Liberty's Paradoxes: Must we surrender freedoms in order to remain free? - Columns - attack on America, 2001

Reason, Dec, 2001 by Cathy Young

THE DAY BEFORE LABOR DAY, I flew to Colorado Springs to teach a three-week course at Colorado College. When I flew home to New Jersey at the end of the month, it was in a different world--one where I had to move my nail clippers from my carry-on bag to my suitcase before boarding the plane, armed federal marshals were conspicuously patrolling the airports, and a disfigured Manhattan skyline was visible from the plane's windows as it approached Newark Airport.

America launched fighter jets against the Taliban regime in October, but psychologically, we have been at war since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. War--to state the obvious--is generally not a good time for advocates of smaller government. Indeed, liberals' and-militarist instincts often coexist (uneasily, one imagines) with a pronounced affection for the public spirit generated by war and other emergencies. In the October 22 issue of The American Prospect, Jeff Faux, president of the leftist Economic Policy Institute, waxed enthusiastic over the statist lessons allegedly to be learned from the tragedy: "How ill served we have been by a politics that perpetuates the illusion that we are all on our own and holds the institutions of public service in contempt."

Unfortunately for liberals, the growth of government and the turn from individualism in wartime extends not only to economic matters but to civil liberties. American history offers a number of unfortunate reminders of this fact, from the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War to the evisceration of the First Amendment during World War Ito the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration quickly proposed legislation that would expand the federal government's wiretapping and cyber-surveillance powers and allow the indefinite detention, without filing charges and without judicial review, of foreigners suspected of terrorist connections.

There's Little doubt, too, that the national mood has shifted in a pro-government direction. It is perhaps symbolic that New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, recently widely assailed for his authoritarian tendencies (even by those who applauded the anti-crime initiatives of his first term), emerged as the can't-do-wrong hero of the moment. Not surprisingly, there is widespread support for federalizing airport security, a task currently entrusted to the private sector. Various polls show that up to 8o percent of Americans expect and accept some abridgments of individual freedom to combat the threat of terrorism. Polls, of course, should not dictate policy, but they act as a proxy for what government is likely to try to do.

How should champions of individual liberty respond? Line up as the usual suspects on the other side, opposing every measure that would increase the size and power of government and quoting the maxim that those who would sacrifice liberty to gain safety end up having neither? Or is this where we stop to ponder the possibility that the preservation of freedom may require some unpleasant compromises, not only to safeguard ourselves from terrorism but to prevent worse encroachments of freedom further down the road?

"We've been having an academic discussion and holding our breath in this area for several years. We can't do that anymore," said Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) shortly after the attacks. This can--and probably should--be seen as a cynically cavalier dismissal of concerns about civil liberties, a reflection of the mentality that freedom matters only until push comes to shove. Yet, in the face of that nightmarish reality TV show broadcast in September, some of those debates do seem academic. Certainly, we can have no illusions about what we're dealing with. There are people who want to destroy us and our way of life. We have witnessed the length to which they are willing and able to go. Perhaps the real surprise is that it didn't happen sooner. The first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993, was itself intended to topple the Twin Towers. (Those earlier terrorists reportedly aimed for a body count of 250,000.) Subsequent to the '93 attack, the government foiled a plot by Islamic radicals to bl ow up two main roadways into New York City, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels. We have no idea what could happen next, but chemical and biological terrorism loom large on people's minds.

If the form of the next attack is unknowable, this much is clear: The actions and the rhetoric of the terrorists undercut the idea, popular among some libertarians and left-wingers, that our vulnerability to terrorism is itself the fault of the expansionist, imperialist state. According to this line of thinking, if the U.S. government stopped playing GloboCop, withdrew from meddling in regions where we have no real national interest, and limited itself to providing for a national defense, there wouldn't be all those people around the world baying for our blood. This argument is myopic for two reasons.