The Ideology Behind Michael Grunwald's Repugnant Assange Tweet
The Time correspondent wrote, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

On Saturday, Michael Grunwald, a senior correspondent at Time, stoked controversy by tweeting, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange." The tweet triggered an immediate backlash among people who believe that murder is wrong, and that expressing preemptive delight at the prospect of defending murder is wrongheaded and repugnant. Shortly thereafter, Grunwald apologized to his followers, called his tweet "dumb," and deleted it.

...It is nevertheless worth dwelling on his tweet a moment longer, because it illuminates a type that is common but seldom pegged in America. You see, Grunwald is a radical ideologue. It's just that almost no one recognizes it. The label "radical ideologue" is usually used to describe Noam Chomsky or members of the John Birch Society. We think of radical ideologues as occupying the far right or left....But Grunwald graduated from Harvard, spent a decade at the Washington Post, and now works as a senior correspondent at Time. How radical could someone with that resume possibly be?

Extremely so.

...Now, no one thinks of Time as a magazine that publishes radicals. But Grunwald's article [quoted below -- RD] fit comfortably in its pages, and he cited the article to explain the thinking that made him eager to defend a murder. Perhaps Time occasionally publishes material that is far more ideological than most of its readers or even its editors realize -- a radicalism not of the left or right, but of the establishment.

Consider a passage from [one of Grunwald's essays in Time, which he linked to defend his tweet]:

Quote:
America was born from resistance to tyranny, and our skepticism of authority is a healthy tradition. But we're pretty free. And the "don't tread on me" slippery-slopers on both ends of the political spectrum tend to forget that Big Government helps protect other important rights. Like the right of a child to watch a marathon or attend first grade without getting killed -- or, for that matter, the right to live near a fertilizer factory without it blowing up your house.

Our government needs to balance these rights, which is tough sometimes. But not always. Requiring gun owners to pass background checks and restricting access to high-capacity magazines would be a minuscule price to pay to help avoid future Newtowns and Auroras. If the FBI waits a few days to read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev the Miranda boilerplate he's already heard a million times on Law and Order, the Republic will survive, and the authorities might learn something that will help prevent another tragedy. (In fact, if America's ubiquitous surveillance network hadn't captured Tsarnaev on video, he might still be at large.) Even in a free-enterprise system -- especially in a free-enterprise system -- a factory owner's right to run his business without government interference is trumped by the public-safety rights of the local community.

This isn't the time to debate all these issues individually, but they are unalike in a way Grunwald shows no sign of recognizing. Background checks for gun owners would come about via democratic legislation. If the bill passed, it could be challenged in court. And it could be found, by way of an established legal process, to pass constitutional muster or else to violate the Constitution. Denying a particular American his Miranda rights, because we're really sure this one is guilty, and hey, terrorism!, is objectionable in different ways, which cannot be waived away with "the republic will survive." Preserving a culture of due process is, in fact, vital to the survival of a free society. No single violation is fatal, but Grunwald appears oblivious to the danger of undermining the culture, and to how radical it is to call for one-off departures of convenience from long established norms.

...Here's a later passage:

Quote:
In the Obama era, Tea Party Republicans like Senator Rand Paul have portrayed the U.S. government as a threat to individual liberty, an oppressive force in American life. They just want government to leave us alone. But while the "stand with Rand" worldview is quite consistent -- against gun restrictions, traffic-light cameras, drone strikes, antidiscrimination laws, antipollution laws and other Big Brother intrusions into our private lives -- it's wrong. And most of us know it's wrong, which is why we celebrate our first responders, our soldiers, our law enforcers. They're from the government, and they're here to help. We know our government is fallible, because it's made up of people, but we still count on it to protect us from terrorists, from psychos with guns, from exploding factories. We also need it to protect us from floods and wildfires, from financial meltdowns and climate change. We can't do that kind of thing ourselves.

...There's dangerous stuff out there, and while it's probably fun to stand with Rand, I'm more inclined to stand with the public servants keeping us safe, even when the al-Qaeda operative they ice in Yemen is an American citizen, even when they shut down an entire city to hunt for a single teenager, and yes, even when they try to regulate coal plants and oil rigs and Wall Street casinos that would greatly prefer to be left alone. That's why I pay my taxes, and that's why I don't feel like I'm being tyrannized when I pay them.

Like the most extreme libertarian ideologue, Grunwald treats all instances of wanting to limit government power as if they are the same. Opposition to pollution laws is bundled with opposition to drone strikes on Americans. Grunwald seems totally oblivious to the fact that it is perfectly consistent to celebrate our soldiers and to limit the instances in which they can kill their fellow citizens. He writes as if a filibuster against drones is tantamount to saying, "We can do it all ourselves." Notice how quickly this worldview causes him to unworriedly dismiss the act of putting an American citizen on a secret kill list without charges or trial and executing him on one man's order -- and to conflate declaring martial law to catch a single teen with regulating coal plants.

These things are not alike!

The irony is that Grunwald sees perfectly clearly that only the most extreme ideologue would be against all the government acts he bundles together -- but is oblivious to the fact that anyone who is breezily comfortable with all the things he mentions is also an extremist ideologue.

...It's true that government is needed to tackle some big collective-action problems of the modern world. That explains [Grunwald's] desire for environmental regulation. But it hardly explains his unexplained comfort with extrajudicial killing and ad hoc changes to criminal-justice norms using a staggeringly naive "if the authorities decided it was vital" standard. (Remember when John Yoo took that one to its logical conclusion? It depends on why the president wants to crush the testicles of the child ...) Grunwald seems to stand for whatever it is that he and the authorities think is best in a given instance, to hell with any procedural constants or absolute checks on power, like the Bill of Rights, getting in the way. Let's just be clear: that worldview has a lot of ideological assumptions baked into it, and is totally contrary to the system laid out in our written Constitution, as well as the real world approach that we've followed successfully for decade after decade, with departures in times of war that we almost always came to regret. To repeat myself, Grunwald's position is the radical one.

Some great points in this article about how so-called "centrists" who instinctively support the establishment position can be just as ideologically extreme as those on the far left and right.

Where does the article identify anyone's ideology as 'centrist'?

That doesn't mean that he's a bad guy, or that he shouldn't be a journalist. But as someone who finds Grunwald's ideology as problematic and wrongheaded as I'm sure he finds aspects of my worldview, I tire of the fact that people who share it are treated as pragmatic centrists while their critics, whether on the libertarian right or the civil liberties left, are dismissed as impractical ideologues.

Grunwald's tweet took a lot of centrists by surprise, as if it was way beyond the pale. And I think it was! But it didn't surprise me. It was totally consistent with his ideology for him to write, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange." The mental mistake that led to the tweet is present elsewhere in his work, and springs from his worldview. Don't take my word for it. Prior to issuing his apology, Grunwald briefly stood behind his remark, explaining his thinking as follows....(emphasis mine -- RD)