When Do People Care About Civil Liberties? When Their Team Doesn’t Run the Federal Government, That’s When

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When Do People Care About Civil Liberties? When Their Team Doesn’t Run the Federal Government, That’s When

Ross
Douthat had a timely
column in yesterday’s New York Times on the warped
perceptions of “the partisan mind,” a concept that
non-Republican/Democrat libertarians are all too familiar with. Key
passage:

In the 1990s, many Democrats embraced Bill Clinton’s wars of
choice in the Balkans and accepted his encroachments on civil
liberties following the Oklahoma City bombing, while many
Republicans tilted noninterventionist and libertarian. If Al Gore
had been president on 9/11, this pattern might have persisted, with
conservatives resisting the Patriot Act the way they’ve rallied
against the T.S.A.’s Rapiscan technology, and Vice President Joe
Lieberman prodding his fellow Democrats in a more Cheney-esque
direction on detainee policy.

But because a Republican was president instead, conservative
partisans suppressed their libertarian impulses and accepted the
logic of an open-ended war on terror, while Democratic partisans
took turns accusing the Bush administration of shredding the
Constitution.

Now that a Democrat is in the White House, the pendulum is
swinging back. In 2006,
Gallup asked the public whether the government posed an
“immediate threat” to Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans
agreed, versus 57 percent of Democrats. In 2010, they asked again.
This time, 21 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 66
percent of Republicans.

Jesse Walker talked about that Gallup poll last
month.

…

Daniel J. SmithOloffson Weaver Fellow of Political Economy
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Email: smith.dan.j
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com
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CES | Centre for European Studies | Thinking Europe

http://www.thinkingeurope.eu/content.php?hmID=20&smID=34&ssmID=196

Daniel J. Smith
Oloffson Weaver Fellow of Political Economy
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Email: smith.dan.j@gmail.com
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com
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Big Brother at the Airport

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Big Brother at the Airport

David Henderson has a post at Econlog about all the recent abuses at airports by TSA inspectors. In a previous post he called for abolishing the TSA.

Tyler Cowen asks if markets can solve this problem and whether Americans can shift to a more European attitude on nude bodies.

What do you think?

Daniel J. SmithOloffson Weaver Fellow of Political Economy
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Email: smith.dan.j
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com
Sent via mobile phone