The cultural contradictions of fusionism

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, November 22, 2010 - 7:30 PM Share

There was something about the TSA body scans/patdowns mass elite backlash that I agreed with on the specifics but found vaguely disconcerting for some reason.

In this post, Tyler Cowen goes a long way towards explaining those reasons.  His glosing paragraphs:

The funny thing is this: when Americans insist on total liberty against external molestation, it motivates both good responses and bad ones.  It supports a libertarian desire for freedom against government abuse, but the same sentiments generate a lot of anti-liberal policies when it comes to immigration, foreign policy, torture, rendition, attitudes toward Muslims, executive power, and most generally treatment of "others."  An insistence on zero molestation, zero risk, isn't as pro-liberty as it appears in the isolated context of pat-downs.  It leads us to impose a lot of costs on others, usually without thinking much about their rights.

The issue reminds me of the taxation and spending debates; many Americans want low taxes and high government spending, forever.  For airline security, at times we want to treat it as a matter of mere law enforcement, to be handled by others, and one which should not inconvenience our daily lives or infringe on our rights.  At the same time, so many Americans view airline security as a vital matter of foreign policy and indeed as part of a war.  We own and promote this view and yet we are outraged when asked to behave as one might be expected to in a theater of war.  

The main danger to liberty here is not the TSA but rather a set of American attitudes which, at the same time, take our current "war" both far too seriously and also not nearly seriously enough.

Overall, I'd like to see less posturing in these debates and more Thucydides.

Amen.

EXPLORE:POLITICS, HOMELAND SECURITY, PUBLIC OPINION, UNITED STATES
 

APPALLED MODERATE

8:53 PM ET

November 22, 2010

The Outrage Caused By Administrative Fiat

This issue has been demagogued for sure. But what do you expect? There was no real discussion of hightened security at the airports over the past few months in the public sphere. There was no congressional act changing the security procedure. I'm sure there was an announcement of changed standards by the TSA, and notice and comments by the airline industry some time during the year. (That probably would have been required by the Administrative Procedures Act.) But the traveling public had no idea what was going on. (This is different than the little container thing, which got a lot of news coverage at the time.)

So, basically, you have a bureaucracy taking a significant, seemingly unilateral action which ends up surprising a lot of people. And they do what people do now -- post their grievances to YouTtube. More Joe the Plumber than Cicero, but who speaks Latin nowadays?

I think that people think their government is imposing on them and ignoring them. And, given the Bush record of wars without much justification and Obama's record of fixing issues folks weren't all that excited about fixing (to the exclusion of other things they were more interested in), they have reason. The people are quite happy to have the elites running things if it looks like they are at least somewhat it sync with the wants of flyover country. But it seems an awful long time (the Clinton of 1995-6) since we've had that.

There are dangers to the uncivil tone that seems endemic to FoxTalkMSNBCBlogRadio. But they seem secondary t the dangers of elites which have become awfully distinct in viewpoints and outlook from the rest of the country.

 

DRLAKE777

11:49 PM ET

November 22, 2010

I'd be happy to accept more

I'd be happy to accept more risk for less molestation myself. There are no indications that TSA security measures have prevented or stopped even one terrorist since 9/11. You'd think if they were successful at least one terrorist would have been caught by them, but it hasn't happened.

In exchange for this apparent lack of performance, some 750 million annual air travelers are inconvenienced, their time is wasted, and their privacy is violated. Assume for a minute that the increased security measures put into place since 9/11 only add 5 minutes to the average time to go through security. That would mean the cost to travelers is 3.75 billion minutes, which is a little over 7000 years of time wasted, or around 90 American lifetimes pissed away due to security measures PER YEAR. How many lives have been saved by doing this? I don't know, but the complete lack of any record of actual success indicates it is probably a bit less than that.

 

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Read More