I intend to look into news reports about the effects of protests against the TSA tomorrow when the smoke has cleared. Thus far, they seem disappointingly minimal.
But anyways, this is probably my last chance to link to commentary so here we go!
This is a pretty good post concerning the sudden conversion to civil libertarianism that people have experienced of late. Personally, I tend to think that libertarianism is something that happens to people: You wake up one day and discover that something you planned to do has inexplicably become remarkably onerous and/or illegal.
Or maybe some government official has decided that he wants to look in your girlfriends pants. Whatever.
However, this sort of conversion is often an extremely shallow one. It's a reaction against a personal infringement rather than a reaction against an infringement on the rights or properties of others.
Consider the overnight conversion of Charles Krauthamer from authoritarian to libertarian. Krauthamer has characterized torture as a "moral duty" in the proverbial case of the "ticking time bomb" (based on highly questionable assumptions that torture produces reliable information and is never inflicted on the innocent; never mind the case of Maher Arar). Absent a ticking bomb, he acknowledges his "tentativeness and uncertainty" about torture, not categorical opposition. But Krauthamer is suffused with moral clarity when confronted with intrusive, (painless) TSA screening procedures. "This time you have gone too far, Big Bro'," he declares, with a show of populist bravado.
What's his solution to airport security? Racial profiling. The trouble with screening procedures is "political correctness." The "profile of the airline attacker is ... universally known," Krauthamer asserts; (no tentativeness or uncertainty here). He's not a libertarian; he's a tribalist, convinced that he and others like him are imbued with rights and confident that his fellow tribesmen can recognize a threatening outsider when he crosses the threshold. The same TSA responsible for the "idiocy" of new screening procedures is apparently smart enough to recognize a terrorist by his appearance; he's not a "beltless salesman," much less a "wizened senior" (and, I guess, he is not Timothy McVeigh); he is an immediately recognizable "Nigerian Nut job." In other words,"Don't touch our junk. Touch his."
It's a generalization of course, but I think that this sort of shallow libertarianism is precisely what one sees with many in the Tea Party. Again, I can't and won't presume to speak for the movement in its entirety but it's worrisome that for all the sturm und drang over government intrusions, I have yet to hear any sort of solidarity with same-sex couples that just want to get married without interference. Or with people that want to make their own decisions over what they will or will not put into their bodies. Or with women who want to make their own family planning decisions.
The silence is telling and unfortunate.
Some time ago an author provided me with in my opinion, a rather elegant definition of his view of libertarianism. Essentially, libertarianism isn't about "don't tread on me". Libertarianism is about "don't tread on them."
So while I certainly support the Opt-Out Day protests...vociferously in fact...I feel that ideally, folks would consider that what they're ultimately protesting for is privacy and dignity. Not just for them but for everyone.
UPDATE (12/30/2010): This is really, really embarrassing and has nothing to do with the content of the post. I just happened to look over this and realized that I failed to provide a link to the source I was writing about. The text in bold was not written by me, but by someone who unfortunately did not receive proper credit. I'm working now to find the original article so I can give credit (and a link), where it's due. My apologies, it was an oversight that I unfortunately only spotted now.
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