The oldest bargain, and the worst one

Reason magazine puts it plainly in its lead: we still believe in the false promise of trading freedom for safety. I would not call that observation novel — it is as old as any republic that ever fell — but the fact that it must still be made, a full quarter-century after the event that licensed the trade, tells us something grave about the condition of American self-government.

The logic of emergency has always been power's most reliable instrument. A frightened people will consent to measures they would never tolerate in tranquility, and the men who hold the levers of government understand this perfectly. What my era called the 'arbitrary exercise of power' now arrives wearing the vocabulary of threat levels, surveillance architectures, and emergency authorizations — but the mechanism is identical: fear converts the citizen into a subject, and the subject rarely notices the moment of conversion.

I held, and hold still, that the concentration of power is dangerous precisely because it is self-reinforcing. A bureau erected in crisis does not dissolve when the crisis passes; it discovers new crises to justify its continued existence. The apparatus built after September 2001 — and I speak here from disposition, not from recollection of events I did not witness — was, by every account that has filtered into the public record, vast, expensive, and only intermittently accountable to the people it claimed to protect. That is the shape of the problem, whatever the specific engineering may be.

I wrote that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time. That line is often quoted as though it were a celebration of violence; it is nothing of the kind. It is a warning that liberty, if left untended, will wither — that an educated and attentive citizenry must periodically reassert its claims against those who, with the best or worst of intentions, have quietly accumulated what was never theirs to hold. The lesson of September 11, properly drawn, is not that safety requires the surrender of the Fourth Amendment; it is that a republic which surrenders its principles under pressure has already suffered its most important defeat.

Reason's editors are right to press this point, however uncomfortable it may be for readers across the political spectrum. A free press — however imperfect, however partisan in its coloring — performs exactly this office: it reminds the citizen what was promised and measures the distance between promise and practice. That is not sedition; that is the republic breathing. The citizen who reads such an account and dismisses it as unpatriotic has confused the symbol of the Republic with the substance of it.

I close where I always close: on the side of liberty. Not reckless liberty, not liberty indifferent to genuine danger, but the liberty of a people who insist on governing themselves rather than being governed for their own supposed good. The bargain Reason describes — freedom surrendered for safety received — has never, in any age or nation, delivered on its terms. The safety proves temporary or illusory; the freedom, once handed over, proves remarkably difficult to reclaim. Twenty-five years is long enough to know this. The question is whether the citizen is yet paying attention.