Earlier this week, Richard Evans, David Runciman and I did a gig about our research project at the opening of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas. We were joined on the panel by Tony Badger, who is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, an expert on FDR and the New Deal and on McCarthyism. We had an agreeably large audience who asked some good questions. Towards the end, someone asked a question that none of us had ever considered: how do conspiracy theories end? Tony Badger took it on, and talked about how the anti-communist hysteria of Senator Joe McCarthy’s time had endured over time, taking different forms in different eras, right down to the present Tea Party conviction that Obama is a socialist and that Obamacare is, essentially, a commie plot. In that context, it’s intriguing to find an excellent New Yorker blog post by Adam Gopnik which makes more or less the same point. Here’s the key bit:

As it happens, I’ve been doing some reading about John Kennedy, and what I find startling, and even surprising, is how absolutely consistent and unchanged the ideology of the extreme American right has been over the past fifty years, from father to son and now, presumably, on to son from father again. The real analogue to today’s unhinged right wing in America is yesterday’s unhinged right wing in America. This really is your grandfather’s right, if not, to be sure, your grandfather’s Republican Party. Half a century ago, the type was much more evenly distributed between the die-hard, neo-Confederate wing of the Democratic Party and the Goldwater wing of the Republicans, an equitable division of loonies that would begin to end after J.F.K.’s death. (A year later, the Civil Rights Act passed, Goldwater ran, Reagan emerged, and we began the permanent sorting out of our factions into what would be called, anywhere but here, a party of the center right and a party of the extreme right.)

Reading through the literature on the hysterias of 1963, the continuity of beliefs is plain: Now, as then, there is said to be a conspiracy in the highest places to end American Constitutional rule and replace it with a Marxist dictatorship, evidenced by a plan in which your family doctor will be replaced by a federal bureaucrat—mostly for unnamable purposes, but somehow involving the gleeful killing off of the aged. There is also the conviction, in both eras, that only a handful of Congressmen and polemicists (then mostly in newspapers; now on TV) stand between honest Americans and the apocalypse, and that the man presiding over that plan is not just a dupe but personally depraved, an active collaborator with our enemies, a secret something or other, and any necessary means to bring about the end of his reign are justified and appropriate. And fifty years ago, as today, groups with these beliefs, far from being banished to the fringe of political life, were closely entangled and intertwined with Senators and Congressmen and right-wing multi-millionaires.

Plus ca change.

Very interesting snippet from a WashPo interview with General Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA.

Q: Privacy advocates say the government is asking Americans to trust it when it comes to the NSA’s activities. Given the existing level of mistrust of the government, what is the argument for trusting the NSA?

A: One argument is, you may or may not think what NSA was doing in terms of the metadata and the American telephone records or the PRISM program or the e-mails — foreign based, but collected here in the United States — you may actually think, “You know, I need to know more about that. I’m not comfortable.” But you can’t say it was illegal. It reflects two laws of Congress in 2006 and 2008, passed by both houses, by both parties, overseen by the intelligence committees, approved by the courts. I mean, in the American system of separation of powers, that’s a trifecta — executive, legislative, judicial branches. So it’s not illegal.

But i’m quite open to a national conversation about, “Got it. Not illegal, now is it wise?” To have that conversation, my old community is going to simply have to explain what it is they’re doing more than we have historically done. I actually think that if we get to most people out of the mainstream — all right, here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it, here’s why it helps, here’s how we’re overseeing it — I think most people would say, “Eh, I wish maybe you didn’t have to, but okay. I’m okay for now. Call me in a couple of years.”

It’s impossible to imagine a British official or government minister talking like this.

Justice Hugo Black’s Opinion in the US Supreme Court judgment of June 30, 1971 which allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to continue publishing the Pentagon Papers:

“In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”

From today’s NYT

It was the second time in three days that allegations of American government surveillance threatened to cloud relations between Washington and close European allies. The consternation in Berlin followed a furor in France over reports in the newspaper Le Monde that American intelligence had collected data on 70 million communications by French citizens in a 30-day period late last year and into January.

The White House issued a statement confirming that Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel had spoken “regarding allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the communications of the German Chancellor. The President assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel.”

The statement did not address whether those communications had been intercepted in the past.

Note that last paragraph, and imagine the conversation that went on two days ago between the White House and the Director of the NSA.

At last, the penny is beginning to drop. Edward Snowden is in the same mould as Daniel Ellsberg. What makes this WashPo column by Richard Cohen so welcome is that he was one of the early and fiercest journalistic denouncers of Snowden.

What are we to make of Edward Snowden? I know what I once made of him. He was no real whistleblower, I wrote, but “ridiculously cinematic” and “narcissistic” as well. As time has proved, my judgments were just plain wrong. Whatever Snowden is, he is curiously modest and has bent over backward to ensure that the information he has divulged has done as little damage as possible. As a “traitor,” he lacks the requisite intent and menace.

But traitor is what Snowden has been roundly called. Harry Reid: “I think Snowden is a traitor.” John Boehner: “He’s a traitor.” Rep. Peter King: “This guy is a traitor; he’s a defector.” And Dick Cheney not only denounced Snowden as a “traitor” but also suggested that he might have shared information with the Chinese. This innuendo, as with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, is more proof of Cheney’s unerring determination to be cosmically wrong.

And this:

My initial column on Snowden was predicated on the belief that, really, nothing he revealed was new. Didn’t members of Congress know all this stuff and hadn’t much of it leaked? Yes, that’s largely true. But my mouth is agape at the sheer size of these data-gathering programs — a cascade of news stories that leads me to conclude that this very column was known to the National Security Agency before it was known to my editors. I also wrote that “No one lied about the various programs” Snowden disclosed. But then we found out that James Clapper did. The director of national intelligence was asked at a Senate hearing in March if “the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false” and he replied that it was. Actually, it was his answer that was “completely false.”

And while we’re on the topic, how come that a very senior US official can lie under oath to Congress and not be fired?

I’m revising my book for its publication in the US and came on this quotation from Nineteen Eighty-Four which I’d used (and forgotten).

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Remind you of anything?