McElvaine’s Column

McElvaine weighs in on the NSA controversy:

“Remember when conservatives wouldn't have bought the argument that giving up freedoms is good for us?”

Now are we really giving up a freedom bequeathed to us by our forefathers to have our foreign cell phone conversations unmonitored? I don’t think that Jefferson would have automatically had a position on the issue. “Should we allow the Bey’s (that is the guy that we had our first war with, “...to the shores of Tripoli,” guy that young men with cylindrical hair cuts have been boasting about trouncing for a couple hundred years) men to send messages to the ears of people on our shores?” The question really hadn’t come up, but it is not clear what his answer would have been.

In the context of a war where the enemy targets civilians by having sleeper cells in the US who scrupulously follow our laws until they don’t , until they kill us, it may not be such a good idea to allow unfettered messaging from people we suspect of being the enemy.

At a deeper level, the tone of the statement is a bit off. Giving up freedoms is often quite a good thing, especially if it leads to an increase in other freedoms, like freedom from getting killed by a guy that was your smiling neighbor until the signal came in from his bosses.

It is the determined refusal to take the issue seriously that has given the Democrats such a bad reputation on security. To pretend that there is no question to be asked about trade-offs between liberty and safety when we are under attack by an enemy whose main tactic is to use those freedoms to engineer mass murder is just naive. Taking every procedural constraint on the government’s ability imposed by courts over the last fifty years as a “freedom” handed down from time immemorial is somewhat tendentious.