Glenn Greenwald's Absolute Tyranny

I've got a new anonymous commenter, "Suzie Q," who left a response to my entry this morning, "Obama Connects al Qaeda to Jet Plot, But Fails to Connect Global Jihad." Ms. Susie Q asks:

So, how many liberties are conservatives willing to surrender to big government?? Because the conservative position is not to surrender liberties to big government. However, mention "al Qaeda" - and conservatives do a flip flop. That's why the whole thing is such a flop in the first place to a real conservative ....

Actually, no, Susie Q. These "real" conservatives you mention are folks like Daniel Larison who purport to be conservatives while allying with the left in destroying the nation. Nope, there's really little difference between these "true" conservatives (with burning hatred of neocons) and hard left extremists. For example, Glenn Greenwald, a regular writer at the misnamed American Conservative, addresses this same point today, by coincidence, regarding how much liberty conservatives are willing to give up for security. Greenwald excoriates the right's "pathology of fear" as his post, "The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears." And while Greenwald is often credited by those on the right for a modicum of consistency (since he's now attacking the Obama administration), I give Greenwald nothing but scorn. A blowhard and windbag, even his legal "expertise" can't save him from this disastrous America-bashing screed:

This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years. It regresses into pure childhood. The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe. A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved. John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power ....

What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset. The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety. Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment. That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety. A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death. And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

Now, as fancy as that sounds, it's pure leftist drivel -- which is why both radicals and "paleoconservatives" eat it up. Even a cursory understanding of the nation's founding rebuts this simplistic -- indeed, devious -- proposition that liberty ALWAYS supercedes security. No doubt one could search around and find quotes from the founding generation to back one's arguments, but few sources would be more authoritative than Alexander Hamilton, author of some of the most important essays of the Federalist Papers. Here's Hamilton outlining the powers of the executive as facilitating the presevation not just of liberty, but ultimately of security and national survival. From Federalist #71:

THERE is an idea, which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous Executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation; since they can never admit its truth, without at the same time admitting the condemnation of their own principles. Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy ....

There are preconditions to both security and liberty, and thus Glenn Greenwald's absolutism is both wrong and immoral -- and certainly not conservative. (In fact, Greenwald and his allies are not unlike the extremists of France in 1792 who took absolute liberté to its ultimate solution of the gallows.) Not only do strong national instutions, in the case of a vigorous executive, serve the interests of basic survival, but they are even more fundamental to the classical political philosophy of constitutional governement. As John Locke understood, whose writing formed a leading theoretical foundation for our constitutional regime, the absence of order in the state of nature formed the chief threat to the rights and liberties of men. To create a state (a government with sovereign legal authority over its the people) was to enter into a contract for the preservation of society, and hence the acquistion of security. Locke even modifies the more aggressive social contract theories of folks like Thomas Hobbes. Without a "common power" in centralized government, no person's security can be safeguarded from both external and internal threats, and thus liberty would be purely extinguished as an artifact of the negation of freedom in the left's "progressive" tyranny.