The other story about Daniel Ellsberg and what followed his disclosure

The other story about Daniel Ellsberg is the story of the Watergate affair. Nixon's illegal actions included breaking into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist and were partly motivated by Ellsberg's disclosure of the Pentagon Papers. The context was the Vietnam War, widespread and growing public opposition to it, and the government's wish to suppress that opposition (even as it moved to end the war). The result was something else: in the popular mind, a new issue replaced that of a bad war: the president was accused and widely found guilty of scandalous behavior and unfair play, and was suspected of paranoia, and thus mental illness. By the time Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, the US was no longer in the war, and political conflict had been replaced by concern for the social effects of the psychological problems of individuals. The early 1970s was a time that saw a remarkable shift in our political culture. Engineered in part by the Democratic Party, major social and political contestations were being replaced by something else. It was the time of the "New Age," with the rise in popularity of a therapeutic mentality, in place of a political one. "Neoliberalism" was partly that. The antiwar movement won, thanks to Ellsberg and many others. But at the same time, something else changed, and that change was partly a defeat, which took place as a result of certain deliberately undertaken actions. It was, in a way, a kind of coup in which a left-wing political movement was replaced by a liberal one that was decidedly anti-political. And that order of things is still with us.

As it happens, this has not much availed the Ellsbergs of recent times, Assange, Snowden, and Manning, all of whom have faced prosecution or avoided it only by being exiled, nor other whistleblowers like Reality Winner. Nor has it kept us out of other bad wars. The Iraq war wasn't televised, and the military that fought it was not based on a draft; those things helped avoid mass protest. Things get worse as new centers of power and moral concern are arranged and manufactured, not without a cynicism that, as we know from Ellsberg's disclosure, is not new. We are still living not in the post-Vietnam era so much as the post-Watergate era. Other presidents have been accused of scandal, and our next candidate tyrant may be deposed similarly. Who needs the political when it can be replaced by law and medicine?