I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually
had an
excellent column in yesterday's New York Times that makes
several insightful and important points. Brooks documents how
"childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been
to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the
always-hysterical American media. The citizenry has been trained to
expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in
that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe.
Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw
this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and
increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad
in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government
officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that
political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety
are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams
out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of
our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us
from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength;
imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and
power so you can Keep Us Safe.
This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady
diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood.
The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the
closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and
Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television,
petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then
collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power
and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry
drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other
competing values can only be degraded and depraved. John
Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this
way:
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so
sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it
predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not
be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on
it.
As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in
maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power. For a
variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment
media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and
Terrorism melodrama as high as possible. The result is a citizenry far
more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could
ever dream of achieving on their own. For that reason, a risk that is
completely dwarfed by
numerous others -- the risk of death from Islamic Terrorism --
dominates our discourse, paralyzes us with fear, leads us to destroy our
economic security and eradicate countless lives in more and more
foreign wars, and causes us to beg and plead and demand that our
political leaders invade more of our privacy, seize more of our freedom,
and radically alter the system of government we were supposed to have.
The one thing we don't do is ask whether we ourselves are doing
anything to fuel this problem and whether we should stop doing it. As
Adams said: fear "renders men in whose breasts it predominates so
stupid and miserable."
What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding
was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is
grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more
important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would
help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the
Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable
cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and
convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual
punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process,
limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more
important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of
the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints
on government power even when doing so means we live
with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of
course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth
was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit
of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere
survival and safety.
These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to
find in our political discourse. It is fear, and only fear, that
predominates. No other competing values are recognized. We have Chris
Matthews running
around shrieking that he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists. Michael
Chertoff is demanding that we stop listening to "privacy
ideologues" -- i.e., that there should be no limits on
Government's power to invade and monitor and scrutinize. Republican
leaders have spent the decade preaching that only
Government-provided Safety, not the
Constitution, matters. All in response to this week's single failed
terrorist attack, there are -- as always -- hysterical calls that we start
more wars, initiate
racial profiling, imprison
innocent people indefinitely, and torture
even more indiscriminately. These are the by-products of the
weakness and panic and paralyzing fear that Americans have been fed in
the name of Terrorism, continuously for a full decade now.
Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted
dynamic, the point on which Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've
thought most important. What matters most about this blinding fear of
Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result.
Policies can always be changed. What matters most is the radical
transformation of the national character of the United States. Reducing
the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a
child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more
consequential than any specific new laws. Fear is always the enabling
force of authoritarianism: the desire to vest unlimited power in
political authority in exchange for promises of protection. This is
what I wrote about that back in early 2006 in How Would a Patriot
Act?:
The president's embrace of radical theories of presidential power
threatens to change the system of government we have. But worse still,
his administration's relentless, never-ending attempts to keep the
nation in a state of fear can also change the kind of nation we are.
This isn't exactly new: many of America's most
serious historical transgressions -- the internment of
Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship
laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven,
over-reaction to extrenal threats, not under-reaction.
Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the
primary fuel over the last decade. As the events of the last week
demonstrate, it continues to spread rapidly, and it produces exactly the
kind of citizenry about which John Adams long ago warned.