Ashcroft and the Price of Freedom
When outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft called Supreme Court rulings restricting presidential powers to deny due process rights “dangerous and constitutionally questionable,” and “profoundly disturbing,” he outlined the problem with the way this administration uses language perfectly. Ashcroft, as our highest level law-enforcement officer, was sworn to protect the people and the Constitution, not the president and his megalomaniacal grabs for power. Yet his rhetoric, in characteristic Orwellian fashion, implies the opposite of what it actually advocates.
Ashcroft’s statement revealed a complete ignorance of the Constitution and its purposes and, in particular, of the role of the court to safeguard civil liberties. A Knight Ridder story of the time quotes the ACLU’s Anthony Romero as saying that Ashcroft’s comments showed “clear disdain for the rule of law.” And he is absolutely right. Maybe the trite phrase “freedom isn’t free” is more correct than is at first clear: it has to fought for every step of the way – from threats both foreign and domestic. It’s most disturbing when that threat comes from the very top.
“Freedom isn’t free” has long bothered the philosophy student in me, not just for its obvious jingoism, but for the implied fallacious equivocation upon which it plays. We use “free” in a couple of different ways, both of which are in use in this phrase. The first, meaning political freedom, and the second, meaning “no cost” are pretty clearly different in this particular construction, so no actual fallacy takes place. But that’s not exactly how we think about it, especially in the case of that second “free.”
“Free” as in “no cost” could mean literal price. We have to pay to secure our liberty. And that much is true: we do have to pay for basic infrastructure, police, courts, defense, and, vital for a functioning democracy, education. But the word isn’t being used that way. It is being used almost exclusively to mean the cost in lives in military combat.
Arguably, that hasn’t actually been the case since World War II. The Cold War, idealistically anyway, pitted two theories of liberty against one another. And while the Soviet Union never lived up to its “workers’ paradise” ideals, the Soviets really thought early on that they were fomenting popular revolution. All of the other wars we’ve fought since WWII have been about somebody else’s freedom, and even then we as often as not were not on the side of freedom at all, as in Nicaragua. Kuwait is free from Saddam’s army, but ask Kuwaiti women if they feel free. Afghanistan is free from the Taliban, but ask them if they’re free from warlordism. Iraq may be free from the Ba’athists, but ask if they have actual self-determination. The current terrorist threat is also not really about freedom, despite Bush’s rhetoric. Al Qeada couldn’t care less about our freedom, about whether or not we watch Baywatch or wear bellyshirts or screw our secretaries on the terraces of our office parks. They only care about our policies toward the Arab world – and whether or not those involve Baywatch or bellyshirts or office debauchery.
Another way to formulate all this is to ask if there’s anything inherently pricey about freedom. If our revered national documents are any indication, the answer is a resounding “no.” The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution assume that our basic rights are “endowed by our Creator,” a part of being born homo sapiens. The price we pay for being free under that formulation is merely being human. From this point of view, it is those most directly in charge of securing and protecting the institutional safeguards of freedom that we must police most diligently. If this last election is any indication, not just Ashcroft et al. have failed to do this, but the American people themselves.