Back to the Future? (Not Quite)

The war on terrorism has been the rubric under which the state has recovered or expanded a number of powers it hasn’t been able to acquire any other way, or lost during the briefly civil libertarian days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today’s NYTimes article about under cover police conducting surveillance against protestors, even disrupting events at times, certainly reminds us of times past. What protestors have to do with terrorism is anyone’s guess. The thing is, it’s not as if there is a dynamic and threatening left-wing movement challenging state power in any serious way. Rather, our government seems to have decided that the war on terror means monitoring, regulating, and potentially suppressing, any social activity that raises any uncertainties whatsoever. The exercise of cherished liberties always comes with some degree of uncertainty and risk. It wouldn’t be liberty otherwise. Perhaps the difference with the past is this: This administration isn’t so much ‘anti-left’ as it is anti-liberty.