Civil Liberties

One of the cases that Sam Alito ruled on as a federal judge is a perfect example of the difference in the way that liberals think versus conservatives. Atrios touches on it a bit today, in his criticism of Jonah Goldberg.

The case involved the police strip searching a 10 year old girl without a warrant, because they believed her drug dealing father had stashed drugs on her. Alito ruled that it was permissible to do so.

This centers the basic argument I make with right wingers when I engage in debate with them, and the really odd thing to me is that they just don't get it for some reason. It demonstrates clearly a way of thinking. Liberals tend to be logical and look at the big picture. Conservatives tend to be driven by emotion and their sense of "justice" and endless trust in the good behavior of government officials.

Goldberg writes:

I understand the need for following the procedural niceties, but as a plain moral common sense issue, if you are a drug dealer and keep drugs on the premises with your child, you get zero-point-zero sympathy from me if your kids are searched, warrant or no. It may be wrong for the cops to do it. But you are not a victim for choosing a life where you can rationally expect to expose your kids to far greater risks than a search by a polite cop. The kid's a victim -- of bad parents.

the real outrage is when drug dealers ensnare or otherwise put at risk their own children in order to sell drugs.

First, notice his use of the words "procedural niceties". It's not a procedural nicety, it's a law. Laws are laws and it is a crime to break the law.

Liberals consider abiding the law a moral imperative. Conservatives thus are advocating an immoral behavior in this sense, yet somehow conservatives are known as the more moral group. That is yet another of those lies that become conventional wisdom.

When looking at what Goldberg is saying, you see the emergence of both highly typical forms of thinking you see from conservatives. The first is the unlimited trust in government authority. Because Goldberg grew up in the relatively "free" United States, instead of say, the Soviet Union, he does not believe that the government can abuse it's power, nor can it be corrupt. He simply assumes that every government official with authority is going to be morally spotless. Therefore, if the official skirts the letters of the law, he is only doing it in order to ensure justice is done.

That, of course, is the fundamental thinking that lead to the rise of the Nazi's and enabled the holocaust. While it's very unlikely a similar thing could happen in the United States, there are degrees of atrocities. It doesn't have to be 6 million people that die from the culture of authority worship that conservatives have. It can be 6 people, and if you are one of those 6 people, you can squarely blame the conservative mentality for it.

The other conservative trait that Goldberg displays is emotion and singularly direct sense of justice that a drug dealer should be dealt with in whatever manner it takes to stop his illegal activity. In other words, it's okay for authorities to use illegal tactics to stop illegal activity.

What Goldberg, and conservatives in general, fail to realize is that the issue is much bigger than one case. I see time and again our favorite freeper post individual stories of crime, and he advocates extreme illegal activities because of his emotional reaction to the specific nature of the crime. What the crazy freeper in Florida, and Jonah Goldberg as well, fail to realize is that these issues affect 250 million Americans, and one specific criminal case means very little in terms of society as a whole. When they advocate for illegal means to address specific crimes, it erodes the civil liberties of 250 million people. It erodes the very fabric of our nation and it's laws. It is highly, highly immoral, and they really should be ashamed.

Once you establish the culture that it's okay in some cases to violate the law based on an individual government official's judgement, you enter the "trust us" zone. History has shown that moral perfection is impossible, but conservatives just don't get it. They assume that it will always be the bad guys that are impacted by government activities. They are wrong.

It is far more important to protect the concept of civil liberties, and legal searches and seizures, for 250 million Americans then it is to arrest and prosecute one drug dealer. Period.

It's the same exact thing with the illegal wiretaps that the NSA has been doing. Many Americans think it's okay to do them because the government is "protecting us", but what they don't realize is that they are destroying their own civil rights in the process.

Here's a great exchange between a former NSA official, and Chris Matthews from MSNBC.

MATTHEWS: We're under attack on 9-11. A couple of days after that, if I were president of the United States and somebody said we had the ability to check on all the conversations going on between here and Hamburg, Germany, where all the Al Qaeda people are, or somewhere in Saudi [Arabia], where they came from and their parents are, and we could mine some of that information by just looking for some key words like "World Trade Center" or "Pentagon," I'd do it.

TICE: Well, you'd be breaking the law.

MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well, maybe that's part of the job. We'll talk about it. We'll be right back with Russ Tice. You're watching Hardball on MSNBC.

Matthews has the typical conservative point of view here. He is saying that he trusts the government implicitly, and he thinks it's okay to violate the law in order to catch law breakers and "protect us".

And those are the two basic concepts that I don't understand in conservative thinking. Why are they so short sighted that they constantly get fixated on individual situations to the point that they cannot see the bigger impact their point of view has? Why do they implicitly trust authority figures? Was it because their fathers beat them into submission and their minds are altered by this fear and respect for authority?

Personally, I'd rather see one rapist or murderer go free then give up the civil rights of hundreds of million Americans, and millions more yet to be born. As Mr. Spock once said, "the needs of the many out weigh the needs of the few, or the one."