My sense is that in the post-Snowden era, most of his articles focus on hypocrisy of some sort. At least that seems to be a dominating theme. I don't read every article he publishes but that's what I associate with Greenwald - he goes after people pushing certain views but then not living by them. Even when he was reporting on surveillance, a lot of his articles had as a theme "the NSA say X but they do the opposite".
When it comes to specific policies and what the best policies are, Greenwald is mostly silent, except for his open dislike of mass surveillance and wars.
Journalists make for an easy target for such a guy because they claim (implicitly or explicitly) to be neutrally documenting events, but then try to actively change the course of those events through manipulating their coverage.
He also targets the Democrats in some stories yes, but usually from the angle "they claim they support X but here they are doing not X". Is this partisan?
You could say that Republicans have the same issues, but I don't see them talk about fiscal conservatism anymore, Trump certainly didn't run on such a platform. Trump is many questionable things but most people I've heard express opinions on him say something like "I disagree with policy X but huh, it's weird to see a politician actually doing what he said he'd do for once". That is, labelling him a hypocrite is tougher than perhaps with other politicians.
Maybe that's why he's hard to pigeon-hole. His latest article on the Intercept is about Michael Moore's new movie. In it he says things like:
Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies
He then goes on to criticise the narrative that America was "good" until Trump was elected, whereupon it became "bad". He criticises a swathe of US policy stretching from the Bush era to the Obama era.
That doesn't sound like he's particularly partisan to me. Instead Greenwald argues for a systems-oriented take on politics. In Greenwald's world, Trump is merely a symptom or byproduct of deeper issues, and it's those issues that are the most interesting to study. This is probably why I like his writing.
When it comes to specific policies and what the best policies are, Greenwald is mostly silent, except for his open dislike of mass surveillance and wars.
Journalists make for an easy target for such a guy because they claim (implicitly or explicitly) to be neutrally documenting events, but then try to actively change the course of those events through manipulating their coverage.
He also targets the Democrats in some stories yes, but usually from the angle "they claim they support X but here they are doing not X". Is this partisan?
You could say that Republicans have the same issues, but I don't see them talk about fiscal conservatism anymore, Trump certainly didn't run on such a platform. Trump is many questionable things but most people I've heard express opinions on him say something like "I disagree with policy X but huh, it's weird to see a politician actually doing what he said he'd do for once". That is, labelling him a hypocrite is tougher than perhaps with other politicians.
Maybe that's why he's hard to pigeon-hole. His latest article on the Intercept is about Michael Moore's new movie. In it he says things like:
Moore’s film is highly worthwhile regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. The single most significant defect in U.S. political discourse is the monomaniacal focus on Trump himself, as though he is the cause – rather than the by-product and symptom – of decades-old systemic American pathologies
He then goes on to criticise the narrative that America was "good" until Trump was elected, whereupon it became "bad". He criticises a swathe of US policy stretching from the Bush era to the Obama era.
That doesn't sound like he's particularly partisan to me. Instead Greenwald argues for a systems-oriented take on politics. In Greenwald's world, Trump is merely a symptom or byproduct of deeper issues, and it's those issues that are the most interesting to study. This is probably why I like his writing.