AWOT Essay: Liberty and the Need to Assert Interests, Part I

As we've discussed before, an underreported aspect of the war on terror is the way in which the federal government has transformed terrorism into a catch-all criminal category. From animal rights activists destroying property to individuals violating immigration laws, aggressive prosecution and harsh penalties have been justified in the name of national security. The USA Today reports that since 2001 the number of terrorism convictions by the FBI has quadrupled from 84 to 336. However, this does not mean that 4 times as many Al Qaeda operatives have been captured by the agency. According to the same article, most of these convictions have had nothing at all to do with terrorism, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reporting in 2003 that three-fourths of the cases were "mislabeled" -- most being low-level immigration violations. Among such mislabeled convictions include 60 Middle Eastern students who cheated on English language proficiency tests.

The convictions underscore a real crisis facing the national security apparatus. At stake in transforming marginal offenders and Arab ESL students into terrorists is the need to prove that government is actually capable of accomplishing its tasks. Despite the immense coercive powers of the bureaucratic state, most citizens experience the state as irrelevant, ineffectual, or utterly arbitrary. In a sense, when the FBI pads the numbers, it's attempting to convince the public of government's ability to fulfill basic social commitments. This need to reassure a skeptical citizenry is thus about justifying the institutions themselves and proving that government can truly eliminate all potential threats.

Yet, the public's need for such reassurance raises a prior question. Why must the state justify itself this way in the first place? Is creating a condition of complete security practically feasible? In fact, as we argued recently, the very idea of security loses meaning without a grounding sense of liberty. Unless individuals develop and collectively entrench an account of freedom, figuring out what would make such freedom secure becomes a futile task. Today, the Administration employs words like liberty and freedom ritualistically, usually as a cant to link the war on terror to the Cold War and to clothe current misadventures with the ideological heft of a previous era. But, the terms themselves are empty, and real public discourse hardly ever addresses what actually constitutes the substance of freedom and liberty.

In fact, both the public's need for absolute physical safety and the hollowness of liberty-speak are part of a more general problem: the breakdown of social trust. The reason why animal rights activists and illegal immigrants can plausibly be presented by the FBI as "terrorists" is because the language of terrorism captures a prevailing sense of alienation. Individuals find themselves isolated, no longer enjoying attachments to community members or to fellow employees. Under these circumstances, everyone appears as an outsider -- a potential threat to safety and a source of danger. Ordinary crime and acts of terrorism merge, as both underscore a feeling of uncertainty and social disconnect. Thus, the quest for reassurance is a reciprocal one between government and isolated individual. With citizens coming to see neighbors as strangers, they seek inoculation for all potentially dangerous and hostile interactions. At the same time, no longer rooted in a collective project of liberty or material progress, government finds its legitimacy dependent on the ability to limit precisely such interactions.

Scholars of civil society like Robert Putnam describe the breakdown of trust as a collapse of "social capital." Putnam imagines that we can restore trust by strengthening community organizations such as the PTA, and by developing local institutions to address public problems. Yet, these arguments almost entirely ignore the central problem with isolation and the loss of trust, not to mention the primary basis by which people actually develop bonds of political attachment. In particular, civil society scholars ignore how the very ability of individuals to develop accounts of freedom is undermined by the experience of alienation. The more isolated individuals feel, the more willing they are to cede power to government and to transform security into a principle that legitimates even the most coercive forms of state violence.

One can only understand the president's claim to a unitary and unchecked emergency power against this backdrop. The breakdown of social trust promotes a collective sense of permanent threat that the government simply appropriates. It also helps explain why the language of security continues to be so powerful even five years after 9/11. Of all the objective threats facing individuals, a terrorist attack is far, far down on the list. Yet, it taps into an experience of isolation and social unease, and reinforces this willingness to reimagine government as principally concerned with keeping bodies safe and secure.

Yet, such atomization also undermines liberty by deforming the very nature of politics. In particular, the lack of social trust undermines the central basis for solidarity and collective agency. As the recent immigration protests remind us, all the great social movements in American history were built on common interests. Marginalized communities, be they poor farmers, industrial wage earners, or disenfranchised blacks, understood themselves as united by shared experiences of economic and political oppression. These experiences could only be addressed by imagining the specific union member, woman, or black citizen as part of a larger group. By liberating this larger group, all individual members would necessarily be freed as well.

Today, a common complaint is that citizens are apathetic and uninterested in politics. But, such apathy is an understandable if not appropriate response when public debate ignores the practical conditions facing individuals -- focusing instead on the symbolics of racial epithets or national languages. Politics only becomes meaningful when it is grounded in shared experience and allows individuals to recognize and develop those interests that unite them. Without social trust the very basis for such a politics disappears, since individuals are unable to appreciate the ways in which they're collectively tied. Instead neighbors and co-workers morph into strangers, potential terrorists or criminals, and the only commonality binding the political community is that of mutual suspicion and threat. In other words, we become equal only to the extent that we are all potentially subject to violence, and thus equally require the state's protection.

In the second part of this post, we'll discuss the kind of politics which has risen to fill the void left by interest. Political life today transforms all assertions of group interest into acts of selfishness. Without a sense of the common ties binding citizens, interest arguments strikes us as competing and arbitrary power claims -- attempts to get special benefits from the state. By contrast, the only worthy forms of political engagement are those that do away entirely with issues of interest and solidarity and focus instead of promoting universal, moral goals (for instance, global human rights). The further removed from the tangible experiences of citizens, the purer the political objective seems. The consequence, of course, is that we lose the capacity to develop and assert substantive accounts of freedom -- those actually responsive to the everyday concerns of neighbors and co-workers. Moreover, we perpetuate a cultural climate in which the language of security and, thus, the rhetoric of the war on terror appears not only a political necessity, but as the only tie that connects us as citizens. Rather than being bound by commitments to liberty or social progress, what unites us is fear and the need for all threats to be eliminated.