The strange case of Glenn Greenwald – part 1

This article is also available at medium.com

Guccifer 2.0 – arbiter of “public good”

26 Feb 2020 – In October 2016, Glenn Greenwald had a conversation with Naomi Klein, in which Klein tried to pose a few criticisms of the ways Greenwald and Julian Assange covered the hacked Clinton/Podesta/DNC emails.

Unfortunately, the two media stars address only one of Klein’s criticisms – about privacy protections when hacked material is released without being “curated”. On the other criticism, which Klein frames carefully – possibly to avoid offending Glenn (they seem good friends) – Greenwald doesn’t take the bait, so nothing of much substance is tackled.

Naomi Klein puts her unaddressed criticism in the following terms: the hacked emails were published in ways to “maximize damage” (to the Clinton campaign); we’re not learning a “huge amount” from them – they’re just used to “reinforce” what we already knew about the venal side of campaigning; The hack isn’t non-partisan or ‘information wants to be free’ – it’s a “political weapon”.

Judging from the transcript date, Naomi’s criticisms came days after an article co-written by Greenwald that published hacked Clinton documents received from Guccifer 2.0. Titled “EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship”, the material here seems relatively weak (the article concedes that “to curry favor with journalists” is “certainly not unique to the Clinton campaign”), but given Greenwald’s standing, the piece served to reinforce the relentlessly negative focus on Clinton during a crucial period in the election run-up.

Guccifer 2.0 was operated by Russian military intelligence according to the 2018 Mueller indictments, although some evidence for this Russian attribution was publicly established months prior to Greenwald’s October 2016 article. After his article, Glenn continued to claim there was “no evidence” of Russian state involvement (although he later reportedly accepted the Mueller indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking).

(Tweets from before and after Greenwald’s Guccifer 2.0 sourced piece)

Greenwald also wrote (a few days after his Guccifer 2.0 piece) that “the motive of a source is utterly irrelevant in the decision-making process about whether to publish”. The only relevant question, Glenn asserts, “is whether the public good from publishing outweighs any harm”.

That seems a nice soundbite, but the “public good” of a story’s publication is often precisely the thing that’s contested in regard to the source’s motive – especially with political stories in the run-up to an election! To ignore the motives behind the creation and timing of political stories is, perhaps, to risk turning journalism into a plaything of the powerful. (If I thought Greenwald understood this, I’d conclude he was disingenuous to suggest that Guccifer 2.0’s motives were “irrelevant” to the decision on whether to publish).

Unrelated, but sort of ‘illustrative’ here, I stumbled on a New York Times story (from 2015) about Bernie Sanders’ alleged cozy relations with wealthy donors. Although not entirely comparable to Greenwald’s story about Hillary’s “cozy press relationship”, it seems on a par in some respects. Both stories attack a political candidate, both rely on an anonymous source with dubious motives, and neither story seems particularly important in its own right. Does Glenn comment on the NYT piece? Yes, he does – on the source’s “cowardly” motives. He also retweets a comment about the NYT “abusing” anonymity to “dump” on Sanders:

(Web archive link to Glenn’s tweet and retweet – both dated 12 July 2015.
Greenwald deleted tens of thousands of his pre-2016 tweets, en masse).

After Wikileaks published material from the DNC hack linked to Guccifer 2.0, Julian Assange unequivocally denied that the source was Russian-state associated (on some occasions he merely said there was “no proof” of this, or gave credence instead to the Seth Rich conspiracy hoax). Like Greenwald, Assange played down the relevance of the source, reportedly telling news media that: “it’s what’s in the emails that’s important, not who hacked them”.

The journalistic equivalent of naïve realism is that there exists such a thing as raw, unmediated “news” – as if publishing is a window (whether clear or distorting) onto this objectively pre-existing “news”. This view certainly makes sources’ motives seem less relevant. But news is created and framed by the act of telling (ie publishing) – that’s what distinguishes it from non-news. Wikileaks asked Guccifer 2.0 for hacked material to create a story apparently timed to “engineer discord between the supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic National Convention”:-

“if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after […] we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary … so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.” (Wikileaks to Guccifer 2.0 – from Mueller indictment)

When Greenwald (with the help of Guccifer 2.0’s hack) co-created the news story about the Clinton campaign’s “cozy press relationship”, his framing was of nefarious political influence on reporting. Central to the story was the source of this influence – namely, Hillary’s PR operation, with its obvious political motives in feeding stories to favoured journalists. Greenwald and his co-author try to make this sound suitably nefarious and newsworthy by using terms such as “plotted”, “manipulating”, “plant”, “induce”, but the hacked documents don’t live up to this framing – to me, they read just like boring, standard bureaucratic campaign documents (see for yourself).

So, Greenwald gives us a story about a source of stories (Hillary’s campaign) and its tactics to “shape coverage to their liking”. But it’s “utterly irrelevant” to the publication of Glenn’s story that his own source (Guccifer 2.0, Russian military intelligence by all accounts/evidence) had a motive to shape news coverage? As people say on social media: rriiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Tweet within tweet within tweet…

Trump-frame reinforcers

A while back, it became clear that my occasional criticism of Greenwald’s output was alienating some of my readers. I hope this post helps to explain why I’m critical of Greenwald, and why I regard his influence on the ‘left’ as a sort of lottery win for projects funded by people on the ‘right’ with an interest in framing debate among burgeoning ‘anti-establishment’ audiences. I’m interested in the analysis of framing, not in speculative conspiracy theories.

The first thing I noticed when I began paying attention to Greenwald’s prolific tweeting was that it seemed to constantly reinforce Trump’s talking points (usually by attacking the same politicians, media and commentators that Trump was attacking, on the same issues, and with more or less the same timing). This was in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, but it continued after Trump was elected.

Perhaps most obviously, Glenn promoted the notion that Trump was less likely (than Clinton) to start wars. This idea had been encouraged by Trump himself, as part of his anti-Hillary platform. Greenwald wrote that Trump had a “non-interventionist mindset”, and encouraged the generalisation of Democrats as being the greater hawks. His colleague at The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill, took a similar line, saying that Trump represents “the best hope we’ve had since 9/11 to actually end some of these forever wars”.

Relevant links: Scahill quote, Guardian piece

Greenwald and Scahill weren’t the only ones who swallowed the ‘war-averse’ version of Trump. It’s notable, and curious, that those who so closely monitored (and fearlessly reported) Obama’s drone-strike militarism seemed to stop paying so much attention when Trump was the one killing thousands. After Trump took office, there was an increase of US troops deployed abroad. Trump escalated every conflict he’s presided over, ramping up bombing in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, increasing civilian deaths (in some cases to record-high levels) while removing civilian protections and reducing accountability. In the year after Trump became president he oversaw more than 10,000 US-led coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, with a 215% rise in civilian deaths. Trump’s drone strikes far exceed Obama’s. US weapon sales to foreign countries have increased under Trump.

None of this should come as a surprise if you paid attention to Trump’s strongman campaign rhetoric on the use of America’s colossal military force (“I would bomb the hell out of them”, “I would bomb the s— out of them. I would just bomb those suckers”,“take out their families”), outside of his rants against the foreign policy of Obama and the liberal interventionism of Hillary Clinton. But if you were focused on the latter – the anti-Democrat diatribes – perhaps you came away with a different story.

When those who viewed Trump as relatively ‘war-averse’ started citing Trump’s firing of John Bolton as support of their view, I felt we’d entered some really weird zone of cognitive dissonance. After all, Trump appointed Bolton in the first place. We’re supposed to think he fired him as a sort of principled stand, after suddenly realising Bolton wasn’t so averse to war after all?

Links: Greenwald tweet via @charliearchy tweet

Less obviously than with the “non-interventionist Trump” view, Glenn sometimes puts forward the notion of Trump as blunt, honest, straight-talking guy (which is something Trump and his people have pushed, no doubt to counter the widespread impression of Trump as habitual liar). Here’s an example: On 17 November 2018, the media reported that Trump was briefed on a CIA report about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Greenwald had already commented on this assassination (on a Fox News show), reinforcing typical Fox News messaging about Obama and Washington media elites: “the reason people in Washington suddenly decided that they’re angry about Saudi Arabia is because this time their victim is somebody they ran into in Washington restaurants”.

Trump’s record is worse than Obama’s – as measured by Greenwald’s apparent criteria – when it comes to defending the Saudi regime’s barbarism (Trump also rejected measures intended to prohibit arms sales to the Saudis, and he rejected a bipartisan resolution to end US military involvement in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen). In fact, Trump’s record on human rights seems shockingly bad across the board – the product of the same shameless, brutal indifference and malice towards “the inferior other” (inhabitants of “shithole countries”, etc) that informs Trump’s whole worldview. So, out of all possible takes on this, what framing does Glenn go with? Well, Trump’s just being more “honest” and “blunt” – we’re seeing his admirable traits:

Link to tweet: just more honest & blunt

It’s not that the Democrats are undeserving of criticism on these issues – it’s that Trump is currently in power, and wielding that power in increasingly brazen authoritarian actions. Greenwald nearly always seems to reframe stories which are rightly Trump-damning as, instead, being about the failing and hypocrisy of “establishment liberals” and “scummy” Washington media. (It reminds me of Frank Luntz’s advice to Republicans to “always blame Washington” – to frame every bad thing as ultimately being the fault of the liberal establishment; to relentlessly repeat that it’s all about elitist D.C. complacency – that was the advice of Luntz, a rightwing spin guru). With occasional exceptions, Glenn’s reframing of controversies in Trump’s relative favour has seemed systematic for around four years.

The tendency hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Trumps:

(Incidentally, the comment from Adam Schiff that Greenwald links to above was from 29 March 2015 [full transcript here], just a few days after the first Yemeni casualties – the full extent of Saudi brutality unfolded over the following years. Cf: the evolution of Glenn’s opinion on hostilities against Iraq – see below)

Of course, the counter-examples shouldn’t be ignored, and this piece by Greenwald stands out as a direct attack on Trump’s escalation of hostilities. It was written after Glenn had been widely ridiculed for his depiction of Trump as “non-interventionist”, and it begins by replaying the shocking catalogue of increased killing under Trump’s presidency. But then it turns into a strange polemic which frames this barbarism in terms of “the clarity of Trump’s intentions regarding the war on terror”. Glenn writes that Trump’s escalation of bloodshed is “exactly what those who described his foreign policy as non-interventionist predicted he would do”.

For months, in 2016, Greenwald had a pinned tweet asking, ‘Is it really necessary to spend next 6 months pointing out that “criticism of Clinton” ≠ “support for Trump”?’ – no doubt to save him the bother of responding to all those who noticed that he seemed overwhelmingly focused on Hillary Clinton and the “lib”/”dem” establishment, while leaving Trump relatively unscathed. (Incidentally, I never noticed anyone arguing that Clinton was undeserving of criticism, or that criticism of her in itself implied support for Trump).

In August 2016, The Intercept’s Robert Mackey noticed a similar thing with Wikileaks: “In recent months, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.”

Both Greenwald and Assange rationalised their constant, relentlessly hostile focus on Clinton’s Democrats (in the 2016 election run-up) by claiming that Trump was already “prevented” from becoming US president. Assange said “Trump would not be permitted to win”. Greenwald said the US media was “preventing him from being elected president”. (After Trump won, Greenwald said the media “played an important role, as well, in ensuring that he could win”).

Greenwald’s style of political framing, with hyperbolic and sweeping denunciations of “liberals”, “Democrats”, “Washington”, NBC and MSNBC (and “liberal media” in general) – and with Hillary Clinton, Obama and the “liberal establishment” typically presented as the greater evils (relative to supposed outsiders such as Trump) – reminds me of so-called ‘alt-right’ framing – the kind of anti-liberal fuck-you message engineered by Steve Bannon and Breitbart (and seen also on 4chan, InfoWars, etc) to appeal to a younger “anti-establishment” audience. (See Joshua Green’s book, Devil’s Bargain, on Bannon’s project to capture this audience. Incidentally, Greenwald praised Breitbart for its “editorial independence”, of all things).

“Democrats are full of hatred and always need to have a heretic to demonize.
They have no ideology, so that’s their fuel.” (Glenn Greenwald, 23 November 2019)

‘Repulsive progressive hypocrisy’ (Title of February 2012 Greenwald article)

“NBC News and MSNBC have essentially merged with the CIA
and intelligence community and thus, use their tactics…
This is who they are. It’s also what the Democratic Party is”
(Glenn Greenwald, 8 July 2018)

“What are Greenwald’s politics, exactly?”

Back in January 2014, The New Republic published an article by historian Sean Wilentz which documented various views espoused by Greenwald, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange that seemed at odds with public portrayals of these men as broadly left/progressive dissidents.

For example, it cited a December 2005 blog post in which Greenwald writes the following:

“Current illegal immigration – whereby unmanageably endless hordes of people pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate – renders impossible the preservation of any national identity.” (Glenn Greenwald, 3 December 2005)

“Hordes” of immigrants threatening “national identity”? Not a very progressive outlook – although many of Greenwald’s fans questioned the relevance of these political beliefs to the more recent NSA whistleblower stuff. So what if Greenwald and Snowden once had some rightwing views and hated socialism? Wasn’t this just another attempt to smear them?

Professor Wilentz’s article perhaps makes more sense in hindsight, following Trump’s ascendance to power. Wikileaks, for example, secretly offered to help Trump’s campaign, privately favoured the Republican Party over Clinton’s Democrats, and openly boasted of how influential it had been (via Facebook metrics) on the US election. Greenwald, with over a million followers on Twitter, and regular appearances on Fox News (on which he responds to the anti-liberal emphasis and framing of Tucker Carlson, usually with reinforcement rather than challenge), seems just as influential.

According to Wilentz, Greenwald envisaged uniting rightwing “paleoconservatives and free-market libertarians” with leftwing “anti-imperialists and civil-liberties activists” in a sort of popular revolt against an establishment composed of “mainstream center-left liberals and neoconservatives”.

This uniting of heterodox left and right against an odious liberal establishment, in order to shake up the status quo, seems a common enough trope. To the extent that it reframes libs/dems/”centrists” as the greater evil, it reinforces a political worldview of the right. Contrast a view expressed by Noam Chomsky in an interview following the 2016 election. Chomsky had been saying that Trump posed an existential threat, and that the main thing was to stop him. When asked if Slavoj Žižek had a point (that Trump would shake-up the system and be a positive force in undermining the status quo), Chomsky replied:

“Terrible point. It was the same point that people like him said about Hitler in the early thirties. He’ll shake up the system in bad ways… If Clinton had won, she had some progressive programmes. The left could have been organised to keeping her feet to the fire and pushing them through. What it’ll be doing now is trying to protect rights that have been, gains that have been achieved, from being destroyed. That’s completely regressive.” (Chomsky in interview with Mehdi Hasan, November 2016)

Although he often quotes the MIT professor approvingly, Glenn’s output regarding Trump-vs-Democrats seems to consistently push in the opposite direction to Chomsky’s advice. As I’ve noted previously, Glenn tends to frame the MAGA, Brexit, “yellow vests” movements, etc, as popular revolts against the elite establishment status quo, rather than as regressive projects that cynically exploit social discontent.

By the way, nothing controversial is implied here by drawing attention to differences/similarities
in the primary framing and emphasis of influential people with similar/different political personas.

Greenwald’s anti-left views?

In contrast to Greenwald’s recent positive framing of the “yellow vests” protests, etc, here’s his reaction to anti-Bush demonstrations (Latin America, 2005), which he says were “depraved” – he describes the protesters as “truly odious”:-

As is true in U.S., the Latin American socialist agitators who have captured the attention and affection of the American media are as substance-less as they are inconsequential. They are lovers of Fidel Castro. The[y] insist that the source of their severe economic woes is not their collectivist policies or national character, of course, but the evil economic policies of the U.S. (Glenn Greenwald, ‘Unclaimed Territory’ blog, 4th November 2005)

Their “national character” is partly to blame for their economic woes? I won’t speculate on what Greenwald meant by this, but it doesn’t sound good. Meanwhile, Glenn denounces the US media in sweeping fashion (“As usual, the truth is vastly different than what the U.S. media is reporting”) – but it’s a denunciation of the type one usually hears in rightwing circles:

Unsurprisingly, the attention-craving [Hugo] Chavez’s principal ally in these escapades seems to be the American reporters and correspondents reporting on Bush’s trip. They instinctively regurgitate stories of supposedly widespread anti-Bush sentiment based upon nothing but a handful of socialist stragglers defacing public property with anti-war cliches and jobless Latin American hippies gathering for some music, celebrity-gazing and chants. (Glenn Greenwald, ‘Unclaimed Territory’ blog, 4th November 2005)

Greenwald hammers the US media for exaggerating the scale of anti-Bush protests, and for suggesting that the “[Bush] Administration’s policies are flawed because people in other countries dislike Bush”. He writes that the US media are doing this because large-scale anti-Bush rallies are “consistent with their ideology”.

In the same post, Glenn argues that because the September 11th attacks didn’t occur in Latin America, “Latin Americans do not perceive the need to change the Middle East as being as critical and urgent as Americans perceive that need to be.”

Although Greenwald had become critical of Bush by this point, the ‘conservative’ framing/tone remains (on the topic of US national security). The whole post reads to me as if Glenn is implicitly defending Bush’s policy in Iraq against the protests of these “socialist stragglers” (and their friends, the US media), who don’t understand the threat posed by Al Qaeda because they haven’t experienced it for themselves, unlike the good American citizens who support Bush because they understand the dangerous reality he’s fighting. As Greenwald puts it: “It should be axiomatic that the risks posed to American national security will best be understood and appreciated by Americans, not by those in other countries.”

In another blog post, Greenwald writes that the protestors are “hard-core Communists” (his italic emphasis). That’s right: commies!:

“These demonstrators hate the United States because they are genuinely opposed to economic freedom and individual liberty, and they seek to impose the collectivist authoritarianism of Fidel Castro onto the entire Latin American continent. It really is that simple.” (Glenn Greenwald, ‘Unclaimed Territory’ blog, 5th November 2005)

Incidentally, Glenn was nearly forty when he held these views.

Greenwald’s deep moral-political worldview?

As the cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, demonstrated at length in his book, Moral Politics, our political opinions are rooted in complex moral worldviews which we form over the course of our lives, starting in childhood. We each have what he calls a “strict” moral outlook in some areas, and a “nurturant” outlook in others, leading to “conservative”, “rightwing” political opinions in the former and “progressive”, “leftwing” opinions in the latter. (See my extended summary of the Moral Politics thesis).

Lakoff uses the term “biconceptual” to refer to this dual outlook in an individual. When semantic framing of a ‘rightwing’ outlook is constantly repeated, it reinforces that outlook in our biconceptual minds, while neurally inhibiting the progressive outlooks (and vice versa). Our self-identity in any area is often most clearly expressed by what we fight against – someone with a well-established “conservative” moral outlook may be disgusted by, and fight against, liberals and lefties, and vice versa. And contrary to flattering opinions we have about ourselves, we tend not to change our established moral-political outlooks based on our changing evaluations of facts alone.

Having said that, people can radically change – it’s possible that a middle-aged adult with an established ‘conservative’ outlook in important (but not all) areas, and exhibiting a deep dislike of dissident lefties and socialist views, could invert this worldview, together with their own self-identity, in a few years. Maybe. Perhaps in Greenwald’s case you don’t need to make that argument if there is, in fact, no deep reversal of worldview, just a shift in hostile rhetorical targeting away from lefties/socialists, to focus more on establishment/liberals.

Glenn’s explanations of some of his earlier ‘conservative’-sounding views make interesting reading. Here’s how he accounted for his views on illegal immigration (he’d complained in his political blog that “nothing is done” about the “parade of evils” caused by such immigration):

“I had zero readers … there were many uninformed things I believed back then, before I focused on politics full-time – due to uncritically ingesting conventional wisdom, propaganda, etc. … nobody was reading my blog; it was anything but thoughtful, contemplative, and informed, and – like so many things I thought were true then – has nothing to do with what I believe now.” (Glenn Greenwald, 24 April 2011)

I find this unconvincing. By his own account, Glenn wound down his litigation practice in 2005 in order to pursue other things, “including political writing”. He was no “uninformed” youth when he started writing a political blog – he was (to quote Wilentz) “a seasoned 38-year-old New York lawyer”, who had, among other things, represented a white supremacist neo-Nazi leader (a remarkable story). Greenwald’s writings on immigration weren’t just isolated “uncritically ingested” factoids – they expressed an established, conservatively-framed worldview on that particular issue. His opinions and framing on other issues in his blog at this time – eg the anti-socialist views discussed above – consistently express this worldview (although it’s important to note that he had liberal views on other issues – what you might call a “partial progressive” in Lakoff’s terminology).

It also seems irrelevant to his political outlook that “nobody” was reading his blog at the time (this seems a strange point for him to emphasize – and one that’s echoed in his argument that his private support of the Iraq war didn’t really count as support because he had no platform as a writer at the time – see below).

Support of the Iraq War – and later denial

Glenn has often attacked ‘libs’ and ‘dems’ for any support they expressed for George W. Bush’s policy of invading Iraq in 2003. This is also attenuated in posts in which he mocks “Resistance” figures for referring to the Bushes in positive terms generally. In one recent example he sarcastically mocks Nancy Pelosi for making a casually friendly remark about the Bush family (somewhat off-target given that Pelosi was a vocal opponent of the Iraq war and a critic of Bush’s policies).

Greenwald also writes scathingly of the “rehabilitation” by Democrats and media of Bush-era hawks, claiming there is “little to no daylight between leading Democratic Party foreign policy gurus and the Bush-era neocons who had wallowed in disgrace following the debacle of Iraq”.

I can understand this – I’m of a similar age to Glenn, and I remember writing, in January and February 2003, to my UK Member of Parliament, Christine Russell (a loyal Blairite), pointing out that invading Iraq would result in humanitarian catastrophe and would increase rather than deter international terrorism threats. I still have the replies from Russell, and I still find it difficult to think of Blair or Jack Straw without a residue of anger.

So, it came as a big surprise when I read claims that Glenn Greenwald had actually supported the Iraq war. I checked this claim, of course. One of the first things I found was a somewhat defensive and repetitive denial from Glenn, who says the people making these claims are “fabricating” by making a “distortion” of the preface to his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act?. So, what’s the truth here?

In the preface to that book, Greenwald describes his reactions following the September 11, 2001 attacks in Manhattan:

“I was ready to stand behind President Bush and I wanted him to exact vengeance on the perpetrators and find ways to decrease the likelihood of future attacks. […] And I was fully supportive of both the president’s ultimatum to the Taliban and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan when our demands were not met.” (Glenn Greenwald, ‘How Would a Patriot Act?‘)

During the later lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Glenn was concerned that policy was being driven by “agendas and strategic objectives that had nothing to do with terrorism or the 9/11 attacks” and that “[t]he overt rationale for the invasion was exceedingly weak”. But, he goes on to write:

“Despite these doubts, concerns, and grounds for ambivalence, I had not abandoned my trust in the Bush administration. Between the president’s performance in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the swift removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that I wanted the president to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country, I still gave the administration the benefit of the doubt. I believed then that the president was entitled to have his national security judgment deferred to, and to the extent that I was able to develop a definitive view, I accepted his judgment that American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.” (Glenn Greenwald, ‘How Would a Patriot Act?’)

The bottom line, then, is that even though Greenwald had concerns over Bush’s invasion policy, he accepted it anyway. He evidently also supported Bush’s “American security” rationale for this act of aggression, despite apparently being aware of its weakness.

Given his own words quoted back to him, how then does Greenwald deny that he supported the invasion of Iraq? Well, his argument is that since he didn’t actively promote, or publicly argue for, the policy of war (as he was neither a writer nor activist at the time) it follows that he didn’t support it. Those who claim he did are, he says, “fabricators” who make a “complete distortion” of the preface he wrote to his book (by accurately quoting it?).

Links for above: Greenwald tweet, Daily Kos piece

I don’t often use the term “horseshit”, but that’s what this sounds like to me. Greenwald denies supporting the war essentially by redefining “support” to mean something else. Public “support” is quite an important idea in democracies – we register our “support” for policies at elections and referendums; our “support” is measured by opinion polls or inferred in other ways. You don’t have to be a writer, activist or politician to support (or oppose) a war policy. Millions of US citizens misguidedly supported the invasion of Iraq by accepting Bush’s “national security” rationale and by giving his administration the “benefit of the doubt” – and that’s precisely what Greenwald did.

Most of those who point out that Glenn supported the war (Glenn says they’re liars) aren’t claiming he publicly promoted war. They’re quoting his 2006 book to show he supported the war in exactly the same way that countless other Americans supported the war – by not being neutral or opposing it; by accepting the case for it, on balance, and trusting those who waged it.

Greenwald repeatedly protests that, before 2004, he was “politically apathetic and indifferent”, “not politically engaged or active”, “was basically apolitical and passive”, “had no platform or role in politics”, “wasn’t a journalist or government official”, etc. You get the picture. But in all these respects he was like the vast majority who supported the war.

It’s obviously possible to be relatively “apolitical”, “passive”, etc, and still support a war. That’s how most people with pro-war views do support any given war policy – since most people aren’t hugely active politically as writers, campaigners, etc. Most, like Glenn, were engaged in other activities, such as full-time jobs, but were still able to form an opinion in support of the war – as Glenn did.

Incidentally, it’s not really true that a passive, acquiescing support of war is “apolitical”. On the contrary, any such acceptance of war requires underlying political beliefs, including what Lakoff calls the ‘Fairy Tale of the Just War’, built on ‘conservative’ framing of ‘self-defence’ or ‘rescue’ scenarios – see my Iraq War Framing for Dummies. The views that Greenwald describes himself as having on Iraq and Afghanistan, following 9/11, use the framing of a typically conservative political worldview: “American security really would be enhanced by the invasion”, “my trust in the Bush administration”, “my loyalty is to my country and he was the leader of my country”, “I wanted him to exact vengeance on the perpetrators”, etc.

The pre-2004 attributes that, according to Glenn, disqualified him from “supporting” the Iraq war (political apathy, no public platform, etc) oddly didn’t disqualify him from supporting the US invasion of Afghanistan. Perhaps the last word on this is a nice quote from Glenn, in which he admits supporting the war in Afghanistan, and then compares himself to Martin Luther King over his stance on Iraq:

“It is true that, like 90% of Americans, I did support the war in Afghanistan and, living in New York, believed the rhetoric about the threat of Islamic extremism: those were obvious mistakes. It’s also true that one can legitimately criticize me for not having actively opposed the Iraq War at a time when many people were doing so. Martin Luther King, in his 1967 speech explaining why his activism against the Vietnam War was indispensable to his civil rights work, acknowledged that he had been too slow to pay attention to or oppose the war and that he thus felt obligated to work with particular vigor against it once he realized the need…” (Glenn Greenwald, 26 January 2013)

---

Update – 19 Oct 2020: I notice this post is currently getting a lot of hits, seemingly related to social media activity arising from a piece by the independent researcher/journalist Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel), which is also critical of Greenwald, and which has some interesting updates on Greenwald’s publication of Guccifer 2.0 material, as discussed above. Marcy Wheeler’s piece is available here.

The economic “growth” frame – and its opposition

Aug 27, 2014 – Outside governments and corporations, the pursuit of economic growth is no longer taken for granted – some commentators are challenging the orthodoxy. But the “growth” frame has deep roots, and in its absence we have what George Lakoff calls “hypocognition”, a lack of established frames enabling us to think differently about the economy. Cognitive-linguistics studies have even suggested that direct opposition to the language of “growth” may be counterproductive.

Promoters of “economic growth”, together with their opponents (eg “degrowth” and most “post-growth” adherents*), share the same starting premise – that something called “the economy” has a meaningful single measure (“growth”, GDP, etc) which should either be increased or not, depending on the respective view.

Both views (pro- and anti- “growth”) tend to reinforce aspects of market ideology as a consequence of this shared premise. To understand why – particularly in the case of Greens – we need to look closely at what the “growth” frame brings to economic thought.

Since we don’t want “to confuse the map with the territory”, it seems a good idea to briefly recall the human-level terrain – the unthinkably diverse activities, communications, materials (or “resources”), processes, “products”, “services”, skills, know-how, information access, etc – all of which have different, and largely irreconcilable, “measures” – and all of which we contrive to aggregate into a single object, or entity, called “the economy”.

Okay, now back to the abstractions which govern us.

Framing economic “growth”

Economics at a “macro” level is, by necessity, a construct of models and metaphor. The conceptual metaphors we use to think about “the economy” bring their own weird logic to the party – mostly from domains more concrete than macroeconomics. This is no trivial matter, as metaphoric frames define the dominant economic worldviews.

Even the basic notion of economic “growth” shapes our thinking along metaphoric lines – in this case, the “natural” growth of a living organism, which is source domain for the growth-as-increase metaphor (“more is growth”).

“Growth” might seem to be merely a dead metaphor – ie one which is conventionalised (or “lexicalised”). But, as Michael White points out (in Metaphor and economics: the case of growth): “despite this lexicalisation, when economists and journalists deal with economic performance, the metaphoric sense of growth is highly active“. (My emphasis)

This seems an important point – and worth emphasising, particularly for those who aren’t familiar with the field of conceptual metaphor. What it means is that various ideas are imported automatically – and largely unconsciously – from the “growth” metaphor into our attempts to think quantitatively about “the economy”. For example:

1. Growth tends to be conceptualised as natural and good. This deeply positive sense is universal, and is imported into our conception of quantitative increase in economics via the metaphor. It’s not just a superficial “surface language” matter.
2. Conversely, absence of growth is conceptualised as bad and unnatural – eg due to adverse conditions, or to interference with the natural process. The list of examples of economic metaphor expressing this fundamentally negative, unnatural aspect of “no-growth” seems endless in our culture. One interesting example I’ve previously written about is economic “flatlining”, in which “flat growth” metaphorically signifies death. The negative connotations of no-growth aren’t overt here – they’re entailments of the metaphor.

So deeply established is the “natural growth” metaphor (and its negative obverse) that we might find it hard to think in positive terms about “the economy” without it. Or, as Anna Gustafsson puts it (in The Metaphor Challenge of Future Economics), “We may even have difficulties in conceptualizing a society not built upon growth; this is visible in our language.”

(Note: There are a few exceptional cases where growth is regarded as bad in its source domain – eg disease and obesity. The phrase, “obese economy”, might have satiric potential, and “cancerous economic growth” makes a point about growth with no end. But I suspect that if Frank Luntz found that his opposition was framing economic growth as “disease” or “cancer”, he’d clap his hands and take the day off. The implication would be of humanity as disease – presumably not a frame that Greens would be keen on promoting.)

“It’s the economy, stupid”, stupid

Both “growth” and “the economy” are what Lakoff calls ontological metaphors. They enable us to think about unthinkably multifarious phenomena (eg all the things “of value” that people do) in terms of “discrete entities or substances of a uniform kind”. This isn’t about “mere language”, but about how people think. The “price we pay” is to be stuck with crude, reductive (eg two-valued) logics, eg growth/no-growth. And it doesn’t help much to change the definition of “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP), or to divide “the economy” into sectors – it simply applies the same binary logic to slightly different, or smaller, entities.

Of course, there have been many conventional criticisms of GDP (and GNP) as a “measure” – eg that it confuses different types of “growth”, and doesn’t reflect (unequal) distribution, environmental damage, etc. These criticisms have been around for a while – some of them were made by Simon Kuznets, the economist who originally developed the ideas behind GDP.

“Economic growth” was first adopted by governments as national policy objective after the introduction of GDP (1940s-1950s) – not for its own sake, but as an approach towards achieving “full employment” (a point I’ll return to). Peter Victor, an ecological economist, has argued (Nature, 18/11/2010) that because “growth”, as a government objective, is a relatively new notion, “dethroning it seems less improbable.”

From a cognitive frames perspective, that seems optimistic. “Growth” is a “deep frame” – its use and extension in economics goes back at least as far as 18th century classical economics (although not as government policy). But, most significantly, it’s been a key feature of saturation-level business propaganda for decades, since political strategists first noticed, or vaguely intuited, that “economic growth” and market ideology are mutually reinforcing.

That means the frame has been hammered into our skulls relentlessly, repeatedly – in all kinds of ways, without pause or break – for much of our lives. This is why Lakoff and his colleagues often bring neuroscience and the physical brain into the equation. If it were just a question of “pure”, disembodied ideas, we could drop the idea, or belief system, immediately, erase it from our minds and replace it with a new one. But we know it doesn’t work like that.

“Since the synapses in neural circuits are made stronger the more they are activated, the repetition of ideological language will strengthen the circuits for that ideology in a hearer’s brain. […] ideological language repeated often enough can become ‘normal language’ but still activate that ideology unconsciously in the brains of citizens – and journalists.” (George Lakoff, Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment)

“Growth” frame reinforces market logic

Market ideology holds profit maximisation to be a moral good, and interference in the market (eg by government) to be a moral ill. Both notions combine easily with the “economic growth” frame. Firstly, with the latter’s entailment of total increase as a “natural” good, regardless of the divisions, precise characteristics or manner of distribution of that increase; and, secondly, of interruptions or interferences with “growth” viewed as unnatural and inherently nefarious.

Market logic on labour is reinforced by the notion of “growth”, also. This logic regards labour as “a natural resource or commodity, on a par with raw materials”, to quote Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors we live by), who argue that uniformity – or interchangeability – is implied by the metaphor of labour as material resource. Overall “productivity growth” is the criterion – the well-being of the worker doesn’t enter into the equation.

Another aspect of market ideology reinforced by the “growth” frame is the heroic individualist entrepreneur fairy tale. “Growth” as a personal or individual-business metaphor seems unproblematic, but when we reflexively conceive of “the economy” as an object with an attribute of “growth”, the entrepreneur idea extends to it “naturally” because of the “good growth” frame. This is the myth that practically all wealth/”growth” derives from entrepreneurial enterprise, which is heroically fighting against “unnatural” interference to growth (eg from governments, “do-gooders”, Green activists, etc).

In fact, corporate market ideology and “economic growth” framing seem so closely intertwined that the mutual reinforcement appears seamless and largely invisible – unless it’s pointed out. Perhaps the most obvious example for most people would be “trickle-down economics” – the idea that as long as “the economy” is “growing”, all those minor inconveniences like mass poverty and corporate monopoly will “naturally” sort themselves out.

The inverse is “mutual inhibition” between “economic growth” and policies which oppose corporate-market domination. Perhaps this explains why the idea of a “leisure society” seemed to grow weaker in our society during the period in which the dogmatic pursuit of “economic growth” grew stronger. As mentioned above, “growth” was originally adopted as a government measure/policy for the purpose of achieving “full employment”. This situation now seems to have reversed, with “economic growth” regarded as an end itself, and “job creation” (at all costs) as a putative (and usually dubious) means to serve that end.

“Degrowth” and “post-growth”

Obviously, these terms express little more than negation of “growth”. Lakoff, as we know, advises that direct negation of a frame merely activates that frame, but this might seem like a trite formula to those who fervently oppose any further economic “growth”. And judging by the frequent use of these “de-” and “post-” terms in various Green projects and proposals, the advice has either been overlooked or misunderstood.

Any use of these terms (eg as proposals, without quotes) tends to imply (and communicate) the premises that I’ve described above, which market-ideological views thrive upon. GDP (or any alternative single “measure” of “growth” of “the economy”) is, by definition, bought into. It’s simply a “for” or “against” inversion according to the narrow terms of the worldview which created the problem.

“Green growth”

I’ve seen differing definitions of “green growth”, but they all start with the conventional premise of overall “growth” in “the economy”, and its inherent two-valued logic. Some “de-” and “post-” “growth” adherents oppose “green growth” by using the argument that any society (historic or modelled), regardless of how “green”, will show correlation between rising GDP and environmental damage. (Some studies have indicated that this correlation does indeed apply).

That seems a good argument against continuous pursuit of “growth” (eg rising GDP) in even the most greenly-imagined society – but only if you accept that a single aggregate “measure” of “growth” in “the economy” isn’t a nonsense to begin with.

A better frame? – Wealth as well-being

“[T]here is a crucial movement toward a new economics – an economics of well-being, in which the Gross Domestic Product is replaced by an overall indicator of well-being. This new perspective is directly counter, in many ways, to the narrowly imagined concept of economic growth.” (George Lakoff, Why it Matters How We Frame the Environment)

Promoting an economics based on well-being and its indicators has the advantage, from a cognitive frames perspective, that wealth as well-being is a very deeply rooted – and universal – metaphoric frame. Our original conceptions of “wealth” are inseparable from expressions of well-being.

The problems of hypocognition posed by negation of “growth” thus seem partly averted when we envisage a system of economic indicators based on the existing deep frame of wealth as well-being.

To give a ‘concrete’ example: Work evaluated in terms of the well-being of the worker, as opposed to employment policy made on the sole basis of boosting “growth”. If economic ends are primarily framed in terms of well-being, not abstract “growth”, this makes sense. The subjective experience of the worker is barely considered at all by governments and corporations fixated on “growth”.

With well-being central to economic thinking, things like leisure and quality of life “naturally” come to the fore. Policies previously avoided because they don’t provide “growth” will be considered if they boost well-being. Interestingly, some of the research into how societies might function without “growth” have found that greater leisure and reduction of poverty may be key elements (together with reduction in the use of fossil fuels, materials, etc) – even without any focus on well-being as a criterion.

More leisure, less anxiety

In the late 1700s, Benjamin Franklin predicted we’d soon work a 4-hour week. In 1965, a US Senate subcommittee predicted a 22-hour work week by 1985, and a mere 14 hours by 2000. Paul and Percival Goodman, in the 1960s, estimated that just 5% of the work being done would satisfy our food, clothing and shelter needs.

What happened to the dream of a leisure society made possible by more-for-less efficiencies in know-how and technology? The conventional answer is that productivity increases were channeled into a spiral of greater consumerism and more work, rather than into increased leisure. And the conventional reason is the massive propaganda push from big business to sell the consumerist culture.

Less conventional a reason, but probably just as important, is the moral framing of work in our society. As David Graeber puts it, “there’s this ideological imperative to validate work as virtue in itself. Which is constantly being reinforced by the larger society. On the other hand, there’s the reality that most work is obviously stupid, degrading, unnecessary, and the feeling that it is best avoided whenever possible.”

Economic “growth” is tied into the “full employment” narrative, and has been since the 1950s. This is where I see an interesting leverage point for change – in terms of broad public acceptance of a new economic worldview. Not in terms of “growth” abstractions (for or against), but towards a greater emphasis on free time, leisure, contentment, happiness, fulfilment – rather than more work, more stuff to buy.

That, and less anxiety. Anxiety seems epidemic in our society – much of it related to work and income. That’s why I see a need for something like a Universal Basic Income to accompany a shift in attitudes away from “more work at all costs” consumerism (or “growth”), and towards an embrace of a time-rich leisure society for all.

* Note: Some “post-growth” and “degrowth” adherents do question the validity of GDP, and argue for alternative measures, etc. But the post-growth and degrowth literature typically proposes reduction or stabilisation of overall “growth” of “the economy” (in other words, it accepts the premise of a single measure of “growth”). 1/9/2014

Graphics by NewsFrames

Frank Luntz reframes Occupy

Dec 5, 2011 – Frank Luntz is the US rightwing’s language guru. He publishes message-framing manuals for conservatives. (BBC’s Newsnight uses him as a pollster, but that’s another story). It was Luntz who, during the US health care debate, advised using terms such as “government-run” instead of “public option” – his focus groups had responded less favourably to the terms that (falsely) implied government funding.

A recent news report claims that Luntz has been advising Republicans on how to talk about the Occupy movement:

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist … “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
(Yahoo! News 1/12/11)

The report lists Luntz’s 10 tips. These include telling the Occupy movement “I get it”, and avoiding the words “sacrifice” and “compromise”. But the ones which caught my attention were:-

• ‘Don’t say “capitalism” … I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either “economic freedom” or “free market”.’
• ‘Don’t say that the government “taxes the rich”. Instead, tell them that the government “takes from the rich”.’
• ‘Don’t say “government spending”. Call it “waste”.’
• ‘Always blame Washington. Tell them, “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington”.‘

You won’t be surprised to hear that little of this is new. It’s a series of frames (about government and markets) which together form what George Lakoff calls the Economic Liberty Myth. It’s already established in people’s minds from years of repetition via mass media, promoted by “market” thinktanks, city pundits, etc. In a nutshell, it’s about “freedom” – particularly “freedom of competition”, which supposedly leads to optimum “efficiency”, “opportunity”, etc. The “market” is cast as the freedom-loving hero, with the government as villain. (I go into more detail here, under the subheading “The Market Discipline frame”).

Occupy gives it a new twist

It’s the new developments that Frank Luntz is so afraid of. Namely:

• The focus on financial sector bailouts.
• The focus on the “99% vs 1%”; the immoral division of wealth.

The problem for Luntz is that even by “conventional” (ie sympathetic to “market”/city, private-wealth) standards of media coverage, the rightwing Economic Liberty Myth looks simply false in the context of the financial collapse/bailouts. (Why? Again, I provide a more detailed explanation of the framing issues here).

That’s why Luntz is saying: “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington”. And it’s why “market” lobby groups in the UK (such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance) are going to great lengths to frame the financial collapse in terms of government failures – as well as simply shifting the focus (and public anger) back to “government waste” (including the usual tabloid favourites – “benefit cheats“, etc).

The Economic Liberty Myth won’t be able to withstand a sustained, widespread popular focus on the financial collapse/bailouts and the immoral division of wealth – Luntz is right to be frightened.