Whose Liberty is at Stake?

Those in power have always confused criticism of the government with threats to national security. This government has been no different. A flurry of blog activity, at Tiny Revolution, Digby, and editorial activity by Glenn Greenwald at Salon, has noted that the National Intelligence Estimate, which has become a national issue after suggesting the terrorist threat has increased, contains a less noticed passage about who counts as potential terrorist suspects. The now notorious passage says:

"Anti-US and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests. The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the Internet age."

The Senate just passed a bill today that permitted treating certain American citizens as enemy combatants, nearly eradicated the civil rights of enemy combatants, and also expanded the category of persons who can be classified as enemy combatants. Put the two together, and one can see why various people on the left are feeling anxious. Indeed, Digby couldn't resist quoting Pastor Martin Niemoller's famous poem about the Nazis, and their progressive eradication of different levels of German society, each indifferent to the other's fate.

Is Bush's SS waiting in the wings to swoop down on the wide swaths of the left? In fact, while there have indeed been some authoritarian extensions of police powers against left-wing groups in the past years, including surveillance of marches, use of brutal tactics against protestors, and greater limitations of free speech, what is noticeable is the relative *lack* of such repressive measures against the 'left' broadly conceived. During World War I, the government shut down thousands of left-wing presses, swept up hundreds of left-wing leaders, and made public criticism of the war illegal, producing some of the most famous first amendment cases in our history. We know how devastating the McCarthy Era was, not just at the national level, but at the state and local level, as thousands of left-wingers and non-conformists were purged from public and private employment, media censored, political association directly criminalized, and domestic spying extensive. Compared to these episodes, what's striking is how non-threatening recent developments are.

The point is not to endorse what is going on. Anyone who reads this blog knows where we stand. However, the point is to try to suggest a different avenue of criticism from what is currently offered - ie, 'next, they're going to come for the left-wing radicals'. For the real lesson of Niemoller's poem about the Nazis, inappropriate as it is for our times, is not that others failed to take account of each prior group's loss of liberty, but rather that those groups failed politically. They failed to demonstrate how everyone's liberty is at stake even if there is little to no threat that the vast majority of (Americans) will be directly threatened by the application of state power. This is the argument that the 'left' has to make. It has to show how the 'liberty-security tradeoff' that the administration offers - dramatic limitation of the liberty of a few, for the security of the many - means no liberty at all.

Winning that argument is harder. It means attacking not just specific policies, but also countering the political logic behind them. That often requires using abstract arguments that might seem removed from the immediate, urgent demands of political engagement. But it is false to oppose abstract argument and direct policy criticism. They depend on each other. For example, in this case, the best argument is not that a few lefties might end up in Guantanamo, it's that nobody is free when they think about their freedom in the way the administration wants them to. Bush et al. want us to think about our freedom entirely in a private, isolated way - as a kind of freedom of choice we enjoy in our personal lives. We all recall how Bush, when asked after 9/11 how best to demonstrate American confidence and freedom, suggested that citizens go shopping and continue travel. For the Administration, private acts of consumption came closest to expressing their account of liberty. The flip-side of thinking about freedom in this way is using the government to protect us from all those social and environmental threats that might interfere with our private freedom. This means looking at other people primarily as threats or at least potential dangers, rather than as a condition for our own freedom. It also means believing that we remain free even while other citizens lose their freedom. That can't be right. We are only free if we live in a society that is really organized around securing everyone's freedom, not ensuring that they are protected from every possible risk. Our society seems to think our public institutions should be about security, and only our private life about freedom. But, since we really live our life in public - at work, in politics, even in the home - that means we really don't live a free life. Can we develop as free beings, develop to our full potential, if our first priority is to protect ourselves from others? If we really want to live in a free society, don't we have to accept that degree of risk that comes with allowing everyone their freedom? After all, we only really experiment with new ideas, new ways of living, new kinds of knowledge when everyone, or at least most, are open to such experimentation.

This is all simply to say that everyone's liberty is at stake in recent events, not because everyone might get thrown in Gitmo, but because these new bills are about trying to redefine our collective expectations, demands, and desires.

Making More Terrorists in Iraq

Tuesday afternoon, Bush bowed to pressure and declassified 3 pages of the 30 page National Intelligence Estimate. As repeated in newspapers everywhere, the report dated April 2006 asserts that the Iraq war has become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists, "breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement." It is this last claim that has been picked up by the media and emphasized by Bush's Democratic critics. In fact, despite rather desperate claims to the contrary by the Administration, it's become almost a truism -- even repeated by Musharraf in his trip to the Daily Show -- that the war in Iraq is increasing the likelihood of a terrorist attack here in the US and is strengthening Islamic extremism everywhere. Coming in the middle of an election, the clear implication is that, while "tough on terrorism" is good, Bush's particular brand of toughness is actually heightening the threat.

Yet, although it may count as common sense, for a number of reasons the oft-repeated argument that Iraq is creating new terrorists poised to attack America is neither self-evident nor good political argument. First, it once again hypes the danger posed by terrorism -- transforming what should at most be one security concern among others into the primary focus of politics. Even if Al Qaeda recruiting is up because of the war, for which scant direct evidence is provided, there is no evidence that they have increased capacity to endanger American lives and institutions. Indeed, the absence of terrorist attacks in the US over the past five years points in the opposite direction. No matter what Bush or Cheney say, civilization is not at stake. Moreover, to the extent that the war has led a few alienated Muslims to lash out at the West, it's telling that such attacks have taken place in Europe. As compared with the US, European immigrant communities -- including Muslim communities -- are far less integrated into social and political life. If anything, as some have argued, social conditions at 'home' (in the West) have more to do with the few, disorganized terrorist acts here than does the Iraq war.

But regardless of whether we're creating more terrorists or not, by viewing the success or failure of Iraq through the prism of terrorism we end up displacing what should be the central concern. The war in Iraq should be opposed because it makes a mockery of the principle of self-rule and has produced a horrendous and disruptive degree of violence. The result is a tragedy -- one sustained by the terrorism discourse and which must end whether or not a boomerang effect exists.

Al-Qaeda in Mogadishu?

The BBC reported yesterday that the interim prime minister of Somalia, Ali Mohamed Ghedi, had called for "international help against the 'al-Qaeda' and 'terrorist' expansion in the country." The event precipitating this newest cry for help from Somalia's 'transitional government' is the Union of Islamic Court's (UIC) recent entry into Kismayo, Somalia's major southern port city, once consider a possible landing point for peacekeepers. The UIC has made headlines for two reasons. First, it has done what no other political power has done since 1991: brought a degree of peace and order to southern Somalia. Second, it is Islamist, leading to fears that it might have terrorist links.

In fact, as we have written before, the evidence for the terrorist connection in Somalia is poor, to say the least. What there *is* good evidence for is that Western intervention in Somalia has done little to resolve the conflict there, and probably done a great deal to strengthen the hand of the UIC. While the transitional government has played negotiating games at endless international negotiations, the UIC has done the somewhat harder work of developing a solid , relatively cohesive political organization in Somalia - something the secular warlords were never able to do. Indeed, Indeed, as the New York Times reported recently about the UIC in Mogadishu:

"Instead of acting like the Taliban and ruthlessly imposing a harsh religious orthodoxy, as many feared, the Islamists seem to be trying to increase public support by softening their views, at least officially, delivering social services and pushing for democratic elections. Islamic leaders are operating almost in campaign mode, organizing street cleanups, visiting hospitals, overseeing a mini building boom and recruiting elderly policemen to don faded uniforms they have not worn for years and return to work."

And the UIC entered Kismayo without firing a shot. In other words, while there are no doubt those who do not support the UIC, it is clearly the most legitimate power in southern Somalia. It has become a force able to bring a degree of unity and stability to the southern territory, and certainly enjoys the widest support of any really existing political organization there.

A while back we noted that fragile third world regimes had acquired a tendency to talk up the terrorist threat at home in order to acquire various kinds of international support - usually aimed at bolstering their repressive state apparatus. Ghedi's cry for help looks like more of the same. Ghedi's 'transitional government' looks on its way to transitioning out of existence. It now controls only one town in all of Somalia - Baidoa - and it does that only precariously. Ethiopian troops have been reported crossing into Somalia, and entering Baidoa to defend Ghedi's government from the inevitable collision with the UIC. Ghedi knows his days may be numbered. He also must know that the West is unlikely to get involved in an African 'peacekeeping' venture unless there are dire stakes. It is no surprise that he has discovered 'Al-Qaeda' in Mogadishu.

The Constitution of Security

The Association of Muslim American Lawyers (AMAL) hosted a forum on racial profiling last Thursday to investigate the “process by which this illegal practice has evolved into a perceived, ‘common sense’ solution to our present day security need.” Thursday’s forum was aimed at examining racial profiling in its newest, post-9/11 context. How and why racial profiling has come to be viewed as a sensible mechanism for securing America’s safety is indeed a worthwhile question for discussion, and the AMAL panel’s approach to the question unwittingly provided many answers. In the various panel presentations and audience comments opposing racial profiling, both implicit and explicit support for the government’s broader security efforts was on display.

Among presentations by staff from the ACLU, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the FBI, and civil rights attorneys, perhaps the clearest example of why current opposition to racial profiling will fail to achieve its desired ends came from Shayana Kadidal, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Kadidal asserts that the strongest political argument against racial profiling is that the practice is not an effective law enforcement strategy. He maintains that while there are many “moral and ethical” arguments against racial profiling, these will not prove as persuasive as demonstrating that racial profiling is itself futile and counterproductive, that it “makes us less safe.” The general public, he claims, is looking at the question primarily through the lens of efficacy, and thus to convince people that the utility of profiling is zero, or even negative, will sap their support for it.

Kadidal presents two arguments as to why this is so. First, racial profiling serves to alienate minority and immigrant communities that would otherwise cooperate with authorities and would be the most reliable source for terrorist intelligence. Second, racial profiling creates a “false positives” problem, diverting law enforcement resources away from traditional methods that actually work. Of course, implicit in both of these critiques is the assumption that the war on terror project, which law enforcement has been charged with carrying out, is legitimate. Kadidal’s "ineffectiveness" argument reinforces the notion that the only thing wrong with current law enforcement efforts is the possibility of racial profiling.

Indeed, Kadidal spends most of his presentation highlighting the positive role that immigrants and minority groups can play in policing their own communities. As an example of “beneficial” tips that arise from immigrant communities, Kadidal points to the case of the Lackawanna Six. Although Kadidal himself describes the charges in the case as “shady,” and the case was worse than "shady" (see here and here), he states that “whatever you think of the merits,” the example holds because the Buffalo men were turned in to authorities by other Yemenis. Similar tips will not be forthcoming, claims Kadidal, because racial profiling convinces minority and immigrant communities that law enforcement is not a friend.

Beyond Kadidal's appalling brush-off of a bad case, his argument is an utterly pragmatic, defeatist conception of public life. What have we gained if our constitutional order becomes a means by which we are encouraged to look at each other with suspicion, and to fulfill our duties of good citizenship by spying on and turning in our neighbors? Whether or not racial profiling contributes to making us safer should be beside the point for a speaker representing an organization whose mission is to defend constitutional rights. Surely once we are checking over our shoulders or looking to snitch on our neighbors we start undermining the solidarity and trust necessary in a free society, and the Constitution starts to lose its value. Kadidal, his fellow panelists, and the audience Thursday night all insisted that we focus on defending against constitutional violations. Yet these activists seems to have lost sight of the substance of the Constitution (living in a free society) for its form (the law). The Constitution as a legal document will not itself guarantee us freedom; there is much that is constitutional yet antithetical to liberty. If it becomes merely a reason to enforce the law, whatever the law may be, the Constitution loses its vitality and reason. It is as a set of principles that inspire thinking about the free society that the Constitution matters most. Yet Kadidal's defense of the Constitution perversely wishes to set aside the principles of a free society so as to improve law enforcement. By attempting to play it safe, and by making the pragmatic argument, Kadidal and others undermine the free society they think they are defending.

Gitmo and Shoddy Journalism

Eric Umansky in the Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent piece on the unwillingness of the American news media to challenge Bush Administration claims that those detained in Gitmo are, as Rumself said in 2002, "the worst of the worst." Although the evidence suggests that most of those being held are non-combatants who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Administration persists in claiming that the detainees are simply too dangerous to be released. From the Administration's perspective, it makes sense to persist in arguing against the facts. After all, Gitmo isn't just a civil liberties nightmare, it's also yet another example of Bush incompetence. Rather than, in Rumsfeld's words, "the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth," the Gitmo prisoners are generally poor Afghans caught off the battlefield in Pakistan and sold into detention for a bounty. Not exactly crack intelligence at work.

More puzzling, however, is the failure of elite journalists to challenge these Administration assertions or to do the basic work needed to uncover the truth. As Umansky writes, "Such skepticism about the government’s claims would prove to be well-founded -- and quite rare. Until recently, reporters have seldom sought to test the Bush administration’s contention[s]." The lack of such skepticism speaks to the precipitous decline of actual investigative journalism, and the simple fact that most of the reporters with access don't have the background or knowledge to challenge Administration officials. As a result, while Gitmo is in the news virtually every day, few journalists seem to be asking the really obvious questions: like just who exactly are the detainees. Partly, this failure has to do with existing ideas about what constitutes 'investigation'. Since Watergate, journalists have confused exposing any personal scandal pertaining to a politician, no matter how small or private, with investigative journalism. The desperate quest for the 'scoop' that will make sensational, tabloid-sque headlines stands in for intelligent research into the facts. Yet, the larger reason continues to be the consolidation of corporate media and the resulting cutback on staffing at most newspapers. Where once a reporter at a bureau would file an independent news story, now due to budget constraints and far greater news centralization, a paper is more likely merely to run an article from the AP. The lack of real investigation also indicates what happens to the press when three-fifths of news sourcing comes from government officials. Under such circumstances, even facts in plain sight have a way of disappearing. For the rest of Umansky article, read on. . .

Election Ads: Giving Politics a Bad Name

In the United States, 'politics' is often used as an epithet. If a report about pork-barrel legislation, or congressional corruption, comes out, people shake their head knowingly - 'that's politics'. In many ways, this attitude is justified. Consider the strategies for the mid-term elections that each Party has taken. As various papers report, the Democrats have taken their familiar, and remarkably unsuccessful, Anybody But Bush message and developed it into a series of advertisements associating vulnerable Republican congressmen with the President. Even non-national elections, like the governor's race in California, have been swept up in the national anti-Bush strategy. In response, Republicans have distanced themselves from Bush, and even substituted an invented likeness with the more admired Senator John McCain.

With both sides playing such a starkly strategic game, it's no wonder that people have a negative view of politics. It's hard not to think politics is about mere power when politicians represent nothing more than personal ambition. What's more, the obviousness of the political strategies, on both sides of the aisle, communicates a profound contempt for citizens themselves. Neither party makes much of an effort to conceal the obvious power calculations behind the advertisements, which communicates to the viewer that he is seen not as a thinking citizen but merely as a political resource in the various attempts to be re-elected. If political parties took their voters seriously, they would attempt to convince them with ideas and arguments, not ply them with empty rhetoric and manipulative images.

The most corrosive aspect of this way of conducting politics, however, is not that it strips politics of its higher ideas, but that it also pushes people towards thinking politics could never have a higher purpose than mere re-election. Apathy, withdrawal and cynicism, though understandable reactions to real problems, do nothing to change the reality to which they respond. This is the predicament with which the current political constellation presents us. It is not easy to see how to refuse this choice, but at least one alternative suggests itself to us: political activity that is not sucked into the constant strategic calculations of the two-year election cycle, activity that insists on debating principles and ideas, not merely electorally successful 'common sense'. Politics, especially political leaders, should do more than reproduce the doubts and suspicions the public already has ('Bush is bad', 'the war isn't going well', 'Dems aren't Bush'). It should strive to elevate common sense into serious argument and debate.
A more effective critique is not to take politics as it is, but push to make politics what it could be.

Bush's Useful Idiots

Tony Judt has written a wide-ranging indictment of the liberal intelligentsia in this felicitously titled London Review of Books piece, Bush's Useful Idiots. We have made similar points about liberalism's strange place in American politics, especially in this recent review of Peter Beinart's new book. A few extracts of Judt's piece are pasted below, which we suggest you read in its entirety, with one reservation. While Judt's arguments are sharp, he fails to suggest why liberalism has ended up where it is, and therefore is reduced to simply wondering 'where liberalism went'. It is more appropriate not to look longingly backwards towards obsolescing ideologies, but to look forward towards developing a new body of ideas.

Selections:

"For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’."

"But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end."

"But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest."

Good and Bad Arguments

In a recent, tightly-argued piece in Foreign Affairs, John Mueller argues that the main reason there hasn't been another major terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 is because "almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad." The best piece of evidence in favor of this argument is precisely how easy it is to pull off a terrorist attack. If, as the Homeland Security Department says, "terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon," and we haven't developed a security apparatus able to cover all targets, then the best explanation for the absence of attacks is the near total absence of the threat itself. Stated intentions alone do not a terrorist threat make. As Mueller continues to point out:

"[I]t is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000)."


This is an argument that we have made before, but it is significant that major public figures are making it (Mueller suggests "it remains heretical to say...that fears of the omnipotent terrorist...[are] greatly exaggerated," but his thoughts being published in Foreign Affairs belie that claim). Mueller's argument tells us two things. First, though his critique is directed at the administration, it is equally damning for the left-liberal argument that Bush's policies have made us less safe. The point is that the determining factor in the prevalence of terrorist threats lies mostly outside the government's actions. Bush has neither made us dramatically safer, nor made us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The Democrats, in claiming the latter, are just as much fearmongers as Bush is.

Second, it is true that the terrorist threat is very exaggerated, and that many are willing to entertain this possibility. But it is also clear that the factual argument, alone, is inadequate to bring an end to the war on terror. For us, this is the most crucial point. The war on terror is more than an empirical claim about the likelihood of a terrorist threat, which can be disproved by logic such as Mueller's. The war on terror is also a political argument about political priorities and acceptable political reasoning. It is one that subscribes to the 'precautionary principle' of 'better safe than sorry', where even if no risk can be proved, it is better to prevent the risk from ever emerging. Mueller's point is a necessary but insufficient part of the critical argument. The harder part of the argument is to say that security should not be the number one priority of society, and security is here meant in the broadest sense. That is to say, not just in relation to terrorism, but in relation to a broader culture of fear and sense of vulnerability. For even if many do not believe there is a specific terrorist threat, there is a much wider acceptance of the idea that it is legitimate for the governmnet to act to allay public fears, even when those fears have a thin, insubstantial basis.

The Fifth Anniversary: Can Fear Be Enough?

As the fifth anniversary of the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, today is being marked by memorials and “remembrances” all around the country. Not least among the solemn rituals designed to honor the occasion was a wreath-laying ceremony yesterday at ground zero led by President Bush himself, followed this morning by a memorial including two moments of silence, one for each tower. The President will mark today’s anniversary at each of the three sites of attack, and conclude the day’s events with a national address from the Oval Office. The emphasis by both public officials and the American public has been to find a way to stamp today with appropriate significance, and somewhat perversely, to hang on to the grief, the sense of tragedy and shock that appeared to unite the nation on September 11, 2001. The fifth anniversary of 9/11 was ushered in by an outpouring of punditry in the past week expressing both this strange nostalgia for the moment of victimhood and a desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

The New Yorker gave voice to this nostalgia by raising the familiar lament that Bush squandered the international good will and domestic social cohesion that arose in the aftermath of 9/11. Most telling about this position is the longing it expresses for “simple solidarity.” Hendrik Hertzberg explains that immediately following the attack, “strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance.” It is as if 9/11 had precipitated a social transformation, and that Hertzberg hoped the nation could somehow hang on to it permanently. But as he describes it, this cohesiveness was nothing more than “traumatized togetherness,” and thus it is no surprise that, regardless of Bush administration policies, it would not last. What kind of togetherness could 9/11 really have fostered? The only thing that was shared was the immediate sense of shock, and later an underlying feeling of vulnerability. The sense of disappointment expressed by Hertzberg is palpable, because immediately after 9/11 some believed that it could provide a wider, collective meaning for American life. To some extent, there has been an attempt in many corners to do exactly that, to establish a new “post-9/11” era in which society organizes itself around a collective sense of fear and vulnerability and finds purpose at striking out against those perceived to be threatening.

This theme is taken up by social commentator Frank Furedi. As he puts it, some of the questions raised since 9/11 “highlight the difficulty we have in endowing contemporary events with meaning. From the standpoint of the traditional vocabulary of public life, many events today do not make sense.” That is to say, if we lack a common framework for understanding a particular phenomenon or event, we tend to endow it with a significance it does not have. In Furedi's words: "public officials also seem at a loss to explain who we are. That is why the "unknown" threats posed by an unimaginable enemy have not helped to forge a strong sense of common identity or resistance. Whatever US president George W Bush has done, he has not succeeded in mobilising a powerful base of support for the war on terror."

One prominent symptom of the common dissatisfaction with the predominant political project of survivalism is, as we have written before here, the rise of conspiracy theory. As this week’s Time magazine deftly explores, such conspiracies have not only survived for five years, they appear to have gained a quite stable foothold. The Time article perceptively explains that conspiracy theories “meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it…Absent another explanation, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.” The Time article, however, presents the popularity of such theories as a timeless psychological need. Unconsidered by the article is whether such lack of meaning is inherent, or whether it tells us something more about our present political climate.

The Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to beat back skepticism of its war on terror policies, and to gather support for the greater security project. In speeches this week, Bush repeatedly emphasized the danger posed by al-Qaeda and renewed his commitment to capturing Bin Laden. This is a shift from recent policy, and as we wrote last week, the Republicans are keen to play up the war on terrorism as unambiguously as possible in the build up to the mid-term elections.

As conspiracist skeptics and 9/11 soul-searching highlight, the war on terror is often weak and incoherent. Nonetheless it is here to stay in the absence of a meaningful opposition to it and given the continued low-level anxiety and social atomization that gives rise to it. Rather than a means to resolve social atomization and the 'lack of meaning', the set of policies that is the war on terror serves to reinforce and exacerbate it. Thus, while so much of the collective reflection and memorializing of 9/11 seems to cry out for social purpose and a collective understanding of the present, these aims cannot be achieved by instantiating a quasi-religious day of mourning. The war on terror demands unity behind a project of security and survivalism, urging us to build our social solidarity out of vulnerability and projected victimhood. That is what today’s memorials, moments of silence, tributes to victims and survivors try to do. But the continuous calls throughout the week to understand or find meaning in 9/11 point to the very weakness of the survivalist framework as a way of understanding human life and of organizing society. The life being offered us by the war on terror project calls for the eradication of risk and the dispensability of freedom. It calls for a life that is itself meaningless. It is a life without liberty, because freedom requires a realm of risk in which to operate—choice cannot exist without it. It is the very meaninglessness of a secured life that makes the war on terror and politics of fear an empty framework. If the current political framework reduces our social aims to survival, at some point we cannot help but ask what the point of surviving, or really living, is. That is the question the war on terror forestalls. A thorough and continued opposition to the war on terror as a whole, not simply a critique of particular government policies but a recognition and rejection of the war on terror’s very premise of the secure life is a necessary condition of any meaningful politics that places liberty at its center.

Fear and Loathing the Mid-Terms

The New York Times reported a few days ago that "Congressional Republican leaders have all but abandoned a broad overhaul of immigration laws and instead will concentrate on national security issues they believe play to their political strength." The report comes amidst a flurry of mid-term election news stories reporting Republican weakness and disorganization, reflected in their reluctance to be associated with President Bush, their inability to generate a clear political message, and in the increase of GOP districts that appear vulnerable to challenge. It is no secret why the Republicans, including the President himself, who has been stumping on the war on terror for almost a week already, have fallen back on the politics of fear. It is the only thing they have to offer. Behind the rhetoric of decisiveness, clarity of purpose, and resolve, lies political impotence and confusion. Floundering on immigration is only the most recent in a series of false starts and protracted, uninspiring legislative battles, including social security reform, the health care debacle, and the energy and transportation bills. The few of these measures that did pass were so mired in pork, parliamentary maneuvering, and compromise, that it has been difficult to claim any kind of victory beyond the traditional one of bringing home the bacon to one's own district.

The curious thing about this situation, however, is that the Democrats seem to be arguing over two, equally wrong-headed ways of approaching the politics of fear. They either hope to let the failure of the administration's policies speak for itself while they emphasize other social and economic issues; or they think they have to neutralize the security issue by addressing it and proving the Democrats' equality or superiority on that subject. Neither option is a convincing stand. In the first, the Democrats reveal their own lack of independent thought when it comes to the politics of fear by not saying anything about it. In the second, they expose their lack of originality if they adopt the language of security and simply try to beat the Republicans at their own game. Calling for an end to the war on terror is of course too radical a thought for the Democrats. But it's the unspoken third possibility, whose tacit rejection by the Democrats exposes one way in which, for all the sound and fury of these mid-term debates, we can expect little progress from the existing electoral process.