During his interview with George Stephanopoulos last Sunday, Barack Obama emphasized the need to be “forward-looking” as he evaluates how to respond to the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. The underlying implication was that somehow, holding those in power accountable for authorizing torture was a form of partisan sour grapes. This has been the village consensus. It is absurd but perhaps understandable: The political press has the power to affect the course of the nation that is comparable to that of many high ranking government officials. Between their failure to forsee the disaster in Iraq, or the collapse of our economy, it’s unsurprising that the villagers would have an inordinate amount of empathy for powerful people who make terrible decisions that cost us all dearly.

It’s difficult to explain how pervasive, and how harmful, this view is. To be blunt, it is a philosophy of applying the law selectively that favors those who choose to break it from a perch of power rather than a street corner. But it has implications beyond the authorities in the White House. What appears to be the summary execution of Oscar Grant by a police officer while he was lying restrained and face down on the floor inside a San Francisco subway station is the direct fruit of America’s collective belief that the great responsibility we vest in public officials is an excuse to abuse that authority. We empathize with these people, we argue that the pressures of power mean that mistakes, even terrible ones, are the inevitable result of having a position where one has to weigh public safety against the rights of individuals.

Or at least, we would like to believe it is empathy that fuels such understanding, rather than fear.  We are not merely afraid of violence; our fear, and subsequently the extremes we accept as necessary to guarantee our “safety,” are provoked the black and brown faces that we have been conditioned to view as the source of such violence, and we are unable to disentangle the acts of an individual from the group to which he or she belongs. It is never clear that such acts make us safe, in fact they may make us less safe (certainly Americans affected by this mechanism are no safer) but they may make some people feel more safe. We simply excuse it because we’re scared.

The correct view of government power can be aptly summed up as the “Spider-Man Rule.” With great power comes great responsibility. We give our law enforcement officials a certain authority over whether we live or we die, and we expect them to use it wisely. That human frailty leads them to occasionally make mistakes is no excuse to not hold them accountable. To do so is to invite more abuse of that power. The same is true of Bush administration officials who, with authority far more vast than that of any police officer, approved the use of torture. The price of that power is the responsibility to use it wisely. The more power we give them, the more disciplined we must be in holding them accountable when they abuse it. We can expect nothing else from a society of laws. Vigilance over the behavior of the Obama administration must be stringent, partly because an unwillingness to prosecute those who have abused their power in the past can be read as an anticipation that once in power, they will be vulnerable to the same temptations. If that happens, they won’t want to be held accountable for them either.

— A. Serwer