Tornado Alley (PROG)

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shermann7, Glenn Greenwald: Neither a Liberal Nor a Progressive

"Glenn Greenwald Interviews Rep. Tulsi Gabbard About Foreign Policy and Her 2020 Campaign VIDEO
Glenn Greenwald is a Great Investigative Reporter "

Posted on April 20, 2011

[...]

The more substantive problem I have, though, is with this:

In his early days as a blogger, Greenwald supported Democratic candidates who shared his pro–civil liberties views. But events of the last two years — in both the White House and Congress — have changed his mind. “I just don’t think meaningful change is possible through piecemeal reforms in either of the two political parties,” he says. As for the Democrats themselves, he can barely contain his disgust. “The Republicans,” he says, “have long lived by what they call the Buckley Rule: always support the furthest-right candidate who can plausibly win. That’s because they believe conservatism will work and want to advocate for it. Democrats [by contrast] prop up the most centrist or conservative candidates — i.e., corporatists — on the ground that it’s always better, more politically astute, to move to the right.”

One of his hopes for 2012 is that candidates will emerge to take on the red and the blue teams — he is keeping an eye on Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican governor of New Mexico, who is pro-gay and antiwar, and who could run with a Democrat like former Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold. He would also be happy to see a billionaire run without the help of either party, to “disrupt the two-party stranglehold.”

Greenwald believes the same manipulation of the two-party system is essential in the fight for gay rights. He says he is encouraged by the rise of the Log Cabin Republicans—not because he likes a thing the GOP endorses, but because “it sends a signal to Democrats that they can’t keep using gay voters as an ATM machine.”

Let’s unpack this. First, let’s have a collective eyeroll at the naivety and (probably surprising to him) Broder-like fetishization of bipartisanship. He’ll support a Republican, but wants the Republican to run with a Democrat? Why? Second, his “I’m hoping for a billionaire to save America from politics” stance is deeply anti-democratic. In effect, he’s hoping for someone to come in and bypass any elections until the presidential general election and just try to buy the election. Doesn’t he know enough to worry about a Ross Perot, or a Silvio Berlusconi?

Then, there’s the issue of his overall political acumen and whether he has a well-formed and resolute set of political values. His written output suggests that Greenwald is politically engaged primarily by civil liberties and security state issues. He writes comparatively little about economic quality of life issues like wealth and income disparities, life opportunities and other forms of economic and social justice, including the rights of workers to act in solidarity to form unions and collectively bargain through their labor unions. And now, in learning he’s open to supporting Republican Gary Johnson, we see enough to know it’s almost certain he doesn’t share with liberals and progressives the core belief that the government has a necessary and essential role in taming the excesses of capitalism or of addressing our existential challenges as a species.

Continued - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=70446184

The emphasis above just added here.

There is so much more to know about people than often meets the eye.