There are a lot of way in which I think the government unjustly infringes on people’s rights. I don’t like the idea of unrestricted warrantless government surveillance. I don’t like the idea that you can lock someone up indefinitely without charge. I don’t think the government should ever, under any circumstances, be allowed to torture someone. The idea that America imprisons around 1% of its population, more than anyone else in the world, deeply bothers me.
These things however, generally don’t bother the right outside of the libertarian set–and while most Republicans like to feign libertarianism when it comes to reducing the social safety net, you can pretty much tell a libertarian from a garden variety conservative when he starts big upping secret CIA prisons and the PATRIOT Act.
That said, there is one area of government intrusion that has Republicans outraged, outraged! But it’s not any of the things I’ve mentioned above. It’s having to go through airport security:
I could go on, of course. The petty humiliations, the routine deceptions from airline employees desperate to rid themselves of troublesome travelers (“Oh, they can definitely help you at the gate!”), the stress-position seats, the ever-changing rules for what can and cannot be in your carry-on, being charged for food that the Red Cross would condemn if it were served at Gitmo: Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy.
To be fair, Goldberg says he’d gladly give up more privacy for “effective” security measures, so he’s not exactly being inconsistent. I’m just still somewhat confused at conservatives constantly comparing mundane inconveniences with say, the hardship of imprisonment. It wasn’t so long ago that you had Rush Limbaugh comparing being a Republican to being a black American living under Jim Crow, or Pete Hoekstra comparing Nancy Pelosi‘s leadership of the House to the crackdowns on protesters in Iran.
All of which reveals the underlying dynamic at play here, which is that some conservatives doesn’t have any problem with the government intruding on people’s rights as long as they perceive it as happening to someone else. Also, any minor inconvenience they face is comparable to the most dramatic historical instances of government oppression.
— A. Serwer
