Two right-on-the-money rebuttals: first off, Moyers’ impassioned fire. Then, Greenwald’s legal, logical ice. Both pieces are brilliant.

All Glenn Greenwald ever does, really, is uphold the sense of political decency, propriety, legality, and respect for the rules and for basic fairness that were, believe it or not, widely accepted by the American establishment as recently as the post-Watergate era (1975-78). Granted, they didn’t consistently practice what they preached, and huge areas — such as all U.S. operations overseas, and certain assassinations that had occured back home — were exempt from any concept of fairness, decency, or lawfulness whatever. But debates within the U.S. were, provided they stayed within certain bourgeois, pro-Cold-War bounds, protected by hard-fought-for rules of fairness — as were the contestations between the two major parties — as was ideological struggle within a rather broadly defined mainstream, from strong liberal to strong conservative. (It wasn’t until the Reagan era that we were indoctrinated through endless repetition with the idea that liberalism isn’t part of the mainstream. Most liberals and progressives, seeming to almost relish their faux unpopularity, did not strongly contest this nonsense at the time, with disastrous consequences ever since.)

And the corporate media, in those same post-Watergate times — at least the respectable, anti-tabloid media — adhered to strict rules of neutrality in news reporting that have since gone by the boards. (Imagine news stories that don’t assert what is likely to win public support or how the ongoing struggles they chronicle are likely to come out, that don’t make use of the passive voice or appeals to anonymous “experts” to attribute authoritative opinions, and that don’t strive for false balance — news stories that, even when they decontextualize or fail to dig enough, more or less report facts and not opinions. Yes, Virginia, many of the basic principles of journalistic integrity progressives now fight a 175-degree uphill battle for were once part of the establishment media’s own rulebook.) These rules did not prevent bias — even massive bias — in sourcing and framing assumptions, for example — but they did put some very real limits on it.

Don’t get me wrong — the rules of fairness under which public discourse operated in this country at that time were perfectly compatible with, and indeed conducive to, the capitalist order. Given the destructiveness which American imperalism had already achieved by 1975 (which Greenwald, significantly, does not criticize), it might not seem like much to aspire to get back to a comparable level of inconsistently principled public discourse. But we’ve fallen so very far that in fact it is a huge undertaking, and a desperately needed one to keep us from outright fascism. (No, North Carolina, we are not already in a state of fascism — or I’d be arrested for writing this — and not merely, as is likely, spied upon.)

Like Greenwald, Bill Moyers also, in his way, upholds the old sense of honor — the one that eventually forced out Agnew and Nixon, and that caused a backlash against their repressive machinations, not just among the great unwashed, but even among the freshly scrubbed of Washington opinion-setters (who already viewed said unwashed with the absolute condescension of an elite whose members know their names will always outweigh their lack of talent). Still less than Greenwald would Moyers ever question American imperalism as such. After all, he was the lackey of the president who lied us into Vietnam. In Moyers’ field of vision, such an act is only an excess, not a monstrosity like those committed by “our” foes.

Yet in opposing these excesses, folks like Moyers and Greenwald sometimes see with brutal clarity the exact place where tyranny is now advancing into yet another former stronghold of those who, however waveringly, resist it. My confirmed impression, from hanging out with my fellow leftists, is that most leftists most of the time don’t see this stuff for what it is, dismissing it as fiddling over crumbs. It is not.

To defend these quite unpurist strongholds, good radicals must fight full-shouldered beside our liberal brothers and sisters — even if in other areas, especially their nationalism, they are themselves part of the problem.