P.S. I sound ridiculous!

But suppose Reno is right in his diagnosis of the situation. Suppose that Gates did “mount an all out verbal assault based on his own presumptions about race”, and that the reason he did this is that he is “the coddled product of elite American society”, and so was outraged at the thought of a “policeman with a working class Boston accent and no advanced degrees telling him to show identification”. (Racism may be dead, but apparently elitism in America is alive and well.) Even if all of this is true, it still doesn’t follow that the policeman was without fault and that Gates owes him an apology, as Jacob Sullum rightly notes:

Notably, Crowley invited Gates to follow him, thereby setting him up for a disorderly conduct charge. “I told Gates that I was leaving his residence and that if he had any other questions regarding the matter I would speak with him outside the residence,” Crowley writes. He claims “my reason for wanting to leave the residence was that Gates was yelling very loud and the acoustics of the kitchen and foyer were making it difficult for me to transmit pertinent information to ECC or other responding units.” But instead of simply leaving, Crowley lured Gates outside, the better to create a public spectacle and “alarm” passers-by. The subtext of Crowley’s report is that he was angered and embarrassed by Gates’ “outburst” and therefore sought to create a pretext for arresting him.

The charge against Gates was dropped. But what are the odds that it would have been if Gates had not been a nationally famous scholar with many friends in high places, including the president of the United States? Instead of showing what happens to “a black man in America,” the case illustrates what can happen to anyone who makes the mistake of annoying a cop.

The crucial point here is that coddled Harvard professors are not the only ones who “pull rank”, act in ways that are “boorish and arrogant”, and use their “position[s] of superiority” to strike out at those who refuse to show them the appropriate “deference and adulation” (all those phrases are Reno’s). “The officer did what officers do”, Reno writes, “in order to assert themselves and show that they are in charge”. But perhaps he should have stuck with doing the thing that would best keep the public peace.

P.S. Will at Ordinary Gentlemen has written a couple of excellent posts on the Gates affair.

If there’s an upside to this it’s that the first generation that can’t remember a time before the Internet does seem to at least to care about civil liberties. They tend to be anti-war, anti-drug war, cognizant of and alarmed by police misconduct, and while they put too much trust in government, they do seem to be be genuinely motivated to force government transparency and accountability, two inherent Internet values. And frankly, if that motivation doesn’t fade, what they discover–either through government disclosures or through its refusal to disclose–ought to be enough to shake at least a few of them from their broader faith in the state.

But as I suggested late last year in discussing Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie’s “Libertarian Moment” cover story from Reason, even this diagnosis seems to rely on a good deal more optimism than is warranted in this instance. Most of the internet generation – and yes, that’s me – is indeed implicitly small-“l” libertarian when it comes to things like drug policy and stupid foreign wars, but the specific kinds of privilege and virtual freedom that technologies like the internet afford us can easily breed a dangerous complacency and a willingness, as I put it, to “accept an unfree world so long as we can find some freedom within it”:

A generation accustomed to carving out its own private spheres of freedom no matter the external circumstances might ultimately be one that lacks the revolutionary impulse that Gillespie and Welch assume is the natural outgrowth of a “hyper-individualized” culture. This is especially true when it comes to things like military policy and the drug war, where the worst effects of our government’s actions are borne primarily by those in society’s lower echelons: so long as no one takes serious steps toward instituting a draft or arresting a third of our high school students for drug use, you won’t find many people agitating for revolt. And it’s not that easy to start a revolution when you can’t pull away from the X-Box.

This is, of course, not all that far from the point that my friend James Poulos is making when he talks about the coming “Pink Police State”, and to be frank it scares the shit out of me. And as Radley himself has known to point out, even the “transparency and accountability” that were supposed to be the Obama administration’s calling cards have been a bit … slow to materialize, but somehow I find it hard to believe that Generation Obama is going to throw the bum out over that. There’s quite a bit more than a few of us who will need to be shaken back to reality before it begins to make a difference.

Apparently the irony in the title of this brief post — “Round Up Hate-Promoters Now, Before Any More Holocaust Museum Attacks” — is lost on its author (h/t Jack Hunter). The logic of “Isn’t it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?” is exceptionally flawed and exceptionally dangerous. (I’m fairly certain that if you replace a few words, you have the soundbite version of justifications used in the past by people with intentions less-than-innocent.)

That final line reveals a belief that hatred of a person or a group will inevitably lead to violence taken against them. (At least, for reasons which will be made clear later, I hope that this is the belief it reveals.) It is, in its way, analogous to some of the rhetorical defenses we have seen employed by torture apologists. And, as in those instances, it is simply wrong. For it to be true, every person who has ever experienced hatred toward a person or a group must have at least attempted (or, for the sake of widening the scenario, prepared to attempt) some action against that person or group. I think it safe to declare that there have been instances of bigots, racists, and hate-speech peddlers who have not acted on those opinions and feelings with intent to do harm. (If you have contrary evidence, by all means, present it.)

But what about the desire to harm to another on account of hatred? The more we broaden the language — the wider we make the net — the more we’re going to implicate. It would make sense, after all, for hatred to correlate to a hire desire to do harm to another. But if I experience an urge to break the law but do not act upon it, I haven’t broken the law. Except, apparently, in the case of racial, religious, ethnic etc. hatred against another.

To treat hatred itself or its expression in thought or word,* as the equivalent of physical violence or any other deed taken against the object of that hatred, is to conflate thought with deed. Conflation of the desire with the deed is little better, but the expectation that they ought to be treated the same is perhaps symptomatic of a flawed understanding within our culture that they are not the same.

We can praise intentions even when the deed goes awry, and this is at times a mitigating consideration, but even that word — mitigating — denotes a distinction between the two, that they are not equivalent. And it is not always mitigating to have intended good when the deed and/or its results are harmful. But intention and desire are both easier than deed. And so we begin to see a culture in which the distinction between sport and spectatorship and sport and the videogame “equivalent” give way; in which one can take pride in the upkeep of a home or yard that one pays another to keep up; and, perhaps most importantly, in which one can claim to hold a set of beliefs without the expectation that one live by them: the talk-radio host who lashes out a drug users while abusing drugs himself, the pro-choice politician who claims that abortion is a moral wrong but sees no need to work to reduce their frequency, the religious man or woman who cheats their customers or on their spouse. (Perhaps also symptomatic of the present incarnation of this manner of belief is the “easy,” feel-good religishness that tends to be labeled Moral Therapeutic Deism.)

In all of which, the intention and the desire more than make up for the failure of deed: some people, after all, are weak-willed and we would be judgmental to judge them for failing to enact those beliefs. To treat everyone fairly, we must obliterate the distinction between desire/intent/belief and deed.

And so we reach the point at which we need criminalize and round up those who hate, because their hatred — spoken or unspoken — is indistinguishable from acting out against the object(s) of that hatred.

*Here, I’m distinguishing “I hate Jews” from “Hey, kike!” Whether the latter is worthy of criminalization is a slightly different debate. (To which my answer is no.)

As Andrew noted yesterday, Obama has done a lot to defang Cheneyism; he has postponed an exit in Iraq, retained Gates, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, elevated McChrystal, kept rendition, revived military tribunals, and punted on the torture photos. So what’s left for Rove Republicans to latch onto?

Unless “defang” now means “embrace”, I’m coming up blank. Because somehow it seems to me that if your route to victory over your opponents involves abandoning your stated views and adopting instead many of the positions they’ve criticized you for failing to adopt, then any triumph you can proclaim will be a little bit pyrrhic ….

The issue is not whether torture is capable of producing results, or even the quality of those results. A million monkeys at a million waterboards will eventually produce a confessional masterpiece. Under existential threat, the argument about torture poses the question of whether to start, not when to finish. And the justification of the decision to start has been that this decision had been kept secret. For Cheney to defend his record, he must not only, like a Soloflex salesman, harp on ‘results’; he must defend the secrecy of the methods that obtained them. Secrecy was essential to results.

This reveals an uncomfortable but important truth about how our argument against our torture differs from ‘the’ argument ‘against torture’ — the ethical or theoretical argument. That latter argument can be resolved in reference to the suffering of the victim or the corruption of the perpetrator. Ours, on the other hand, is not. Even someone who justifies the suffering of our victims or the corruption of our perpetrators cannot yet be finished. They must defend the secrecy; in so doing, they must defend trusting the government of a free and equal people to violate the terms of that people’s law, custom, and mores on terms which only the government is to set and know.

E.D. Kain, on Iraq:

But that should call in to question why we are so dependent on oil to begin with, and beyond that, why we as a culture have shifted so many of our priorities to a belief in unending growth that can and should be enforced by an omnipotent military.

The problem with “the American Way Of Life is not on the table” “is not up for compromise” or some other such better phrasing that’s escaping me this morning doesn’t lie in a devotion to liberty.  But we haven’t defined The American Way Of Life as involving, to a primary degree, devotion to liberty, but to growth, the clearing of the economic elbow room in which we will then practice our liberty.  But when “growth” and “expansion” are viewed as at least as essential as liberty, when reconsidering “unending growth” is a reconsideration of The American Way Of Life even if such growth is not sustainable (except, perhaps, by force — eh, what I mean is anangkê, not bîos or hybris), then we ourselves are compelled to do the compelling.

Which is to say: anangkê esmen — we are compelled — we are required — we are constrained to this course by our choice of this course.  We clear space, ostensibly in which to grow and expand a liberty, but in reality because the past and present benefits have grown comfortable: we haven’t seen the cost, the underside; or if we have, we are less terrified by them than the the unknown nature of a different life.

And we see liberties more essential to liberty constrained, restricted, deemed inessential because they interfere with the growth which is supposed to to allow them to flourish.  Though meant as a force to expand liberty, unrestrained and unending growth (or at least the philosophy thereof) are forces of constraint on our ability to live in liberty.  Yesterday there was a girl on campus shouting very loudly that she had free copies of the Constitution for anyone who wanted them — presumably (I could be wrong) as part of those tea-party-things I’ve heard about.  I was tempted to tell her it was better late than never she’d discovered the document.

Two weeks ago (but I’m just now getting to it) Patrick Deneen helped reiterate a point that I’ve become particularly keen on over the past year or so:

My argument, in a nutshell, is that the liberal arts were based on the teaching of an older form of liberty, namely the liberty that is achieved through self-governance. Its role has been increasingly displaced with the rise of the new liberty – achieved through the new sciences – namely, the liberty from limits aimed at the fulfillment of our desires.

and

For the humanities – the older science – liberty had been understood to be the achievement of hard discipline, the learned capacity to govern appetite and desire, to tame the unlimited cravings of the will and achieve a condition of self-government. For the new science, liberty was constituted by the removal of obstacles, by the overcoming of limits, by the transformation of the world – whether the world of nature, over which humans increasingly exercised control by means of science and applied technologies, or even the nature of humanity itself, a nature that was believed to be as malleable as nature had proven to be.

Case in point, for me: Sophokles’ Antigone is just as ill-at-ease with the title character as it is with Kreon, despite the fact that she follows the laws of the gods and he refuses to, despite the fact that her individualism sits better with modern audiences than Kreon’s blind near-authoritarianism.  A polis in which there is only one vote is not a polis, Kreon Haimon [EDITED 4/15: Whoops! -- JLW] says.  And, in the eyes of the play, neither have liberty and neither is the ideal citizen.  Antigone’s interpretations of what is right, her radical freedom from any restraint, separates her from society as much as Kreon’s decrees do him — this despite the fact that she is right to offer her brother the minimal burial rites required by the gods.  One could not be free except among fellow freemen, within society.  Say what one will about the particulars, it is a liberty that requires restraint and responsibility.

Or, since we’re in the proper season for it: Pesach is a celebration of liberation from slavery.  It is a deliverance into freedom, however, that culminates with the reception of the law and the Covenant at Sinai.  Deliverance into freedom required the revelation and acceptance of responsibility.

Freedom isn’t just another word for nothing left to lose. (The word you were looking for, Mr. Kristofferson, is “desperation,” or, if you needed more syllables, “Backed up against a wall.”  Neither actually give you choice, just alternatives that you might sometimes confuse for it.)