As John Edwards used to say, there are two Americas.<\/p>\n
On the subject of freedom versus safety, there certainly are. \u00a0 And one of the Americas – the one that would give up liberty to get safety – is growing, and the other, the ones that are pretty hard-core about liberty? \u00a0That one’s shrinking.<\/p>\n
Wendy Kaminer, writing a few weeks back in that noted conservative tool,\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, \u00a0noted that while in any group – especially a group of 660,000 like Boston – there will be heroes and cowards and lots in the middle, but when the heat is on, people will retreat to the comforting arms of Mother Government.<\/p>\n No matter what we say:<\/p>\n David Ortiz brags that “nobody is going to dictate our freedom,” and I assume he hasn’t heard of the Patriot Act or warrantless wiretaps, much less the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Dennis Lehane can be excused for declaring that “they messed with the wrong city,” but don’t take seriously his confidence that not much will change: “Trust me,” he adds implausibly, “we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this.”<\/p>\n Of course we will. We’ve been surrendering liberty in the hope of keeping ourselves safe for the past decade. The marathon bombings will hasten our surrender of freedom from the watchful eye of law enforcement. The Boston Globe is already clamoring for additional surveillance cameras, which are sure to be installed to the applause of a great many Bostonians. You can rationalize increased surveillance as a necessary or reasonable intrusion on liberty, but you can’t deny its intrusiveness, or inevitable abuses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Every disaster – at least the man-made ones – lead to calls for less liberty and more government control. \u00a0Sandy Hook – a disaster that could have been prevented or controlled by precisely one government intervention, an armed cop (or teacher – or, for that matter, parent) led to the biggest surge in demand (real and astroturf) for paring back the Second Amendment in 25 years.<\/p>\n Kaminer notes the disconnect between Americans’ and their leaders’ words and their actions:<\/p>\n You shouldn’t deny the fear that drives the diminution of freedom. You’ll only end up looking foolish. “A bomb can’t beat us,” President Obama assured Bostonians three days after the attack. “We don’t hunker down … we don’t cower in fear.” Yes we do. Less than 24 hours after Obama left town, hundreds of thousands of us were “sheltering in place.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, the very act of living with a civil government involves giving up\u00a0some\u00a0<\/em>freedom; getting a drivers license, paying taxes, following procedure and voting and negotiating to reach consensus with your idiot neighbors to change the rules we all go by, having a police force; all of them involve surrendering\u00a0some\u00a0<\/em>form of liberty. \u00a0And most of us, even the most libertarian, go along with\u00a0some\u00a0<\/em>of it, since they’re broadly considered acceptable trade-offs.<\/p>\n But a new CNN\/Time\/ORC poll shows that Americans – at least, the Americans who take polls – are willing to trade more and more<\/a>:<\/p>\n A new poll shows a willingness by 4 out of 10 Americans to give up some civil liberties to fig\u00e5ht terrorism. But they don’t want the government eavesdropping on their cell phone calls or emails.<\/p>\n The CNN\/Time\/ORC International Poll shows that concerns about terrorism have increased since the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings. Forty percent say they are worried someone in their family might become a terrorism victim. That number is up 6 percentage points from a CNN poll conducted on the 10th anniversay of 9\/11.<\/p>\n When it comes to security versus personal freedoms, 81 percent favor expanding use of cameras on streets and in public places. That’s up 20 points since 2001. Seventy-nine percent favor using facial-recognition technology to search for suspected terrorists at public events.<\/p>\n But only 30 percent want the government to increase monitoring of cell phone and email conversations to prevent terrorist acts. Slightly more than half, 55 percent, favor law enforcement monitoring of online chat rooms and other forums.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But commerce need not worry:<\/p>\n Americans are still mostly refusing to respond to terrorism by changing their routines. Seventy percent said they would not be any less likely to attend large public events in order to reduce their chances of being a victim of a terrorist attack.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is pretty dire stuff – or, if you’re a DFLer, music to your ears.<\/p>\n It’s easy to take the hard-Libertarian tack; “he who trades liberty for security ends up with neither”. \u00a0And it’s true; the search for the bombers in Boston itself showed this, metaphorically speaking. \u00a0The people of Boston “voluntarily” hunkered down, “voluntarily” let their houses be searched (or so the government and media lines went) – and waited nearly a day at Mother Government’s mercy with no result, before the younger Tsarnaev was found by a civilian.<\/p>\n But if you’re concerned about the future of liberty in this country, the behavior of government isn’t your biggest concern – although that is truly worrisome, with the government confiscating guns, food and supplies after Hurricane Katrina, making up watch lists of average Americans involved in mundane non-left causes<\/a>, police departments acting officially<\/a> in ways that used to be considered “rogue” (all the while militarizing themselves to an extent that’d boggle the minds of cops 30 years ago), its behavior after Sandy, and now the Boston Dragnet.<\/p>\n No, your biggest concern is your fellow Americans.<\/p>\n Partly it’s things like the polls above; so many well-meaning Americans are willing to trade liberty for (short-term) security.<\/p>\n More so? \u00a0It’s the way that our larger culture is stigmatizing the very concern for liberty.<\/p>\n More on that later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As John Edwards used to say, there are two Americas. On the subject of freedom versus safety, there certainly are. \u00a0 And one of the Americas – the one that would give up liberty to get safety – is growing, and the other, the ones that are pretty hard-core about liberty? \u00a0That one’s shrinking. Wendy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35948"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36085,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35948\/revisions\/36085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}