Last Decade at Marienbad

Scott Horton asks six questions of Glenn Greenwald.

But there’s also a more positive side: the country’s vigorous embrace of the principle of equality before law enshrined it as aspiration. It became the guiding precept for how “progress” was understood, for how the union would be perfected.

And the most significant episodes of progress over the next two centuries—the emancipation of slaves, the ending of Jim Crow, the enfranchisement and liberation of women, vastly improved treatment for Native Americans and gay Americans—were animated by this ideal. That happened because “blind justice”—equality before law—was orthodoxy in American political culture. The principle was sacrosanct even when it was imperfectly applied.

The Ford pardon of Nixon changed that, radically and permanently.

There's more.

And I completely spaced the fact that Christopher Hitchens had been Harper's Washington Editor (I do read the rest of the magazine after I've done the puzzle, y'know.)