Dramatic Reversal: Democrats Now Trust FBI and CIA

Here are the numbers, a Gallop poll from 2022:

Glenn Greenwald comments on the dramatic change in the attitudes of Democrats:

So, here you see the FBI: 79% of Democrats think the FBI is doing an excellent or good job. For decades, distrust of the FBI and a view that it is a fundamentally corrupted organization pervaded and shaped federal politics. That is gone. Democrats worship the FBI. We report on those hearings all the time in the House where Democratic members of the House, of Congress, stand up and applaud the U.S. security state for censoring the Internet on the grounds that these agencies are benevolent, have nothing but the most patriotic and noble intentions and want to protect us from disinformation. So here you see the FBI with 79% trust among Democrats; among Independents, about half, 47%, and among Republicans, 29%.

So, essentially, the FBI is seen to a purely partisan end or political framework, ideological framework. They have immense powers, they operate in secrecy, they spy on Americans, they investigate crimes and the only people who really trust them are Democrats. Independents are split. Republicans overwhelmingly view them as corrupt.

It's even worse for the Department of Justice. Only 58% of Democrats trust the Department of Justice; 28% of Independents think the DOJ is doing a good job; only 24% of Republicans. So, imagine how much this is going to exacerbate that distrust. These remarkable and extraordinary prosecutions were brought during an election against the leading political opponent of the current government.

And then you have the CIA. When I tell you that opposition to the CIA has long been a central plank of left-liberal politics, I cannot overstate that case. To be on the left meant that it viewed the CIA as a malevolent institution forever, for decades, until 2016, and you see the reversal happen immediately. The reason for it is so disturbing. It's because the CIA – and the FBI – is where Russiagate came from, and liberals started recognizing validly that the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the NSA and the Justice Department were on their side. They were political allies of the Democrats. And so now you have this remarkable reality that 69% of Democrats – 69% – think the CIA is doing a good or excellent job: 69% of Democrats. To be a Democrat is basically to mean that you place a lot of faith and trust in the CIA and even among this 30%, that won't say it; you barely can find opposition to the CIA in mainstream laughable discourse Turn on podcasts or YouTube programs of self-proclaimed leftists. I don't mean real leftists like the kind we have on our show, like the Black Revolutionary Network, but I mean, like the ones in the Democratic Party, the ones who follow Bernie Sanders and AOC. You will not hear a peep of meaningful denunciation of the CIA if they mention them at all. It's very much in passing with no passion, with no concern, because they don't consider the CIA menacing, because they know the CIA is their political ally. The CIA is not supposed to be anyone's political ally. They're not supposed to have anything to do with American politics and yet everyone knows they do. And they have to explain these percentages.

Here you see 50% of independents. So again, independents are split like they are with the FBI; 38% of Republicans have positive views of the CIA, largely from probably decades of Republican politics, the establishment weighing the hawkish wing of the Republican Party that has long viewed the CIA as an important ally. But that has cratered. And here you see the massive partisan split and how these agencies are viewed and the fact that a huge chunk of the country believes that these institutions are politically corrupted and fundamentally and irretrievably broken. It's a massive crisis of institutional authority in the United States. And it's aimed at the agencies that are now the ones responsible for trying to prove that the indictment of President Trump is illegitimate, invalid.

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About our Increasingly Visible Political Realignment.

Matt Taibbi has such a way with words. This is an excerpt from his most recent article, "Campaign 2024: Not Left Versus Right, But Aflluent Versus Everyone Else: The realignment of major parties away from blue against red and toward a rich versus poor dynamic is America's most undercovered political story."

"People like to say nothing matters anymore,” Greenberg said. “But the conversation that you’re not having actually does matter.” Try saying that one three times fast.

A lot of coverage of Campaign 2024 is going to be like this, in which aides, pundits, and pollsters speak like fridge-magnet haikus or Alan Greenspan pressers. There are now so many taboo subjects in American politics that even data journalists, whose job is to give us the cold hard facts, are forced to communicate in allusions and metaphors, because what’s happening can’t be discussed.

American politics has long been a careful truce, in which natural economic tensions were obscured by an elegantly phony two-party structure that kept urban and rural poor separate, nurtured a politically unadventurous middle class, and tended to needs of the mega-rich no matter who won. That system is in collapse. Voters are abandoning traditional blue-red political identities and realigning according to more explosive divisions based on education and income. As the middle class vanishes the replacement endgame emerges. A small pocket of very wealthy and very educated, for whom elections have until now mostly been ceremonial and to whom more fraught realities of the current situation are an annoyance, will move to one side. That’s your “15% strongly approve” group, the Marie Antoinettes who’ll go to the razor pledging loyalty to the regent, even if he’s a loon in a periwig, or Joe Biden.

The inevitable other constituency is just everyone else, which should be a larger demographic. The only reason polls are at 43-43 (or perhaps slightly in Biden’s disfavor) is because the other actor is Donald Trump. If Democrats should be panicking because they’re not trouncing an opponent whose biggest campaign events have been arraignments, it’s just as bad for Trump that he polls even with a man who’s a threat to walk into a propeller or carry a child into a forest every time he walks outside. Still, the abject horror Trump inspires among the Georgetown set may be his greatest political asset, and a reason the realignment seems to be proceeding even with him around."

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Conservatives Defending Traditional Liberal Values

How did it come to be that conservatives have become the most vocal defenders of traditional liberal values? At Public, Michael Shellenberger describes the challenge facing those of us who embrace traditional liberal values:

For most of the post-war period, liberalism in the United States was defined around freedom of speech, the needs of the working class, and the fight against racism and sexism. It was liberals who defended the right to burn the American flag, and of neo-Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. It was liberals who fought against corporate power and for the rights of working people. And it was liberals who fought to end racial segregation and to protect girls and women, including in sports.

All of that has changed. Today, it is conservatives who are fighting the racial re-segregation of classrooms and workforces by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) administrators in thrall to Critical Race Theory (CRT). It is conservatives who are defending the right to freedom of expression online from progressives demanding greater censorship by Big Tech and the government. And it is conservatives who are defending the rights of girls and women to female-only spaces and sports from natal males...

A similar dynamic occurred with the natural environment. After World War II, both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, supported industrialization, economic development in poor nations, and nuclear power. Starting in the 1960s, the radical Left turned against industrialization, and started romanticizing peasant life in poor nations, while opposing nuclear energy in rich nations. The result was that Republicans were left holding positions that were once mainstream liberal ones...

As a result, conservatives find themselves in the paradoxical position of defending traditional liberal values like free speech and racial equality from progressives.... A big part of the reason as to why it has been left to conservatives to defend liberalism is because the radical Left, or what is sometimes called the Woke Left, had already defeated traditional liberals, first in major societal institutions and then in Congress, many years and some cases decades ago. [Christopher] Rufo attributes much of the radical Left’s success to its ability to manipulate language and emotions.

Traditional liberals didn’t understand who they were dealing with. The liberal university presidents, the newspaper editors, and the heads of various professional associations were committed to civil dialogue and democracy; the radical Left insurgents were not. The radical Left didn’t hesitate to use illiberal means, including making false accusations of racism, sexism, and homophobia, against their opponents...

Readers of Public know that I believe that the radical Left’s power stems from being able to offer a complete Woke religion to fill the vacuum left by declining belief in traditional religions ... Into the spiritual void emerged a new religion: victim ideology, or Wokeism.

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Whence “Liberals”?

I abhor Donald Trump. I canvassed for Bernie Sanders. I considered myself to be "liberal" until what seems to be the majority of liberals who I know turned pro-censorship, war-friendly, trusting of the FBI & CIA, abandoning the working class in most things except rhetoric, willing to applaud authoritarian measures during COVID & clueless that they were being played by the corporate media on numerous major issues including Russiagate. The majority of these people wouldn't recognize themselves if they time-traveled to meet themselves from ten years ago. For several years I have considered myself to be politically homeless.

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