Is America free?

Jonathan Turley has a piece in the Washington post offering ten reasons why America is no longer a free country. (I'm sorry if the link is behind a paywall.) His list:

1.  New presidential powers to assassinate Americans
2.  Indefinite detention
3.  Arbitrary justice (the president can decide whether someone receives a trial in a federal court or a military tribunal)
4.  Warrantless searches
5.  Secret evidence
"Even legal opinions, cited as the basis for the government’s actions under the Bush and Obama administrations, have been classified. This allows the government to claim secret legal arguments to support secret proceedings using secret evidence."
6.  War crimes (alleged war crimes of the Bush administration and the refusal of the Obama administration to investigate and try Bush administration officials, in violation of international law)
7.  The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, with its secret warrants and secret searches
8.  Granting immunity from judicial review for companies who aid in warrantless surveillance
9.  Warrantless GPS monitoring of citizens
10. Extraordinary rendition (outsourcing justice to countries with more ... flexible justice systems

None of this is probably new to anyone who reads my blog or follows me on the Google +, but Turley has summed up the authoritarian aspects of the national security apparatus very well. He also compares the items on his list with the situation in other countries commonly accepted as authoritarian.

I don't like the phrasing of the question "Is America no longer free?" because that threatens to get the discussion stuck in the quagmire of people arguing back and forth that for women, blacks, and most minorities, liberty has obviously expanded since even fifty years ago. That's an important conversation, but it can cloud the issue too.

I've talked before about the trouble with the instinctive reflex to define America as free. What I wonder is if there is any kind of strategic or rhetorical upshot to coming out and declaring America is not free (whether or not it ever has been in the past). Does it matter at all to the argument? Are people more or less likely to take civil libertarians seriously if they describe America as authoritarian? Could the shock value of hearing that frank description (perhaps over many conversations and articles) perhaps jolt people into examining their assumptions?

Or will hearing this description close more minds to civil libertarian arguments? Does describing America as unfree or authoritarian violate the patriotism many people feel and feel is very important? Could it cause people to view the civil libertarian as a member of an out-group because he or she is seen to be casting aspersions on the big American in-group?

I just don't know!

smart thoughts from others on Ron Paul

This post by Ta-Nehisi Coates is rather required reading for anyone interested in my previous post.

The Times notes that Ron Paul's racism newsletters are, again, becoming an issue. The standard defense has generally been Paul didn't write the newsletters. I think an honest reckoning with that defense would have someone question the faculties of an adult who would allow a newsletter filled--by Paul's own admission--with bigotry to be published under one's name. Had I spent a decade stewarding an eponymous publication steeped in homophobia and anti-Semitism, I would not expect my friends and colleagues to accept an "I didn't write it"excuse. And I have no (present) designs on the launch codes. It is a peculiar thing when the basic standards of honesty and decency are lowered in direct proportion to the power one seeks to wield. This is especially true of our friends. One has a hard time imagining a President Barack Obama who had done a stint writing for, say, for The Final Call lambasting gays and Jews.

Be that as it may, I think it's extremely important that the discerning consumer understand that the problem isn't merely that Ron Paul claims that the newsletters are a bizarre forgery, but that when initially asked about them Paul actually defended the letters. 

[...]

Racism, like all forms of bigotry, is what it claims to oppose--victimology. The bigot is never to blame. Always is he besieged--by gays and their radical agenda, by women and their miniskirts, by fleet-footed blacks. It is an ideology of "not my fault." It is not Ron Paul's fault that people with an NAACP view of the world would twist his words. It is not Ron Paul's fault that his newsletter trafficked in racism. It is not Ron Paul's fault that he allowed people to author that racism in his name. It is anonymous political aids and writers, who now cowardly refuse to own their words. There's always someone else to blame--as long as it isn't Ron Paul, if only because it never was Ron Paul.

This is not a particular tragedy for black people. The kind of racism which Paul trafficked is neither innovative nor original. Even his denials recall the obfuscations of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens. But some pity should be reserved for the young and disgruntled, for those who dimly perceive that something is wrong in this country, for those who are earnestly appalled by the madness of our criminal justice policy, for those who have watched a steady erosion of our civil liberties, and have seen their concerns met with an appalling silence on the national stage. That their champion should be, virtually by default, a man of mixed motives and selective courage, is sad.

Do read the whole thing, where incriminating Paul quotes abound.

Maybe here is also a good place to link to Tyler Cowen's thoughts on Ron Paul from four years ago. Quite relevant today.

The Ron Paul phenomenon reminds me of the old America First movement, with Misesian 100 percent reserve banking theory on top.  He is making (one version of) libertarianism much more popular by allying it with nationalist and also states’ rights memes.  That includes his stances on immigration, NAFTA, China, devolution of powers, and "The Constitution."  Even when the policy recommendations stay libertarian, I fear that the wrong emotions will have the staying power.  Evaluating a politician is not just about policy positions; for instance personally I am skeptical of most forms of gun control but I worry when a candidate so emphasizes a pro-gun stance.

Many libertarians see the Paul candidacy as their chance to have an impact and they may well be right.  There is also no one else for them to support.  But, raw milk or not, I am not myself tempted to take a stance this year in favor of any of the candidates, Paul included.  Liberty is lacking in the United States but I’d like to see it more closely bundled with reasonableness, moderation, and yes pragmatism; I am looking to advance on all fronts at the same time.  Call me fussy if you wish.

I fear that Ron Paul is so taken with his own ideas that he is unable to see how or when his views might ever be wrong; it is in that sense I consider him insufficiently intellectual.  (Admittedly all the other candidates are too open to whatever is politically popular at the moment.)  Openness also means ability to improvise, which is a critical leadership quality; many of the challenges of the presidency are the surprises, 9/11 being one example of many.

The America Firsters, by the way, were right about many things, but they were very wrong about a few very big things, such as World War II and the civil rights movement.  They also suffered a virtually total eclipse for decades.  I don’t see nationalist and states’ rights memes as a path toward a future with more human liberty.

thoughts on Ron Paul

I have never been a fan of Ron Paul (well, since high school/early college, but that hardly counts, right?), but his increasing viability changes the dynamic somewhat. A new PPP poll puts him in the lead in Iowa. I easily prefer Gary Johnson, who is like Ron Paul, but with actual accomplishments and more enlightened views on immigration and reproductive rights. But, sadly, he never managed to get any traction. Paul has.

Erik Kain has written a few posts endorsing Ron Paul and then defending that endorsement. These are all choice posts, but here are a few highlights, all of which I second.

I have lost faith in Obama. Yes, I think that some things in the healthcare reform legislation and financial legislation do some real good for some people. But I see a very poor trade in electing folks who give you corporate healthcare legislation in exchange for dubious, never-ending war powers.

What it comes down to for me is not spending or taxes or anything like that at all. I want peace. I want to elect whichever candidate is most likely to lead us in a peaceful direction – toward peaceful commerce and a vastly downsized military abroad. I want a candidate who will honestly and frankly assess the abuses of liberty here at home, because without our basic rights intact, how can we trust anything our government does?

For me it is hardly about left vs. right anymore or the various second-tier policy differences Democrats and Republicans may have. Yes, I care about jobs, about taxes, about healthcare and public education. Yes, on many of these issues I’m far to the left of Ron Paul. But I care more about peace.

from the first link.

In a startling break with tradition, Ron Paul took a few quick jabs at his Republican rivals on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno Friday. Asked his opinion of Michele Bachmann, who Paul had clashed with earlier in the week over the question of a nuclear Iran, Paul said Bachmann “hates Muslims” and “wants to go get them.”

Leno asked Paul his opinion of Rick Santorum, asking whether he talked about anything other than gay people. “Gay people and Muslims,” Paul quipped.

and

I appreciate his belief in live-and-let-live. His clarifications on his belief in state’s rights (which he noted do not actually have rights) was welcome, as were his arguments about the environment (which he said should be governed by property rights which would prevent pollution better than current regulation.)

His notions on marriage and morality are likewise non-interventionist. It is more Christian, I think, than the shrieky attempts by his rivals to push their beliefs on everyone else through the long arm of the law. Morality is built by communities and families and harbored in the human heart. The state cannot enforce it, only nudge us in the right direction by first doing no harm.

from the second link. I absolutely love that Ron Paul just comes out and says Michelle Bachmann hates Muslims. In Kain's third link, he musters some mighty moral clarity and defends his endorsement over the protestations and condemnations of those concerned about the "racist newsletter":

Has Paul espoused any of those views himself? Not that I can tell. Do his preferred policies lead as much killing as the preferred policies of Obama or Romney or any of the other candidates currently swarming about? No, they don’t. Do you think the children we blow to shreds with our aerial drones care if Ron Paul’s associates published a racist newsletter in the 90′s or do you think they care more about being blown to shreds?

Paul obviously should not have allowed things like that to be published under his name and I completely and utterly condemn that newsletter and those behind it. It’s just not as big a deal to me as the aforementioned wars and assassinations under this president.

What’s more important to your idealism – words or bombs? What is more liberal? What is more progressive?

I see it as a matter of life and death. I know you see it as a matter of Your Team vs. The Others. But that’s just not enough for me.

Now, as our President might say, Let me be clear. There really appears to be some nasty stuff in those newsletters. Here is the Weekly Standard:

Though particular articles rarely carried a byline, the vast majority were written in the first person, while the title of the newsletter, in its various iterations, always featured Paul’s name: Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Political Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report, and the Ron Paul Investment Letter. What I found was unpleasant.

“Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks,” read a typical article from the June 1992 “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism,” a supplement to the Ron Paul Political Report. Racial apocalypse was the most persistent theme of the newsletters; a 1990 issue warned of “The Coming Race War,” and an article the following year about disturbances in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was entitled “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” Paul alleged that Martin Luther King Jr., “the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,” had also “seduced underage girls and boys.” The man who would later proclaim King a “hero” attacked Ronald Reagan for signing legislation creating the federal holiday in his name, complaining, “We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.” 

No conspiracy theory was too outlandish for Paul’s endorsement. One newsletter reported on the heretofore unknown phenomenon of “Needlin’,” in which “gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14” roamed the streets of New York and injected white women with possibly HIV-infected syringes. Another newsletter warned that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” a strange claim for a physician to make.

Does Ron Paul have racist, far-right inclinations? I have no idea. He certainly hasn't employed racist or particularly far-right rhetoric in either of the last two of his presidential campaigns, that I have seen. I find it exceedingly hard to believe that as president he would even try to dismantle civil rights laws, let alone succeed. That really doesn't appear to be where his passions lie. No, what gets him really riled up are military aggression, fiat currency, and the authoritarian power grabs by the Bush and Obama administrations.

While I have a hard time thinking Ron Paul as president would disenfranchise minorities or reinstitute segregation, I am under no delusion that a Paul administration would be at all enlightened. He is a Creationist and is opposed to abortion. With his deeply held belief that all of our economic woes can be laid at the feet of central banking and can be (easily!) explained by Austrian economics (an obscure, heterodox school of economics), he has all the markings of a true believer. While I am happy we could trust him not to bomb Iran under just about any circumstances, I am wary how adamantly convinced he is that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon (I think the evidence is at least mixed). The world is a complex place and I think it is quite dangerous for the world's most powerful person to be a fundamentalist of any kind, and I think this is a fair characterization of Paul's intellectual curiosity and flexibility.

Maybe through some second-order effects (e.g., sparking a violent populist movement because of economic blunders) Paul could cause more damage than a status quo president like Obama or Romney. I doubt it. But luckily for all of us we don't have to worry about that yet. The primary benefit of  nominating Paul as the Republican candidate is the issues that he would bring to the nation's attention. We have already seen this in the Republican primary race. Minus Paul, who on the national stage would be defending civil liberties? Who would be arguing for the reestablishment of the 4th Amendment guarantees of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures? Who would be arguing for the rights of terrorism suspects to fair and speedy trials by jury? Who would be arguing that perhaps the president of of the US should not have the power to order the assassinations of American citizens (or anyone else, for that matter)? Who would be suggesting that killing foreigners with flying death robots is not the right thing to do?

All civil libertarians already have Ron Paul to thank for bringing these concerns into American dinner conversations. A Paul nomination would only amplify these issues and we would still have a few months to change our minds. The opportunity to bring civil liberties back into the national spotlight should be enough for all sorts of liberals to change their party identification to Republican and vote in their primaries for Paul, even if their ultimate priorities are economic or otherwise. Hold your noses if you must.

Cultural imperialism (as it were)

I have become obsessed with the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks. For those unfamiliar, the books tell stories (unrelated, so it's not a proper "series" and it doesn't matter in which order you read them) about a mostly humanoid galactic civilization called the Culture that is pretty well described as a post-scarcity, hedonistic utopia. And really a utopia, not a dystopia; they actually *have* figured everything out and are pretty much all happy. So of course it sounds like a boring setting for stories (where's the conflict?), except that all of the stories deal with the Culture's interactions with other civilizations, usually lower on the technological ladder.

If I have one complaint about the books, it is ideological. Banks is a bit of a technosocialist. Money and exchange are all outdated concepts, and the reason the Culture has so many nice things is because they are 'ruled' by benevolent artificial intelligences, called Minds. I'm a fan of artificial intelligence so I have no problem with that, but the Culture appears to have solved all its problems by brute force figuring by the Minds. There is no appreciation evident in Banks' writing (at least in the five books I've read so far) for any sort of bottom-up, organic processes.

The aspect of the books that I really want to bring up is related, though my complaint doesn't really extend to it. For someone so far to the political left, Banks displays a very Whiggish attitude. As I mentioned above, the conflicts in the book revolve around interactions with less-developed peoples. And these interactions are usually interventions to liberate people from illiberal and inegalitarian regimes.

To be fair, Banks isn't totally unaware of how this comes off, and he often addresses these criticisms of the Culture in the books. He at least pays lip service to the idea that unintended consequences are a threat in these interventions. But the Minds have almost always got their sums right. While it might be more interesting if, every once in a while, the Minds forgot to carry a 1 and the Culture damaged their intended beneficiaries, his world is interesting for coloring a thought experiment. If we ever live in a society that to a large degree has solved all its problems, and really does represent a flourishing way forward for all peoples, then how would our foreign policy change? If the United States, for example, were everything its more ardent admirers like to think it is, then would it be justified in militarily interfering in the internal affairs of other nations on humanitarian grounds, and to spread our spectacularly successful way of life?

To be sure, the assumption is rather hard to swallow. "Suppose we have solved essentially all of our own social problems and have vast wealth to spare, and further that we have a very good track record of nearly bloodless humanitarian intervention and nation building", where "essentially", "vast", "very good", and "nearly" are parameters that can be adjusted for the realism of the thought experiment. For appropriate values, I think interference would be perfectly okay and indeed it would be hard to argue that non-interference would even be ethical. Cultural- or moral-relativistic arguments that other peoples should be able to construct their own societies as they see fit without the interference of arrogant (call them "Western") outsiders would seem to be laughable collectivistic caricature. The thought experiment almost morphs into the Problem of Evil in theism. As far as this atheist has ever seen, there is no satisfactory answer to the trilemma of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent god so long as evil and suffering exist in the world. Replace "god" with "advanced society" and the only difference is that the advanced society didn't actually create its potential beneficiaries. But that fact doesn't even enter into the moral calculus as far as I am concerned. Fun to think about, anyway. Back to the real world of suffering and limited knowledge ...

school vouchers and the separation of church and state

I was surprised to find that some atheist activists get riled up over school vouchers. Hemant Mehta lays the issue out:

There’s one main reason church/state separation advocates don’t support school vouchers: It would allow parents to send their kids to religious schools on the taxpayer dime. (Want a second reason? The private schools also wouldn’t be held to the same accountability standards as the public schools.)
...
Separation of church and state means that tax money cannot be used to fund one particular faith (or an “atheist school,” whatever that is) over another.

I think this is misguided. My libertarian instincts nudge me to view voucher programs favorably, because it seems to preserve the most choice for families, given mandatory, publicly funded education. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I'd like to set that aside the policy merits for now. Do publicly funded school vouchers violate the separation of church and state?

I think the answer is no. Okay, under a school voucher regime, public money indeed finds itself going into the coffers of religious institutions operating schools. But the state is in no way respecting the establishment of any one religion over another, or over non-religion. In principle, the state is essentially doing nothing other than giving each student a backpack full of money and telling them to go get educated with it. It would be a different story if every student was given a voucher and only religious schools were on offer, but that isn't the case.

Imagine a church that decided to operate something like a health maintenance organization. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that the federal government decided to mandate the private purchase of health insurance but also subsidized that purchase. Would that also be violating the separation of church and state?

Is the Earned Income Tax Credit a violation of the Establishment Clause because some people are going to tithe or pay for vacation bible school with their tax rebates?

I suspect most atheists are opposed to school vouchers because most atheists are liberals and the school voucher idea is a darling of conservatives and libertarians. And that's fair enough. But the argument from church/state separation is weak at best, and it should not be a priority for atheist activists.

never a better time to vote Republican

I would love to see civil libertarian Democrats mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012 and have argued for as much previously. Conor Friedersdorf inspired the post behind that link and he's now offered a twist to the idea: Democrats and independents who are concerned about civil liberties should register as Republicans and vote in the Republican primary.

To get it out of the way first, this will not happen for the same reason that no primary challenge will materialize. If there were enough voters out there hot and bothered enough over civil liberties to make a convincing primary challenge, then we would probably already have more civil libertarians in positions of power.

That said, this is a clever idea. The absolute worst that can happen is that the least dissatisfying of all the Republicans wins, and there is no danger of destabilizing the Democratic party (for those who think that is a bad thing). As Friedersdorf argues, there's really only an upside here:

At this point, Obama is effectively going to run unopposed in the Democratic primary. He'll be the general election candidate regardless. A protest movement that used the GOP primary as its vehicle would, at worst, fizzle out with no real effect. If it succeeded in getting Johnson even a bit more attention, there would be two voices, Johnson and Ron Paul, speaking out in favor of shrinking the military, ending the drug war, and protecting civil liberties; they'd give voice to an actual marginalized constituency on the right that the left should want to see better represented; in the unlikely event that elevating Johnson succeeded wildly, and he won the GOP nomination, the left would have dodged the possibility of President Perry or Cain; Obama would be no less likely to win the general election; and to do so, he'd be forced to move toward the civil libertarians on issues like drugs, war, and homeland security policies, rather than moving right. Much the same logic applies to Roemer. Elevating him would inject into the campaign more talk about the capture of government by various moneyed special interests.

This has an advantage over mounting a primary challenge in that there's no need to start from scratch. Candidates have already surfaced in the Republican primary who are well to the left of Obama in civil liberties. The hardest part is already done!

One disadvantage that Friedersdorf doesn't mention is that there are more races next November than just the presidential race. Voters have the most sway in local elections. If a Democrat switches to Republican on a pie-in-the-sky attempt to sway a national election, then she may lose the chance to vote in a Democrats-only race closer to home. Of course, no one's vote is going to make a difference, one's party identification can remain secret, and there's nothing to stop a RINO (really!) from campaigning for their favorite Democrats.

My favorite aspect of this stratagem is that if it became a habit, if enough people regularly switched parties every election cycle, then that would represent a real assault on the two party duopoly, which would benefit everyone.

a conservative argument for immigration

Last week Matt Yglesias suggestively alluded to a "national greatness" case for more immigration. This, or at least a more generally conservative case for increased immigration is something I've wanted to write for a while. My own passion for removing barriers to migration come from the more bleeding heart libertarian concerns of 1) greater personal liberty for migrants and natives who would like to peacefully interact with those migrants and 2) the trillions of dollars of potential poverty alleviation. So take this in the spirit of a semi-Ideological Turing test, if you will. I say "semi" because I'm just offering different arguments for a policy I do support, but still, I want to get the motivations roughly right.

Yglesias presents this map of world population density, noting that India and China have a lot of people and they're getting richer all the time. That means that in a short while their economies will dwarf that of the United States. To wax Hegelian, this means India and China will dominate the world historical stage; the story of world history will be the stories of India and China, for better or worse. This is the national greatness case for greater immigration: keep birth rates at or above the replacement rate and throw open the gates to increase the number of Americans. A nation of one billion Americans, with our head start in technology and productivity, can balance the rising powers in the east. We can then extend (what we like to think of as) our historically benevolent influence on world affairs well into the foreseeable future.

The skeptical conservative might balk at this, suggesting that opening up the gates to a bunch of Chinese is not a good way to curb China's relative influence in the world. I suppose conquest of a democratic state through immigration is possible, but it is hardly a plausible in the light of America's history. America has had for long stretches effectively open borders, and in every case incoming immigrant communities have assimilated--learned English and adopted American institutions and culture in just a couple generations. The conservative spin I suggest is this: immigration is a way of making more Americans. Few people worry now about the fate of the Republic in the hands of swarms of Italians or Irish or Germans or Japanese now. This isn't because those populations were successfully got rid of; it is because they are Americans now. For the sake of the paranoid conservative, an open immigration policy can be combined with stricter assimilation requirements as well.

In principle this applies to Europe as well. While EU enlargement isn't big on anyone's agenda at the moment, one can view admission of new nations into the EU as a way of wrapping those nations within the customs and institutions of the Europe. My impression is that much of the opposition to allowing, say, Turkey into the EU comes from fears that teeming Muslim Turks will threaten the liberal, secular society the western European nations have fashioned for themselves. But, as in the case of US immigration (or for that matter a North American economic union), the current EU nations have a better bargaining position and are more likely to make Turkey more secular and more liberal than vice versa.