We haven’t seen anything like this since the Vietnam war era: an administration caught red-handed illegally and systematically spying on Americans in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war. At that time, too, the political class was badly divided, with the hard-liners circling their wagons against the rising tide of popular outrage and the dissenters auguring a new and not-so-Silent Majority.
While the Vietnam conflict dragged on for years without much protest aside from a marginal group of extreme leftists, as more troops were sent and the conflict expanded in scope the massive demonstrations against the war began to shake the heretofore solid unity of center-left liberals who constituted the electoral base of the Democratic party. The cold war liberalism of the Arthur Schlesingers and the George Meanys was the main intellectual and political bulwark of the war’s defenders, but that fortress was stormed and taken by the "new politics" crowd, who took over from the defeated supporters of Hubert Humphrey and LBJ’s old gang and handed the party’s nomination to George McGovern.
With the news that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has handed in a report declaring the National Security Agency’s meta-data dragnet flat out illegal it is clear that Edward Snowden’s revelations have badly split a political class that was once pretty much united in its fulsome support for the national security status quo. This comes on the heels of a new poll that shows the majority of Americans oppose the NSA’s data dragnet – with an even larger majority contending that the main danger to their welfare is their own government.
Yet history never repeats itself exactly: there are endless variations, and the one we are living through now is extraordinary in the sense that it inverts its precursor. The tumult of the Sixties was provoked in large part by ostensible conservatives who badly overreached: our current state of affairs is the result of "liberals" of a Rooseveltian stripe who have gone a step too far.
President Barack Obama, who campaigned on a platform of government "transparency," and promised to protect whistleblowers, long ago surpassed Richard Milhous Nixon in his paranoid penchant for secrecy: his Justice Department has relentlessly pursued leakers with the zeal of Inspector Javert. Not only that, but a good many of his Boomer acolytes, who spent the Sixties marching in the streets against government repression under J. Edgar Hoover’s watchful eye, are now defending the little J. Edgars of our own time as they sit at their computer stations at NSA headquarters reading our emails. Sean Wilentz, a sixty-something year old Princeton professor and historian, who recently authored a vicious attack on opponents of the Surveillance State, has a photo of Bob Dylan as his Twitter avatar. Do we all become what we loathe in the end?
