Donald
Trump has scrambled the political spectrum in certain ways, and one of
them has been to introduce a new set of players to the national scene.
“Nationalists” or “populists” (as they now call themselves), or the
“alt-right” (as they used to call themselves), have been vying with
traditional Republicans for control of the Trump administration. The
nationalists tend to be pro-Russia, virulently anti-immigrant,
race-centric, and conspiratorial in their thinking.
Their current
project is a political war against National Security Adviser H.R.
McMaster, a conventional Republican who displaced the nationalist
Michael Flynn. The nationalist war against McMaster has included waves
of Russian social-media bots, leaks placed in the nationalist organ Breitbart, and undisguised anti-Semitism.
Most
observers outside the nationalist wing have treated McMaster as the
sympathetic party in the conflict. The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald is a
notable exception. Greenwald has depicted the conflict, much like the
nationalists themselves have, as the machinations of the deep state to
prevent the authentic, democratically legitimate populist
representatives of Trumpism from exerting their rightful authority.
Greenwald himself is not a nationalist, and is certainly not a bigot,
but the episode has revealed a left-winger’s idiosyncratic sympathy for
the most odious characters on the right.
Greenwald lays out his thinking in a deeply, if inadvertently, revealing column denouncing anti-Trump saboteurs in the deep state.
The
foundation of Greenwald’s worldview — on this issue and nearly
everything else — is that the United States and its national-security
apparatus is the greatest force for evil in the world. “Who has brought
more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six
decades,” he writes, “than the U.S. National Security State?” (This
six-decade period of time includes Mao’s regime in China, which killed
45 to 75 million people, as well as the Khmer Rouge and several decades
of the Soviet Union.)
In Greenwald’s mind, the ultimate expression of
American evil is and always will be neoconservatism. “It’s hard, for
instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in
more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly
aligning,” he argues.
The
neoconservatives have lined up against Trump, and many Democrats agree
with them on certain issues. Since the neocons represent maximal evil in
the world, any opponent of theirs must be, in Greenwald’s calculus, the
lesser evil. His construction that “it’s hard … to imagine” any worse
faction than the neocons is especially telling. However dangerous or
rancid figures like Steve Bannon or Michael Flynn may be, the
possibility that they could match the evil of the neocons is literally
beyond the capacity of his brain to imagine.
A
second source of Greenwald’s sympathy for the nationalists is their
populism. The nationalists style themselves as outsiders beset by
powerful, self-interested networks of hidden foes. And while their
racism is not his cup of tea, Greenwald shares the same broad view of
his enemies.
Trump
“advocated a slew of policies that attacked the most sacred prongs of
long-standing bipartisan Washington consensus,” argues Greenwald. “As a
result, he was (and continues to be) viewed as uniquely repellent by the
neoliberal and neoconservative guardians of that consensus, along with
their sprawling network of agencies, think tanks, financial policy
organs, and media outlets used to implement their agenda (CIA, NSA, the
Brookings/AEI think tank axis, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.).”
It
is certainly true that all manner of elites disdain Trump. What’s
striking is Greenwald’s uncharitable reading of their motives, which
closely tracks Trump’s own portrayal of the situation.
Many elites
consider Trump too ignorant, lazy, impulsive, and bigoted for the job.
Instead Greenwald presents their opposition as reflecting a fear that
Trump threatens their wealth and power. (This despite the pro-elite tilt
of his tax and regulatory policies — which, in particular, make it
astonishing that Greenwald would take at face value Trump’s claim to
threaten the interests of “Wall Street” and its “financial policy
organs.”)
The
opposition to Trump naturally shares a wide array of motives, as would
any wide-ranging coalition. Greenwald’s column consistently attributes
to those opponents only the most repellant beliefs. He doesn’t even
consider the possibility that some people genuinely believe McMaster is a
safe, responsible figure who might help dissuade the president from
doing something terrible.
Greenwald emphasizes, “Hank Paulson, former Goldman Sachs CEO and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary, went to the pages of the Washington Post
in mid-2016 to shower Clinton with praise and Trump with unbridled
scorn, saying what he hated most about Trump was his refusal to consider
cuts in entitlement spending (in contrast, presumably, to the Democrat
he was endorsing).” It is true that Trump promised not to cut
entitlement spending. Greenwald’s notion that this promise placed him
“presumably in contrast” with Hillary Clinton ignores that fact that
Clinton also promised to protect these programs.
The
passage about entitlements appears deep in Paulson’s op-ed, which
Paulson began by lambasting Trump for encouraging “ignorance, prejudice,
fear and isolationism,” among other flaws. Greenwald asserts that
Paulson identifies Trump’s hostility to cutting entitlements as “what he
hated most” about the Republican nominee, but nothing in the op-ed
indicates this is what Paulson hated most.
Greenwald just made that part
up.
The
same concoction of motives is at work in Greenwald’s contempt for
McMaster and John Kelly, the new chief of staff. The pair of former
generals “have long been hailed by anti-Trump factions as the Serious,
Responsible Adults in the Trump administration, primarily because they
support militaristic policies — such as the war in Afghanistan and
intervention in Syria — that are far more in line with official
Washington’s bipartisan posture,” he writes.
Note
that “primarily.” Greenwald is arguing that news coverage treating them
as competent managers, as opposed to the amateurish nationalists, is
propaganda by the elite plumping for greater war in Afghanistan and
Syria. He is implying that if Kelly and McMaster took more dovish
positions on Afghanistan and Syria, their public image would be
altogether different. Greenwald supplies no evidence for this premise.
In fact, McMaster’s most acute policy struggle has been his efforts to maintain the Iran nuclear agreement, one which has placed him on the dovish side, against an established neoconservative position. Greenwald does not mention this issue, which fatally undermines his entire analysis.
The
final point of overlap between Greenwald and the nationalists is their
relatively sympathetic view of Russia. The nationalists admire Putin as a
champion of white Christian culture against Islam, a predisposition
Greenwald does not share at all. Greenwald has, however, defended Russia’s menacing of its neighbors, and repeatedly questioned its ties to WikiLeaks.
From
the outset, he has reflexively discounted evidence of Russian
intervention in the election.
“Democrats completely resurrect that Cold
War McCarthyite kind of rhetoric not only to accuse Paul Manafort, who
does have direct financial ties to certainly the pro — the former
pro-Russian leader of the Ukraine,” he asserted last year. (Manafort did have financial ties to that leader, a fact that was obvious at the time and which Manafort no longer denies.) Democratic accusations that Trump had hidden ties with Russia were a “smear tactic,” “unhinged,” “wild, elaborate conspiracy theories,” a “desperate” excuse for their election defeat, and so on.
As
evidence of Russian intervention piled up, Greenwald’s line of defense
has continued to retreat. When emails revealed a campaign meeting by
Russians on the explicit promise of helping Trump’s campaign, Greenwald brushed it off
as politics as usual: “I, personally, although it’s dirty, think all of
these events are sort of the way politics works. Of course if you’re in
an important campaign and someone offers you incriminating information
about your opponent, you’re going to want it no matter where it comes
from.”
This
closely tracks the Trump legal team’s own defense of the Russia
scandal, a fact that is probably coincidental. (There are only so many
arguments to make.) Greenwald is not a racist, and is the opposite
of a nationalist, and yet his worldview has brought him into close
alignment with that of the alt-right. A Greenwaldian paranoid would see
this quasi-alliance as a conspiracy. The reality of his warped defenses
of Trump is merely that of a monomaniac unable to relinquish his
obsessions.
