punishable by a misdemeanor. But the deeper point for Greenwald isn't the support for the Bush administration, it's posing that support as "dispassionate," "non-partisan," and "above the fray." Like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald is trying to reveal the partisan bias of excluding war opponents behind the non-partisan pose of the New Republic.

However, the New Republic's rhetorical strategy is the same as that of Joe Klein at Time Magazine, Mickey Kaus at Kausfiles, Jacob Weisburg (editor of Slate), Michael Kinsley, and a variety of other "neo-liberals" in the media.

But why do the neo-libs do it? Why do they so persistently pose justifications for the War or conservative positions more generally while treating liberals as too far left to be taken seriously.

Much of the reason is historical. Beginning as Democratic critics of liberalism, the neo-libs staked out positions to the right of liberals on taxes, deregulation, the welfare state, civil rights movement, and foreign affairs without being as programmatically right-wing as the Reagan Republicans. That allowed them to pose themselves as rational in comparison to the "partisan zealots" in both sides. But the chief rivals of the neo-libs have always been liberals within the Democratic Party and the neo-libs have always focused on criticizing liberals while finding "interesting," "counter-intuitive," and "intellectually compelling" reasons to agree with conservative views. This is the long-time formula for both TNR and Slate and is the context within which both magazines supported the Iraq invasion.

As the MSM began pandering more to the right, neo-liberals began (with few exceptions) to monopolize the "liberal" position in the media shoutfests. Thus, the MSM, neo-liberal journalists, and the right-wing attack media have combined to define all but the most mild liberalism as "outside" the realm of normal political discussion. As is the case with most blacks, gays, feminists, and union activists, the media has constructed a taboo on white liberals. This is why a struggle has developed between the left blogosphere and neo-liberals over foreign policy. Liberals and leftists rightfully want to leverage the fact that they've been right about Iraq into renewed media legitimacy. For TNR, Slate, Joe Klein, Thomas Friedman, et. al, continuing to exclude white liberals and the left is a matter of maintaining their own leverage within the Democratic Party and the media. In other words, it's a matter of survival.

That's the main reason why neo-liberals have been so nasty with their recent accusations of anti-Semitism. They sense that their position in American political life is being fundamentally challenged.