Every now and then I come across some liberal commentator who is mildly critical of abuses of power under the Obama administration, but warns against making too much of them, because you thereby create distrust of government and play into the hands of libertarians.
The reasoning is that if you make too much of an issue of preventive detention, undeclared wars, assassination lists and warrant-less surveillance, you’ll lead cause people to focus on abuses of power by government and forget about abuses of power by big corporations. Never mind that corporate power is so closely linked to government power these days that this is a distinction without a difference.
As an example of this kind of thinking, click on Would You Feel Differently About Snowden, Greenwald and Assange If You Knew What They Really Think? by Sean Wilentz for The New Republic. He does not rebut anything that Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald or Julian Assange have actually asserted. Rather he speculates on their underlying philosophy based on thin evidence, and warns against playing into the hands of corporations and libertarians.
For a good response to Wilentz, click on The Liberal Surveillance State by Henry Farrell on the Crooked Timber web log. For some more examples of strained reasoning, scroll down through the comments section.
I am not a libertarian. But I am a civil libertarian, and it is a fact that right now, many self-described libertarians are better defenders of basic civil liberties than pro-Obama liberals.
A recent study shows the pitfalls of thinking that you have to either be on Team Blue or Team Red. Click The Depressing Psychological Theory That Explains Washington for a report on the study by Ezra Klein for the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. It tells how people were for (or against) a set of proposals when told it was a liberal program, and against (or for) the same set of proposals when told it was a conservative program.
If what somebody says is factually correct and morally right, you shouldn’t worry about whose hands it will “play into.”