[Mb-civic] Give Me Liberty Or Let Me Think About It - Michael
Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Fri Jan 13 04:00:41 PST 2006
Give Me Liberty Or Let Me Think About It
By Michael Kinsley
Friday, January 13, 2006; A21
Most of us are not Patrick Henry and would be willing to lose a great
deal of freedom to save our lives. It's not even necessarily deplorable.
Giving up a certain amount of freedom in exchange for the safety and
comfort of civilized society is what government is all about, according
to guys like Hobbes and Locke, who influenced the Founding Fathers. And
that's good government. Many people live under bad governments that take
away more freedom than necessary, and these people choose not to become
heroes. That is not a contemptible choice, especially if we're talking
France or maybe even China, and not Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany.
The notion that freedom is indivisible -- if you lose a little you have
lost it all; if one person is deprived of liberty then we all are -- is
sweet, and useful for indoctrinating children. But it just isn't true.
The current debate about government wiretapping of U.S. citizens inside
the United States as part of the war on terrorism -- like the debate
before it about the torture of terror suspects, and the debate about
U.S. prisons in foreign countries, is all about the divisibility of
freedom. The arguments all seem to pit hard practicality on one side
against sentiment, if not empty sentimentality, on the other. There are
the folks who are fighting a war to protect us from a terrible enemy and
there are the folks getting in their way with a lot of fruity
abstractions. You can note all you want the irony of the government's
trampling American values in the name of protecting them. But that irony
can be turned on its head. If the cost of losing the war and the cost of
winning it are measured in the same currency -- American values,
especially freedom -- then giving up some freedom to avoid losing all of
it is obviously the right thing to do.
Arguing for abstractions while the other side argues for practicality
is, to some extent, just a burden that civil libertarians -- or even
liberals in general -- will always have to bear. In the old days,
liberals at least had the luxury of the easy, tempting argument in the
economic sphere -- "here is some money from the government" -- while
conservatives were stuck with long-term abstractions such as fiscal
responsibility. Now conservatives promise tax cuts starting yesterday
and liberals are left defending big government and fiscal responsibility
as well.
The good guys need to frame their argument in ways that don't require
people to be heroes -- to give up something practical and immediate,
such as safety from terrorism, in exchange for an abstraction, such as
liberty, especially the liberty of someone else (like a young Arab swept
off the streets of Baghdad and locked up in a secret prison).
The argument starts with the traditional, and still powerful, slippery
slope: Today it's him, tomorrow it's you; or, today it's your
international phone conversations, tomorrow it's your desk drawers. The
Bush administration is helping to prevent slippery-slope arguments from
seeming paranoid by slipping and sliding before our very eyes. We gave
it the thuggishly titled Patriot Act and now it claims constitutional
authority to ignore the act's safeguards.
And the slippery slope extends beyond civil liberties, which not
everyone fetishizes, to the rule of law generally, which is more
popular. That Congressional Research Service report revealed last week
is a meticulous and deadpan analysis of the administration's express and
implied reasoning in claiming a right to wiretap conversations at will.
No legal restriction on presidential power of any sort could survive the
administration's logic, which skips with ease over statutes and the
Constitution itself.
The Fourth Amendment is typical of laws protecting civil liberties in
that it doesn't forbid the government to invade people's privacy, or
lock them up or take their property. Rather, it requires the government
to be "reasonable" and to explain its reasons to someone else.
In short, it requires a reality test. It recognizes that even freedom
exists in a world of trade-offs. But it does not necessarily trust the
government in power to make those trade-offs correctly.
This is the second answer of the soft-hearts to the hard-heads: We're
not as otherworldly as you think. We do recognize that there is a
trade-off between the values we celebrate and the practical demands of
protecting those values. We just need a reality test. Is the enemy in
the war on terrorism really worse, justifying greater violations of
civil liberties and human rights, than the enemy in World War II was?
Here, once again, the Bush administration helps to make the softies'
case. It could have jumped through the required hoops and been
wiretapping away about five minutes later. Or if the administration
didn't like the way some court was interpreting the law, it could have
gotten a law tailor-made from Congress just the way it liked. ("I'll
take it medium rare, with cuffs but no pleats, and hold the right to a
jury trial.") But that was too much trouble.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/12/AR2006011201535.html?nav=hcmodule
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