Our founders had their flaws, and huge moral blind spots – but on liberty, they were way ahead of their time
As the 2016 presidential election comes slowly into focus, my most fervent wish is for a prominent candidate to give the following speech, or one like it:
Thank you for taking a few minutes out of your busy schedules to listen to me. I want you to do more than listen, though; I want you to hear me because nothing I talk about in this campaign is more important than what I’m going to discuss today.
The topic is liberty.
We are losing our liberty. In some cases, it’s being taken away. In others, we are giving it away. If we don’t reverse course, and soon, we will lose it entirely. And if that happens, we will lose our republic.
Liberty is our civic lifeblood. Our founders had their flaws, and huge moral blind spots. But on liberty, as it has come to be understood, they were way ahead of their time. Every American – everyone – should know by heart a quotation from before the American Revolution. It is widely attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and it goes like this: “Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
The constitution limited government’s power, by design. Its first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, are almost entirely about limiting government’s power. They are about choices.
For example, as Americans, we choose to permit even offensive speech because we know that when we protect the speech we hate, we are protecting our own free speech. We choose to make it more difficult to convict guilty people of the crimes they’ve committed, in order to protect the innocent from being convicted of crimes they did not commit. We choose to accept more inconvenience, and more risk, in order to have more liberty.
Yet too frequently in our past, and to an alarming degree today, we’ve chosen to limit liberties in order – we’ve told ourselves – to have more safety or less trouble. We’ve tended to correct our worst impulses over time, even if too late for the people whose lives have been harmed or destroyed when those impulses were the law of the land. As Martin Luther King Jr said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
No precedent
But the current threat to liberty has no precedent.
It starts with expanding and, often, unchecked executive power. Then it adds an inexorable push for total surveillance. Big Brother is expanding his reach directly, spying on our digital communications in almost every form. Cameras are capturing us on city streets, and watching where we drive, and you can be sure that Big Brother wants access to that, too. And he has has co-opted the businesses we patronize, forcing them to turn over information we thought we were sharing only with them. It is all going into massive databases.
Soon, if we don’t change course, everything will be captured and stored. Everything we do and say will be visible to government, and it will be available retrospectively when someone wants to know what we were saying or doing in the past. Even though the vast majority of people who enter public service are good and honorable, we know from history that the ones who are not will abuse their positions – and that power inevitably corrupts.
Surveillance of everyone, all the time, may – may – lessen the risk of one kind of disaster. But it guarantees another kind. We know from all kinds of research that pervasive surveillance is bad for society. It fuels distrust. It chills free speech, the foundation of liberty. Massive surveillance isn’t just un-American as a civic matter. By turning people who would be innovators into timid conformists, it is economically damaging as well.
When people say, “You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide,” ask them if it’s fine to install cameras in their homes, not just in the living room but the bedroom and bathroom. Ask them if they’d mind wearing a microphone and video camera every day, so others can check on what they’ve said and done.
You are guilty of something. I guarantee it. Lawmakers have created countless new crimes and punishments, and allowed law enforcement to extend old laws in dangerous ways. Have you ever told anything short of the absolute truth when filling out an online form to use some service? We can charge you with a felony for that. And, by the way, we don’t need to convict you at trial. If you are a target, we can ruin you financially if you try to defend yourself. This is what we expect in banana republics and police states, not here. And as the surveillance state expands, it will create more targets among people like you.
Our political leaders have made a calculation in recent years. They believe you are too frightened, too cowardly, to face the truth – and that you think liberty is much less important than temporary safety.
We are human. Terrorism unleashes our deepest fears, and our most lethal fury, even though the risk for any one of us is vanishingly low. We must challenge the fear mongers, and ourselves.
A hard truth
Here is the truth. We will be attacked again, no matter what we do to prevent it. Americans will die. Murderers like the Boston bombers will evade our best efforts at prevention. Rarely, but realistically, they will find a way to commit their crimes because in an open society we can’t possibly seal every border, building and open space; we can’t watch everyone closely enough; and we can’t track every material that someone can turn into part of a bomb. If we did that, and all the other things we’d have to do, we would become a police state.
And remember: in police states, the biggest crimes – the worst acts of terrorism – are committed by government.
Yes, we will be attacked again. No matter who is president when it happens, we will hunt down the murderers and bring them to justice.
But if I’m in the White House, we won’t give them what they want by punishing ourselves, as we did in too many ways after the horrors of 9/11. We won’t again waste thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on an unnecessary war and security measures that do little, if anything, to make us safer, but much to curb our liberty.
We will mourn our victims, rebuild what was destroyed and remember that we take some risks for our liberty. Terrorists will realize how America’s liberty and resilience is what truly makes us strong, and that they have no possible way to bring us down as a free nation.
Our immediate task is to restore the liberties we’ve lost in the past decade and more. This does not mean a unilateral disarmament in preventing terrorism and crime. It does mean putting liberty first, where it belongs.
President Obama and his team believe we are not entitled to know what our government is doing in our names and with our money. He says, “trust me”, but he doesn’t even begin to trust us. My first goal as president will be to restore that trust.
A new balance
In seeking a balance that puts liberty first, my administration will unwind the surveillance apparatus to a substantial degree. Some surveillance is necessary, to be sure. But we will have clear rules and boundaries, and we will punish those in government who go beyond them. As we have seen repeatedly in recent years, without genuine accountability, rules and laws mean nothing.
We will not turn great domestic companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft into unwilling arms of the national-security state. At the same time, we will seek to repeal laws that give domestic companies immunity from lawsuits when they break the law to violate their users’ privacy.
We will work to dismantle Washington’s culture of secrecy. We do have legitimate secrets, and we do have lethal enemies. But we will insist that every time someone classifies a document they justify it. And we will not reward government workers who unnecessarily classify what they are doing. We will need to adjust our civil service and classification laws to ensure that the entire government operates on principles of transparency.
We will immediately make public the assortment of secret laws that my predecessors have created. It should be inconceivable to have secret laws in the United States of America.
We will also work to repeal laws of all kinds that have a marginal effect on safety but a disproportionate effect on liberty. Not every problem should be a felony.
A president can begin to undo some of the damage with executive orders, and by the way he or she governs. Without the help of Congress, a beginning is as far as it will go.
The House and Senate have been handmaidens to the surveillance state, not because our representatives and senators are bad people but because they, too, are fearful – that opponents and the security-industrial profiteers will cynically, and wrongly, label them as “soft on terror”, and that you will fall for the lies. I pledge to use every ounce of influence the White House brings to the table to persuade Congress that America is better off taking some risks in order to be more free, and to challenge the cynical interests that profit from paranoia.
I also pledge this: I and my administration will never work for the defeat of a candidate, Democrat or Republican, who shares my view of liberty. We will never actively support a candidate, financially or otherwise, who does not.
Help me
I need your help. We politicians tend to follow, not lead. You can help persuade Congress that liberty should be our first duty, not an afterthought.
I don’t expect everyone to agree with what I’m saying today. But I am asking that we at least have an intelligent conversation about liberty. We need to look at what we’re doing, and what it is costing us, and compare that to what would happen if we trust liberty, and what the costs of that are likely to be. To have this conversation we will need the help of leaders at all levels of political, corporate, nonprofit, religious and educational life, and ultimately we all need to participate.
Please take some time to think about these issues – and to discuss them with your family and neighbors, in your workplace and your place of worship, in schools and bars and town meetings and everywhere else that we gather as people and citizens. I’m confident in your wisdom. Be confident in yourselves, and our future, by recognizing that we can enjoy the benefits of liberty only if we agree to take some chances.
We are stronger when we embrace liberty. Please join me in believing it, and acting on it.
Comment is free | theguardian.com America"s next president had better believe in restoring liberty | Dan Gillmor
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