Lawmakers across most of the ideological spectrum have found consensus on the topic. | AP Photos Establishment harsh on Snowden

He is the toast of the libertarian left and the libertarian right. But for most of the political establishment, across the ideological spectrum, it has taken only a few days to conclude that Edward Snowden is nothing less than a dangerous villain.

If any part of Snowden hoped for a Pentagon Papers-style response to his leaks – a round of applause across Washington and New York at the daring revelation of secret national security information – this week certainly shattered any such illusion.


Ask nearly anyone in a position of authority in Washington and you will get a similar judgment on Snowden, the 29-year-old former defense contractor who exposed a vast National Security Agency surveillance program in multiple newspapers last week.

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Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein denounced his “act of treason” and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called for his prosecution. Republican House Speaker John Boehner bluntly called Snowden a “traitor.”

Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, told reporters Tuesday: “He’s no hero. He put people’s lives at risk.” His Republican colleague, Susan Collins, lambasted Snowden as “a high-school drop-out who had little maturity [and] had not successfully completed anything he had undertaken.”

Washington’s opinion elite has been even more savage in its assessment of Snowden. The Washington Post’s Matt Miller assailed him as a “celebrity waiting in Hong Kong for Diane Sawyer’s call,” whose complacence about national security allowed him to “indulge … his precious conscience.” POLITICO’s Roger Simon lampooned Snowden as “the slacker who came in from the cold,” a self-styled spy with “all the qualifications to come a grocery bagger.”

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Legally, it seems clear that Snowden breached all manner of regulations governing information security. It remains to be seen how the Obama administration will handle Snowden, who fled the country for Hong Kong before his leaks became public.

But according to the moral code of Washington, Snowden’s actions speak for themselves, and represent a grotesque offense against some of the Beltway’s most respected institutions: the intelligence community and the military.

In effect, the former Booz Allen Hamilton employee has become a new focal point in the running debate over the fate of communal institutions – and the balance of power between institutions and individuals – in a chaotic digital age.

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In that ongoing clash, Snowden basically embodies some of Washington’s worst fears: A disaffected, Ron Paul-supporting mole within the defense industry, carrying no elite credentials and a bundle of messianic aspirations, and the improbable wherewithal to blow a hole in the national intelligence establishment.

The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin criticized Snowden for the temerity to think he was answering to a “higher calling” when he leaked all that information, despite the obvious criminality of his actions.

“He wasn’t blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety,” Toobin wrote. “In an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it.”

The most cutting denunciation came from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who cast Snowden as a troubling archetype of the 21st-century antisocial male, one of “the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.”

“For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures,” Brooks wrote. “By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”

Snowden has his high-profile defenders, too, largely located closer to the margins of public life, like the leaker himself. Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman and presidential candidate, said Snowden performed a “great service” to his country.

To which Snowden’s most energetic critics would surely reply: Go figure.

If the attacks on Snowden seem a little overheated – and if some are aimed a little too obviously below the belt – that has everything to do with the larger context of his disclosures.

The backdrop for the Snowden leaks is steadily declining trust in public power. Gallup’s “Confidence in Institutions” poll found last year that only 37 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency. That number was 21 percent for banks and big business and 13 percent for Congress. The military was an outlier, with 75 percent of respondents expressing high confidence in the armed forces.

The poll didn’t test the public’s view of the intelligence community. If it queried only Washington D.C. on that point, the positive response would be off the charts.

Snowden’s leaked material strikes at that gold-plated Beltway brand, tearing at the image of one of the few major American entities that still commands the public’s trust.

That’s profoundly alarming to the community of elites in and outside of Washington who believe that the nation’s public and private institutions basically deserve our collective confidence. They see no compensating light at the end of the tunnel into which Snowden has dragged the country.

Publicly, Snowden has taken a fatalistic attitude toward his newfound infamy, telling the Guardian newspaper: “I don’t want public attention because I don’t want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the U.S. government is doing.”

Conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru, himself a critic of Snowden-style libertarian politics, argued that the leaker is a more difficult figure to contend with than his antagonists acknowledge.

“The more you say this guy is a crackpot with no judgment, the more you have to say: then why was he given so much authority over information?” Ponnuru said. “Snowden may not make good arguments against these surveillance programs, but he is a good argument.”

If the debate over the NSA has gotten extraordinarily personal, Ponnuru chalked that up to a more straightforward phenomenon: “Not everybody can say something intelligent or interesting about the data collection techniques and analysis techniques in PRISM. Everybody can say somebody’s a narcissist.”

Peter Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic, likened the backlash against Snowden to the 1990s-vintage concern over mainstream political forces losing ground to actors on the ideological margins.

“On the one hand, the ideological division amongst elites is not so great, and they share some basic assumptions about the potential benevolence of the federal government,” Beinart said. “And there’s this sense that there’s a motley crew of outsiders – Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader – all being fueled by the sense that the government was predatory, and what seemed to elites like a paranoid set of fears.”

Brooks-style dismay, Beinart mused, has more to do with the columnist’s long-running concern for “how to make elites work as figures of authority” in a democratic society, than the narrow specifics of the case at hand.

It’s worth pondering whether a leaker with a different profile than Snowden’s might have won a substantially different reception. Imagine if the same disclosures had come from a 40-year-old Pentagon employee with a Stanford degree, rather than a 20-something defense contractor with a GED.

In this respect, too, Snowden represents a phenomenon that strikes fear into the heart of national elites – the empowerment of once-marginal individuals to have an outsized (and in this case, apparently illegal) impact on the environments they inhabit.

Tufts professor Daniel Drezner, who blogs for Foreign Policy magazine, raised an eyebrow at the tenor of the Snowden criticism.

“It’s interesting that a lot of the reactions, especially from the D.C. community, have been along the lines of, ‘Oh, this is a high school dropout. He doesn’t match up to our academic qualifications,’” said Drezner, who expressed ambivalent feelings about Snowden.

“My hunch is over the long term, the people who have attacked him will get the better end of the argument,” Drezner said. “In some ways, the fact that he outed himself kind of backfired, because now all anybody’s talking about is this guy, instead of the information he leaked.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.