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I am discussing the traditional political positions on these issues with students this week. Conservatives would sacrifice liberty and equality to gain security. Liberals would sacrifice equality and security to gain liberty. Radicals would sacrifice liberty and security to gain equality.
In last November’s The Atlantic, the editors had a wide variety of authors write about the American Ideal. One of my favorites was David Foster Wallace, who wrote in Just Asking:
Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?
(This is most of his piece, with footnotes and the last paragraph removed.)
It is a worthwhile conversation to consider the trade-offs inherent in the concepts of stability, liberty and equality. We value all three, and yet all three cannot exist in their full form simultaneously. Nearly complete stability would require the arrests of millions on mere suspicion, the denial of people’s liberty without cause, in an effort to prevent death and disorder (think Nazism). Nearly complete liberty would mean no controls over human beings desire to harm and control one another, and no protection for the weak (think child labor in the Industrial Revolution). Nearly complete equality would mean depriving people of property and security in an effort to continually provide equity to all (think the values, rather than the actuality, of Marxism).
Before lauding the Patriot Act, or standing behind the President, or depriving Americans of their liberty, it is necessary to discuss these subjects so we don’t become, now or in the future, a society that deserves none of the ideals we say we value.
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