David Brooks: The Last Stalinist
...This is an old argument on the communitarian right and left: the loss of social bonds and connections turns men and women into the flotsam and jetsam of modern society, ready for any reckless adventure, no matter how malignant: treason, serial murder, totalitarianism.
It’s mostly bullshit, but there’s a certain logic to what Brooks is saying, albeit one he might not care to face up to.
In the long history of state tyranny, it is often those who are bound by close ties of personal connection to family and friends that are most likely to cooperate with the government: that is, not to “betray” their oaths to a repressive regime, not to oppose or challenge authoritarian rule. Precisely because those ties are levers that the regime can pull in order to engineer an individual’s collaboration and consent....
David Brooks and the Mind of Edward Snowden
...Snowden strikes Brooks as the “ultimate unmediated man,” “suspicious,” not fully beyond the “fuzzy land” of childhood or properly “embedded” in “gently gradated authoritative structures.” And yet he concedes that Snowden is “right that the procedures he’s unveiled could lend themselves to abuse in the future.” Here, again, is Brooks’s imperative to rely on niceness: someday, someone might abuse these procedures, but we’re fine now. He’s wrong about the present, but the future risk ought to be bad enough: that such a structure is in place, that archives are filled with what we have a right to keep private, is abusive in itself. ...
...Brooks, as I’ve written before, seems to have a greater horror of impoliteness than of injustice.
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. ...
