The reflexive call for fewer liberties
January 12, 2011
William Galston -- former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow -- has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty: namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties.
The lesson of the Arizona tragedy, he argues, is that it's too difficult to force citizens into mental institutions against their will. This, he says, is the fault of "civil libertarians," who began working in the 1970s on legal reforms to require a higher burden of proof for involuntary commitment (generally: it must be proven that the person is a danger to himself or to others). As a result, Galston wants strict new laws imposing a litany of legal obligations on the mentally ill, their friends and family, and even acquaintances, as well as dramatically expanded powers to lock away those with mental illness (with broader definitions of what that means).
What Galston is doing here is what the American political class reflexively does in the wake of every tragedy: it immediately seeks to exploit the resulting trauma and emotion to justify all-new restrictions on basic liberties (such as the right not to be locked away against one's will in the absence of a crime or a serious threat to others) and all-new government powers. Every traumatic event -- in the immediate, emotionally consuming aftermath -- leads to these sorts of knee-jerk responses. The 9/11 attack immediately gave rise to the Patriot Act, warrantless eavesdropping, a torture regime, due-process-free imprisonment, and ultimately an attack on Iraq. High-profile, brutal criminal acts have led to repressive measures such as three-strikes-and-out laws and minimum sentencing guidelines, causing the U.S. to maintain the largest Prison State in the world.
What lies at the core of this mindset is desperate pursuit of a total illusion: Absolute Safety. People like William Galston believe that every time there is a violent or tragic act, it means that the Government should have done something -- or should have had more powers -- in order to stop it. But that is the reasoning process of a child. Even if we were to create an absolute Police State -- the most extreme Police State we could conjure -- acts like the Arizona shooting would still happen. There are more than 300 million people in the U.S. and, inevitably, some of them are going to do very bad and very violent things. Thus has it always been and always will be. The mere existence of bad events is not evidence that the Government needs to be more empowered and liberties further restricted. Just as there are serious costs to things like the Arizona shootings, there are serious costs to enacting the kinds of repressive systems Galston envisions, yet people like him never weigh those costs.
Having people do bad things is the price we pay for freedom. There is a cost to all liberty. Having to hear upsetting or toxic views is the price we pay for free speech; having propaganada spewed by large media outlets is the price we pay for a free press; and having some horrible, dangerous criminals go free is the price we pay for banning the Police from searching our homes without a warrant (the Fourth Amendment) and mandating due process before people can be imprisoned (the Fifth Amendment). The whole American political system is predicated on the idea that we are unwilling to accept large-scale abridgments of freedom in the name of safety, and that Absolute Safety is a dangerous illusion. There is a new report today that a police officer in Tuscon stopped Jared Loughner's car for speeding shortly before his rampage, but was unable to search his car because he lacked probable cause to do so. Obviously, that's regrettable -- if you're a family member of one of his victims, it's horrifying -- but the alternative (allowing Police the power to search whomever they want without cause) is worse: that's the judgment we made in the Bill of Rights.
Read the full article at:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
