Liberals and conservatives love to accuse each other of shredding the Constitution while the other is in power. "The Pledge to America," the GOP's much maligned attempt at a governing agenda, begins by decrying "an unchecked executive, a compliant legislature, and an overreaching judiciary." What's interesting about this round of accusations from the right is that they ignore the very real abuses of power the Obama administration has carried over from the Bush administration in favor of mindless attacks on the administration's efforts to expand -- or even just maintain -- the welfare state.
James Madison wrote, "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other." During our decade-long "war" against terrorism, Americans acquiesced, fearfully, to the Bush administration's assertion of the "inherent" powers of warrantless surveillance, torture, and indefinite detention for terror suspects captured away from the battlefield.
The Obama administration has successfully expanded the scope of the surveillance state, most recently, proposing private Internet communications companies reverse engineer their systems to accommodate government snooping. It has ended -- to conservatives' great disappointment -- the practice of torture, but it has used terrorism as a rationale to propose eroding Miranda rights even as the Supreme Court chips away at them. It's even asserted the authority to kill American citizens suspected of terrorism without trial while preventing courts from adjudicating the legality of that claim by labeling the matter a state secret. The imperial executive has marched on under Obama while the liberal critics of the Bush administration have remained mostly silent.
Conservatives haven't heeded Madison's warnings about war -- they've remained fixated on the alleged tyranny of a democratically elected president and Congress pursuing a publicly predetermined domestic agenda. And they've ignored all the other ways in which government has become less accountable, and society has become less free.
Obama's attempt to appoint executive advisers, or czars, in the face of unprecedented obstruction from Republicans in the Senate was "a danger to the Constitution." The administration's attempt to extend health-care coverage through a plan modeled in part on Mitt Romney's efforts in Massachussetts was "tyranny" comparable to that which inspired the American Revolution. The financial-reform bill meant to curtail industry practices that led to the economic crisis was a "giant power grab." In May, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned that the Obama administration threatens America more than "Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did."
The rhetoric has trickled down from conservative talkers to actual candidates for public office. Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller suggested unemployment benefits were unconstitutional before admitting his wife had received them. Nevada Senate Candidate Sharron Angle gave a veiled endorsement of violent insurrection when "our government becomes tyrannical," but later conceded both she and her husband receive government-sponsored health-care coverage. In Kentucky, Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul, who refers to Medicare as "welfare," has drawn comparisons between the current deficit and the rise of Nazi Germany. For some reason, every Republican running for office in 2010 wants to sound like Ronald Reagan in 1961, when he heralded the creation of Medicare as the end of a free society.
The conventions of traditional journalism force reporters -- including cable-news hosts for whom collecting unemployment is as much of an abstraction as a terrorist attack -- to represent this kind of alarmist nonsense as part of a balanced debate between two sides. The result is a complete redefinition of "abuse of power," so that it refers almost exclusively to government intervention on behalf of people who aren't rich. In the meantime, more alarming infringements on individual liberty and assertions of executive power have been ignored, mostly because they're less likely to affect the white and wealthy. This understanding of "freedom" reached heretofore unseen levels of self-parody this week when conservatives began touting the virtues of subscription-only firefighters who watch as families' homes burn down and attacking efforts to legislate minimum standards for unscrupulous breeders who run puppy mills.
Paul offered the most coherent example of how this view of individual freedom and limited government works when he suggested that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional because it prevented businesses from discriminating on the basis of race. He called this "the hard part of freedom." The understanding of individual liberty that has emerged from the right over the past few years is one that sees the minor inconvenience of a slightly marginal higher tax rate as "tyranny" while treating the unnecessary suffering of the poor and working class as the price of a free society. The "hard part of freedom" is, predictably, the one conservatives usually imagine someone else having to face.