Flosky and Sackbut

 At some point during one of those pointless and interminable GOP primary debates that were available for streaming only on Rumble (in which the worst and leading candidate declined even to show up, rendering the whole exercise futile), an advertisement popped up for the site's own content. Rumble, recall, is one of the various attempts that have been made, some with greater success and longevity than others, to create a right-wing version of Twitter (now, of course, that's just Twitter, or "X"), or a right-wing YouTube, etc. This ad for Rumble showcased some of the platform's name talent. Tucker Carlson was there, as well as various other right-wing goons. 

And then the face of Glenn Greenwald popped up. There he was, the once-vaunted journalist who broke the Edward Snowden story; the once-celebrated advocate for civil liberties and critic of the excesses and human rights violations of the U.S. war on terror; now hawking a right-wing social media site, alongside ads for survivalist kits, gold coin investment scams, and Hillsdale College. 

Long-time readers of the blog will know that I have long been fascinated by the decline and fall of Glenn Greenwald. To my shame, he is a person I once took seriously. I always found his self-righteousness to be grating, to be sure; but back in the Obama years, I thought he was a salutary sort of irritant. He was forever harping upon the apparent double-standard of Democrats: how "liberals never spend as much time denouncing Obama's drone strikes as they did Bush's war crimes." And I was always retorting: "Nuh-uh, I denounce both!" But the truth was that I probably wouldn't have spent as much time denouncing them, if Greenwald hadn't always been there prodding us into speech. 

As Greenwald gradually morphed over the course of the Trump years into an alt-right figure, I regarded this process first as a sort of tragic arc. I compared him to Wordsworth, who, after becoming a hero to left-wing idealists in his youth, ended his life as an arch-conservative and reactionary defender of the established order. I quoted from Browning and Shelley, as they both wrote eloquently of Wordsworth's fall from grace. Here, I said, was another "lost leader." Here was another hero of our youth who had lived to betray his best self; who had turned his back on our once-shared values. The man who had denounced civil liberties violations and crimes against humanity had lived to become a defender of Trump and Putin. 

But now, Greenwald's behavior is so absurd that it is time to retire the Wordsworth analogy. He is not remotely worthy of that dignity; and these days, I'm just embarrassed that I ever took him the least bit seriously. I'm not sure exactly when Greeenwald crossed this threshold for me; in part because it's not always clear exactly when Greenwald shed the last thin garment of his left-wing credentials and became thoroughly red-pilled. Maybe it was when he started appearing on Tucker Carlson. Maybe it was when he gushed in a conversation with Alex Jones about how "handsome" the far-right conspiracy theorist is. But at some point, Greenwald's fall stopped being a tragedy, and became a farce. 

So now, I think it's safe to say Greenwald is less Wordsworth than he is Robert Southey. Wordsworth, after all—erstwhile poet of romantic rebellion and youthful idealism that he was—was worth shedding a few tears over. But Southey's quite similar ideological evolution has always evoked more mockery than sorrow—in part because he was a more minor poet; in part because his elevation as Laureate, after having once written scathingly of the monarchy, was a more dramatic and blatantly self-interested political volte-face. I was reading Thomas Love Peacock's delightful satirical novella Nightmare Abbey yesterday, for instance, and we find Mr. Southey there represented as "Mr. Sackbut"—so named because he had "sold his birthright for a pot of sack" (the then-traditional royal grant to the Poet Laureate). 

Greenwald, of course, is no isolated phenomenon (even if he is a particularly extreme example). He stands in as a fine representative for every left-wing activist who becomes "disillusioned" with the official progressive parties; the activist who spends so much time attacking the perceived departures from principle of his own side that he ends up positively favoring the opposition; the critic of the abuses and horrors of U.S. foreign policy who becomes so exercised about them that he eventually concludes that all adversaries of the United States must actually be good, and who therefore ends up making excuses for far-right authoritarian bullies like Vladimir Putin, who embody the polar opposite of all the values that he once purportedly stood for. 

Why is it that so many one-time progressives undergo this same political evolution? Perhaps it is because they expected too much from politics to begin with. They thought that the official organized left was going to change the world; and when the world emerged from this process still flawed in various ways, they gave up on the whole project, and ended by endorsing the worst foes of progressive social change. Thomas Love Peacock explains this dynamic as well. In writing of the political peregrinations of another character, Mr. Flosky—this one a stand-in for Coleridge (who joined Wordsworth and Southey in shifting over the course of his career from left to right)—Peacock observes: 

He had been in his youth an enthusiast for liberty, and hailed the dawn of the French Revolution as the promise of a day that was to banish war and slavery, and every form of vice and misery, from the face of the earth. Because all this was not done, he deduced that nothing was done; and from this deduction, according to his system of logic, he drew a conclusion that worse than nothing was done; that the overthrow of the feudal fortresses of tyranny and superstition was the greatest calamity that had ever befallen mankind; and that their only hope now was to rake the rubbish together, and rebuild it without any of those loopholes by which the light had originally crept in.

 So many of our left-wing activists, whether they were crying "Obama is just as bad as Bush" ten years ago, or "Biden is just as bad as Trump" today, fall into this same error. Greenwald is just the most precipitous and illustrative example of their number. They start by saying "Obama betrayed us with his war in Libya and his drone strikes;" or "Biden betrayed us with his support for Israel's war in Gaza." But rather than resting satisfied with a merely absolute statement of wrong ("it was bad to invade Libya"; "it is bad to assassinate people using drones"; "it is bad to indiscriminately bomb civilians, even in an otherwise justified conflict"—all of which statements I agree with), they then make an unjustifiable comparative claim. "Therefore," they say, "Obama is just as bad as Bush" or "Biden is just as bad as Trump."

And this, by the same crock-logic that Mr. Flosky pursued, then leads them to a further, and even more unjustifiable conclusion: "Obama is actually worse than Bush" or "Biden is worse than Trump." And then they end up endorsing Trump (and with him, his buddy Vladimir Putin) by a kind of process of negation. It is an apophatic approach to MAGA theology, but it leads to a no less orthodox conclusion than that reached by all the screaming fans at a Trump rally. Because Obama and Biden didn't solve all the problems, and end war, then—it is unjustly concluded—they achieved nothing at all. And then, by the next step in the Flosky-logic, we conclude that they achieved worse than nothing. They are a positive evil. 

And so the people who were supposedly the most left-wing end up endorsing the deepest shade of right-wing reaction. They become apologists and enthusiasts for Putin and Trump's plans to remake the West along far-right authoritarian lines. They become foot soldiers in a Putin-led neo-fascist revolution, when they were the ones who were supposed to be the most anti-fascist of us all. 

What these people fail to understand is that politicians in power will always disappoint us. They will do so for two fundamental reasons: 1) because the ability of politics to reshape human nature and our flawed institutions is limited, rather than absolute (and thank goodness for that); and 2) because they operate within structures that condition their behavior in office, regardless of their personal views and promises. 

But—and this is Peacock's point—having concluded that political practice will always fall short of our ideals—having found that no government will ever usher in the age of perfect equality and absolute justice—this is no reason not to try to work toward those ideals. Still less is it any reason to erect their antithetical values into positive ideals. Because we cannot have perfect justice, is no reason to worship injustice. The fact that we cannot have perfect equality, is no reason to make a virtue of inequality and arbitrary power. Because we do not have perfect democracy, is no reason to want a dictator. In a word, because Biden will never be all we might want him to be, is no reason to crown Trump and Putin the emperors over us all, and pipe a tune—Sackbut-style—for these two autocrats so that they might "dance and revel on the grave/Of liberty" (Shelley).