By David Harsanyi
Thursday, June 13, 2013
There are many idealistic progressives who've remained
opposed to the National Security Agency's data mining programs regardless of
who is in the White House. (We can't surrender our freedom for safety, you
know!) It's only a shame that these same people have such little reverence for
constitutional liberties in other areas of public life.
Really, it's worse than that. Consider the central case
of the left these days: "Unfettered" freedom is a tragedy --
decadent, unfair and un-American. So if, as liberals like to argue, it's a
moral imperative for Americans to scale back personal liberty to build a
cleaner, fairer and healthier world, shouldn't we be willing to do the same to
protect the nation from terrorists? Why one and not the other? If Washington
can shield you from the vagaries of economic life, why can't it do the same
with terrorists?
Soon after news of the NSA's data mining and PRISM
programs hit the news, we learned that there are Democrats with an uncanny
ability to be malleable, apathetic and partisan in the face of an intrusive
state. In January 2006, when George W. Bush was president, Pew Research Center
asked Democrats how they felt about the NSA's surveillance programs.
Thirty-seven percent labeled the spying "acceptable," and 61 percent
said they were unacceptable. The reverse is true today, as 64 percent of
Democrats believe that Barack Obama's surveillance programs are acceptable and
34 percent say they're not.
We could see this as an instance of mass hypocrisy if we
assumed that the response is driven by a concern for the snooping itself rather
than the administration in charge of the snooping. But it's likelier that folks
on the left tend to be idealistic about presidents and less concerned about
inquisitive NSA agents. (No, Republicans aren't innocent by any stretch. But
it's fair to say that they've become more ideologically consistent in their
skepticism of state power. This position is now popularly defined as
fanaticism.)
Even those Democrats who claim to have a special
reverence for privacy regularly support policy that undermines it. If this
affection for privacy were unwavering, would they be demanding that we expand
government-run background checks on firearms? Would they advocate legislation
that forces Americans to ask the Internal Revenue Service for permission to
assemble and partake in the political process? Government should be
transparent, but shouldn't citizens be free to support politicians without
registering with government? And really, how could someone who claims to value
privacy support a law such as the individual mandate, which coerces every
American citizen to report the status of his health insurance to the IRS?
And why is privacy a more critical liberty than economic
freedom -- or any other freedoms regularly pooh-poohed by progressives?
Overregulating trade and markets can be more consequential to the freedom of an
average person than any data mining program. Just ask a small-business owner.
Let's face it. Most of the concern about these NSA
programs is likely driven by an antipathy toward the war on terror rather than
a concern about the corroding of constitutional protections. And though I agree
with progressives that we've lost too many liberties in this effort, it's a
shame they don't believe we're deserving of similar liberty elsewhere in our
lives.
H.L. Mencken wasn't exactly right when he wrote,
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and
hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of
hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Let's concede that not all alarms are
imaginary. Sometimes we are faced with genuine choice between more freedom and
more safety. And as it stands, progressives almost always take the path of more
safety. Why should it be different this time?
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