Excellent Glenn Greenwald essay in Salon:
David Brooks' column in The New York Times this morning contains several important observations. It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks' central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with -- it is in fact overtly hostile to -- the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today's so-called "conservatives" exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don't believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis of those principles.
Brooks comes out and explicitly declares the twin icons of "conservatism" to be every bit as quaint and obsolete as the Geneva Conventions: "Goldwater and Reagan were important leaders, but they're not models for the future."
Brooks admits what has been crystal clear for some time -- namely, that so-called "conservatives" (meaning the contemporary political "Right") no longer believe (if they ever did) that government power should be restrained in order to maximize freedom. That belief system, says Brooks, is an obsolete relic which arose out of the the 1970s, and has been replaced by the opposite desire -- for expanded government power on every front.
And here's Andrew Sullivan, discussing (and quoting) Greenwald's essay:
We do indeed have the beginnings of a realignment in American politics. As Glenn Greenwald recognizes, that is the core argument of The Conservative Soul. Conservatism has been highjacked by an ideology favoring an authoritarian, constantly-militarist, debt-ridden welfare state. It has no real roots in the Anglo-American conservative tradition. It explicitly rebukes Reagan and Goldwater as outmoded icons. David Brooks has decided to side with the Bush agenda - against individual freedom and for more government power over people's lives. Glenn Greenwald recognizes and grasps this new and essential divide in today's politics. It is not: are you left or right? It is: are you with this radical, new statism or are you against it? I'm against it, from the perspective of conservatism. And these people are not going to take that tradition away from me without an almighty fight. Money Greenwald quote:
To be considered "liberal" or "leftist" now means, more than anything else, to oppose that [Bush-Cheney-Rove] agenda. All of the people now deemed to be on the "left" - including many who have quite disparate views about the defining political disputes of the 1990s - have been able to work together with great unity because all energies of those "on the left" have been devoted not to any affirmative policy-making (because they have had, and still have, no power to do that), but merely towards the goal of exposing the corruption and radicalism at the heart of this extremist right-wing movement and to push back - impose some modest limits - on what has been this radical movement's virtually unlimited ability to install a political framework that one does not even recognize as "American."
Regardless of what other beliefs one might have, opposition to endless warmongering in the Middle East (and the wonderful tools used to promote it, such as rendition, torture and indefinite detentions) - combined with a belief in the rule of law, along with basic checks and balances, as a means of modestly limiting the power of the federal government over American citizens - is now sufficient to render one a "liberal" or "leftist." That's because the political movement that dominates our country is radical and authoritarian - "security leads to freedom." Our political spectrum is now binary: one is either a loyal follower of that movement or one is opposed to it.