President Woodrow Wilson pulled America into World War I based on bogus idealism and real fear-mongering. Evocations of fighting for universal freedom were quickly followed by bans on sauerkraut, beer, and teaching German in government schools. H. L. Mencken observed in 1918: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” In Mencken’s time he was often considered cynical. Subsequent developments have proven Mencken to be a prophet.

The Democratic Party relied heavily on the fear card in the 1920 presidential race. On the eve of the November vote that year Democratic presidential candidate James Cox declared: “Every traitor in America will vote tomorrow for Warren G. Harding!” Cox’s warning sought to stir memories of the “red raids” conducted in 1919 and 1920 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, during which thousands of anarchists, communists, and suspect foreigners were summarily jailed and in many cases deported. The American people rejected Cox and embraced Warren Harding’s promise of a “return to normalcy.”

President Franklin Roosevelt put “freedom from fear”atop the American political agenda in his 1941 State of the Union address. But FDR’s political legacy—especially Social Security—has institutionalized fear-mongering in presidential and congressional races. Democrats perennially portray Republicans as planning to yank life support from struggling seniors.

For almost 50 years American politicians have used television ads to spur dread, most famously in the 1964 “Daisy” ad for Lyndon Johnson’s campaign. The ad showed a young girl, in the words of Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times, “picking the petals off a daisy before the screen was overwhelmed by a nuclear explosion and then a mushroom cloud and Mr. Johnson declared, ‘These are the stakes.’” The ad did not specifically claim that Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, would annihilate the human race, but the subtle hint wafted through. Though this ad only aired once, it instantly became a legend.

Whipping up fear was the flipside of President Bill Clinton’s “feeling your pain” political style. Clinton fanned people’s fear of guns, militias, and life without medical insurance. At the same time, the Clinton administration stretched the power of government on all fronts—from concocting new prerogatives to confiscate private property to championing FBI agents’ right to shoot innocent Americans to bankrolling the militarization of local police forces. Clinton was the Nanny State champion incarnate, teaching Americans to look to government for relief from every peril of daily life—from unpasteurized cider to leaky basements. As long as the President seemed to care about average Americans, his abuses were largely forgotten. (The 1996 Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Bob Dole, also promised to provide voters with “freedom from fear” via untying “the hands of the police.”)

Fear and Bush

The 2004 race was the most fear-mongering presidential campaign in modern American history. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, George W. Bush referred to terror or terrorism 16 times. Bush reelection campaign television ads showed firemen carrying a flag-draped corpse from the rubble at Ground Zero in New York and a pack of wolves coming to attack home viewers as an announcer warned that “weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.” (One commentator suggested that the ad’s message was that voters would be eaten by wolves if John Kerry won.) Just before Election Day a senior GOP strategist told the New York Daily News that “anything that makes people nervous about their personal safety helps Bush.” People who saw terrorism as the biggest issue in the 2004 election voted for Bush by a 6 to 1 margin. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, observed that the Bush campaign was “using the fear factor almost exclusively. This is a highly researched decision with all the tools of public opinion management. It’s nothing but a reflection that it works.”

Bogus terror alerts might have made the difference in the 2004 election. Robb Willer of the Sociology and Small Groups Laboratory at Cornell University examined the relationship between 26 government-issued terror warnings reported in the Washington Post and Bush’s approval ratings. “Each terror warning from the previous week corresponded to a 2.75 point increase in the percentage of Americans expressing approval for President Bush,” Willer concluded. Bush beat Kerry by 2.4 percentage points in the popular vote. Former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge later admitted that many of the 2004 alerts were unjustified. The Cornell study also found a “halo effect”: Americans’ approval of Bush’s handling of the economy also rose immediately after the announcement of new terror warnings, Willer reported. Apparently the more terrorists were allegedly poised to attack America, the better job Bush was doing.

Voters in 2004 could choose whether they would be killed by terrorists if they voted for Kerry or whether they would be left destitute and tossed out in the street if they voted for Bush. Boston University professor Tobe Berkovitz commented to the Washington Post: “It’s not surprising that both campaigns are looking for the leverage point: scaring the hell out of the American public about what would happen if the other guy wins.” But the more an election is about fear, the more the winner will presume to be entitled to all the power he claims to need to combat the threat.

In his 2005 State of the Union address Bush declared: “We will pass along to our children all the freedoms we enjoy. And chief among them is freedom from fear.” The Founding Fathers would have derided the notion of politicians giving citizens “freedom from fear.” And they would have denounced the notion that this new-fangled freedom is superior to the freedoms the U.S. government had pledged to respect for more than 200 years.

After promising freedom from fear a politician can always invoke polls showing widespread fears to justify seizing new power. The natural result of making freedom from fear the highest freedom is that any policy that reduces fear can be portrayed as pro-freedom. Bush claimed that to keep Americans safe he had to suspend habeas corpus and detain any suspected terrorist in perpetuity based solely on his unproven assertions. Bush authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other methods of torture on detainees. He ordered the National Security Agency to launch a massive illegal wiretapping program that eavesdropped on thousands of Americans’ phone calls and emails without warrants. Yet Bush remained a great champion of freedom—at least in the eyes of his supporters.

The political mass production of insecurity is a dominant trait of our age. The easiest way for rulers to destroy the leashes the Constitution imposed on them is to make voters think they must choose: “We can obey the Constitution or we can prevent you from all being killed. What is it going to be?”

Rising fear can also undermine the freedom of speech that is a bulwark against government abuse. To the extent people desperately cling to faith in the leader to save them from all perils, they develop an intolerance to anyone who points out government follies or falsehoods. The Bush 2004 reelection campaign did all it could to fan such intolerance. Stumping around the nation for Bush, former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik told audiences in the final months of the campaign: “Political criticism is our enemy’s best friend.” As criticism is suppressed government becomes more incorrigible. Eventually the mistakes that could have been corrected cheaply early on become catastrophic national failures.

Fear and Obama

President Obama has picked up the fear-mongering relay baton with his attempts to frighten Americans about health care, global warming, economic collapse, and government shutdowns. Obama has also invoked the fear card to sanctify bombing bad guys anywhere and everywhere.

Government fear-mongering creates a downward politico-psychological spiral. The more fearful people become the more gullible they will be. British philosopher John Stuart Mill warned in 1842: “Persons of timid character are the more predisposed to believe any statement, the more it is calculated to alarm them.” It is almost irrelevant whether 10 or 20 or 30 percent of the citizenry can see through government’s fraudulent warnings. In a democracy as long as enough people can be frightened, all people can be ruled.

In the same way that some battered wives cling to their abusive husbands, the more debacles the government causes the more some voters cling to rulers. The craving for a protector drops an iron curtain around the mind, preventing a person from accepting evidence that would shred his political security blanket. In the days after the 9/11 attacks polls showed a doubling in the number of people who trusted government to “do the right thing.” The media fanned this blind faith—as if trust in government was the high road to public safety. The Bush administration exploited the trust to unleash itself at home and abroad, and the nation is still paying the costs of its post-9/11 infatuation with government.

Bogus fears can produce real servitude. The Founding Fathers expected the American people to bravely stand up for their rights if their rulers trampled the law. Citizens cannot cower on cue without forfeiting any possibility of keeping government on a leash. If this nation is to have a rebirth of liberty, it must begin with a rebirth of courage.

In 2004, three years after the Patriot Act was enacted, politicians started to worry about the rising number of Americans grumbling about government intrusions. The 9/11 Commission proposed creating “a board within the executive branch to oversee adherence to the guidelines we recommend and the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties.” Creating another office within the executive branch to report on executive branch activities was unlikely to produce anything more than extra jobs for Washington hangers-on. The White House edited the 9/11 commission’s report before it was publicly released, so the Bush team had no trouble with this toothless-tiger palliative.

In December 2004, acting on the commission’s recommendation, Congress mandated the creation of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The same law that created the oversight board also made it easier for the FBI to get eavesdropping warrants on Americans, created a new standard to make it easier to prosecute citizens who donate to foreign charities of which the U.S. government disapproves, and provided a new layer of secrecy for federal agencies.

Some congressmen hailed the board as the start of a brave new era. Things would be different since there was a new sheriff in Washington—or at least that was what people were supposed to think. The civil liberties developments in the years after the board was created offer profound lessons into how the government works.

It would have been difficult to design a better rubber stamp than the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It had no subpoena power, so it was effectively obliged to accept unsubstantiated assertions from the agencies violating privacy and liberty. The president had the right to appoint board members and could fire them any time. Bush did not appoint any experts on civil liberties; instead, the board was stacked with Republicans who formerly held government positions as enforcement zealots. And the first appointments did not occur until seven months after the law passed. The American Bar Association noted that Bush’s nominations were timed “as part of the administration’s push to encourage Congress to reauthorize provisions of the USA Patriot Act that expire within the next few months.” The oversight board supposedly guaranteed that Patriot Act powers would not be abused.

Six months after Bush stacked the board, the biggest civil liberties expose of recent decades exploded on the front page of the New York Times. The prior year, when he was running for reelection, Bush assured Americans that no wiretaps were occurring without federal court authorization. But the Times revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had conducted warrantless wiretaps on thousands of Americans based on flimsy pretexts. The Times’ James Risen reported that Bush’s “secret presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse . . . the email of millions of Americans.” The NSA’s program was quickly christened the “J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner.”

In the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights the Founding Fathers decreed that government searches must be based on probable cause and approved by a neutral magistrate. The Bush wiretapping program was based solely on the president’s edict. Shift supervisors at the National Security Agency decided which Americans got wiretapped. But a GS-13 civil servant is not constitutionally on par with a federal judge.

An Ineffective Rage

Did the existence of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board change how the wiretapping scandal played out? Not a whit. Bush seized on the Times exposé to portray himself as heroically rising above the statute book to protect the American people. A month later, Republican members of Congress gave Bush a standing ovation when he bragged about his “terrorist surveillance program” in his State of the Union address. There was more enthusiasm in Congress for prosecuting New York Times editors and reporters for treason than for prosecuting NSA officials for violating federal law.

Supporters of civil liberties rallied a few months later to try to slow the bandwagon to renew the Patriot Act. One major concern was the provision in the original Patriot Act that made it far easier for the FBI to use National Security Letters (NSLs) to compel private citizens, businesses, nonprofits, and other entities to surrender information on demand. NSLs empower the FBI to seize records that reveal “where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work,” the Washington Post noted. The FBI was issuing more than 50,000 NSLs per year.

While Bush pressured Congress to renew the Patriot Act in 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced, “The track record established over the past three years has demonstrated the effectiveness of the safeguards of civil liberties put in place when the act was passed. There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.” In reality the feds had already discovered hundreds of criminal abuses of Patriot Act powers involving FBI agents and NSLs. But the abuses were kept under wraps until after Congress renewed the Patriot Act.

A bipartisan agreement to renew the Patriot Act was finally reached, giving the White House almost everything it wanted. As part of the deal Bush administration officials agreed to provide Congress far more details on how Patriot Act powers were being used. The Justice Department would be obliged to disclose to Congress how many Americans were having their privacy violated by NSLs.

However, Bush reneged in a “signing statement” quietly released after a heavily hyped White House bill-signing ceremony. He decreed that he was entitled to deny Congress any information that would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.” Bush announced that he would interpret the law “in a manner consistent with the president’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information.”

In other words, any provision of the law that required disclosure would be presumptively null and void. The crux of the Bush administration’s “unitary executive” doctrine was that all power rests in the president and that “checks and balances” are archaic.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board had no complaint about this charade. Instead, the members belatedly and heartily endorsed the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps on Americans’ phone calls and emails.

In 2007, before the Board could issue its first annual report, White House staffers massively rewrote and censored a draft version. Lanny Davis, the sole Democratic member of the board, resigned, later protesting that “the board was logically viewed . . . as the functional equivalent of White House staff.”

Toothless Watchdog

But the mere existence of the board allowed members of Congress to pirouette as constitutional saviors. When the House passed legislation later in 2007 moving the board out of the White House and requiring Senate confirmation of its members, Rep. Carolyn Maloney proclaimed, “The American people must have trust in their government to support its tactics against terrorism, and a strong Civil Liberties Board is vital to upholding that public trust.” But the restructured board, like the original, was better designed to alleviate public fears than to restrain federal power. The “reformed” Board was given little or no power to acquire information that federal agencies chose not to give. And it is difficult to understand how requiring Senate confirmation of Board members was a silver bullet, since the Senate had given approval, retroactive or otherwise, to the Bush administration’s most controversial abuses.

The same season that Congress passed the civil liberties board reform proposal it also enacted a law requiring the Homeland Security Department’s chief privacy officer to “to report each year about Homeland Security activities that affect privacy,” the New York Times reported. The law required that “reports be submitted directly to Congress ‘without any prior comment or amendment’ by superiors at the department or the White House.” Congress passed this law because of an earlier controversy about White House censorship of the Homeland Security Department’s report on privacy violations.

Five months after the law passed, Bush covertly issued a legal opinion effectively declaring that provision null and void. Deputy assistant attorney general Steven Bradbury declared that “such interference [by Congress] is impermissible.” Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, denounced Bush’s action as “unconstitutional” and “a dictatorial, after-the-fact pronouncement by him in line with a lot of other cherry-picking he’s done on the signing statements.” But Bush’s action was largely ignored by the media. And his Civil Liberties Board certainly did not even whimper.

When Bush lagged in appointing members to the restructured board, Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, urged him in 2008 to move quickly “to preserve the public’s faith in our promise to protect their privacy and civil liberties as we work to protect the country against terrorism.” Lieberman wanted to preserve “the public’s faith” at the same time he championed “enhanced interrogation” methods and retroactive immunity for any company or person who violated Americans’ rights in the name of antiterrorism. (The Senate did not confirm any of Bush’s belated nominations.)

Change You Can Forget About

During his presidential campaign Barack Obama vigorously criticized Bush’s civil liberties abuses. Many of his supporters expected that, if elected, Obama would radically change federal policies regarding American liberty.

As of this past October, Obama had made no appointments to the oversight board. Rep. Bennie Thompson, then chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Jane Harman, then chairman of that panel’s subcommittee on intelligence, wrote Obama early last year urging him to speedily make appointments because “we believe that the Board will give an anxious public confidence that appropriate rights are respected.” Harman is best known as the sponsor of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which could have spurred massive crackdowns on libertarians, constitutionalists, and others with nonmainstream ideas.

Many newspaper editorials have also complained about Obama’s failure to stock the oversight board. But this is perhaps the most honest action the Obama administration has taken regarding civil liberties. In area after area Obama has rubber-stamped Bush-era abuses and signaled that there would be no investigation or prosecution of official wrongdoers from the previous administration. Obama is also embracing Bush-style State-secrecy doctrines that prohibit disclosure of the rationale for U.S. government-planned assassinations of Americans.

The oversight board is far more likely to induce complacency than to protect liberty. Since 9/11, trampling the Constitution is a no-fault offense. In Washington nowadays, only “extremists” believe that federal officials should be jailed for violating citizens’ privacy.

For every member of Congress such as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who vigorously and consistently opposes federal abuses, there are vanloads of congressmen cheering federal agents’ trampling the statute book in the name of public safety. The founders intended Congress to be a vigorous check on the abuses of the executive branch. However, few members of Congress have the gumption to pursue official lawbreakers or to fight to expose agencies’ crime sprees. In the 1970s, senators like Sam Ervin (D-N.C.) and Frank Church (D-Id.) spearheaded probes into executive-branch abuses, revolutionizing how Americans thought about the president, the CIA, and the FBI. Ervin and Church succeeded in part because of sheer willpower. But there is little or no such courage in Washington nowadays.

Washington vastly prefers the appearance of checks and balances to the reality of government under law. At a time when federal officials who violate Americans’ rights have nothing to fear from Uncle Sam, the existence of the oversight board is a cruel taunt to private citizens.

Perhaps the best epithet for the feds’ civil liberties record is the saying of Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” “I’m from the government, and I’m here to safeguard your privacy” is the post-9/11 version of the old joke. But American liberty cannot afford any more sham protections. Abolishing the oversight board would be the most honest step Washington has taken on civil liberties in this century.

The train from Budapest to Bucharest, Romania, was called the Orient Express. The original Orient Express began in the 1880s and connected Paris to Constantinople. The menu on the train’s first run included oysters,  turbot with green sauce, chicken “à la chasseur,” fillet of beef with “château” potatoes,  and a buffet of desserts. In the communist rendition of the Orient Express, there was no food on the train in Romania, though a few morsels may have been available in Hungary.

I had a cabin to myself as the train rolled southeast from Budapest. I had been told that if border guards found a map of Romania or any other dubious papers, I could be arrested or denied entry. So late at night, nearing the Romanian border, I studied the documents one more time, drilling into my head the things that I should be looking for. Then I tore everything up and threw it out the train window, piece by piece.

Shortly after midnight the train lumbered to a stop in Transylvania, at the Hungary-Romania border. The scene had all the ambience of the original 1932 Dracula movie. I didn’t hear wolves howling, but the mountain terrain, low-hanging fog, and military guards with German shepherds circling the train time and again sufficed.

My cabin was searched four times, with each team outdoing its predecessors. The mattresses on the bunk beds were jostled, and practically every cubic inch of space was poked or prodded.

The final inspection was supervised by a cute (by socialist standards) military officer. Perhaps the authorities thought I would confess my perfidy to the opposite sex. Nope: I was just another tourist heading to the “Paris of East Europe,” as Bucharest preened in pre-communist times. Except that there were almost zero tourists in a land renamed “the Ethiopia of Europe.” (I entered the country illegally—relying on an easily acquired tourist visa, instead of enduring the hassles and delays for a journalist visa.)

After the final search, guards bolted my cabin shut from the outside. The pseudo-luxury train had officially been converted into a traveling jail. But at least the intellectual-political virus was quarantined. My American passport had earned me special treatment. I just leaned back and counted my blessings: In Western Europe they charged double for a private cabin.

The Orient Express was no longer an express after it entered Romania, taking 13 hours to go roughly 400 miles and running far behind schedule.

Everywhere were signs of a government increasingly fearful of its people. Throughout Transylvania radio towers were surrounded by military guards and barbed wire. The train stopped at Brasov, a medieval city renamed Stalin City in 1950. A dozen years later, as friction rose with Moscow, Brasov regained its old name. Shortly before I passed through, thousands of workers responded to wage cuts by ransacking communist party offices and killing two government militia men.

Romania looked double-damned by government planning and political meddling. There were horse-drawn wagons next to spewing factories and huge apartment complexes. Many people had abandoned their slipshod cars after government sporadically banned the sale of gasoline for private vehicles.

Around nine the next morning, there was a rapping on my cabin door—like someone sending a secret message. I heard someone struggling with the bolted lock. The door popped open, and half a dozen ragtag Romanian workers poured in. They had heard there was a foreigner—perhaps an American—confined on the train. They obviously knew how to overturn the bolt that sealed the door. The workers stared at me like I was E.T., and it probably wasn’t just because of the old canvas hat I was wearing. Two of them leaned over and pawed/stroked my leather boots—eyes wide in amazement. Leather boots had apparently become the same type of luxury there that full-length mink coats were in America. Yet, in the pre-communist era, leather boots were probably routine for factory and farm workers. We communicated with simple gestures since I did not speak Romanian and they spoke no English. They seemed full of goodwill, but vanished after a few minutes—perhaps fearful of being caught talking to a foreigner.

Starved Into Submission

The workers were likely no fans of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the communist dictator who made Romania the most barbaric and repressive regime in Europe. Though Romania had been a breadbasket of Europe before World War I, food had become as rare as honest economic statistics. The communists destroyed hundreds of square miles of prime farmland to erect factories and open-pit mines. The government responded to food shortages with a publicity campaign on the danger of overeating. The government also revved up advertising in western nations touting Romania’s “world famous” weight-loss clinics.

Ceauşescu seemed determined to starve the people into submission. Romanians were forbidden to receive food shipments from foreigners. Visitors were stopped at the Romanian border and denied entry if they attempted to bring in a chocolate cake or bubble gum.

The government put almost all investments into heavy industry—the ultimate source of bragging rights for communist leaders. But roughly half of Romanian factory output was so shoddy it was ready for the junk heap as soon as it left the gate.

Romanian industry was also extremely inefficient, consuming up to five times as much energy per unit of output as western factories. The government compensated by cutting off electricity to people’s homes for up to six hours during the winter and permitting only one 25-watt light bulb per room.

The health system was collapsing, and the infant-mortality rate was so high the government refused to “register” children as being born until they survived their first month. The government also routinely cut off power to hospitals, which had caused a thousand deaths the previous winter.

The Darling of the World Bank

Yet some western experts thought Ceauşescu was the greatest thing since sliced bread. A 1979 World Bank report, the “Importance of Centralized Economic Control,” praised the Romanian regime for pursuing “policies to make better use of the population as a factor of production [by] stimulating an increase in birth rates.”

And how did the benevolent ruler do this? By prohibiting distribution of contraceptives and banning abortions. These policies turned Romania into the world capital of abandoned babies.

Finally arriving in Bucharest, I learned that the Hotel Intercontinental was the only place westerners were allowed to stay. After I checked in, a beefy thirtyish woman came up and asked in a gravely three-pack-a-day voice: “Would you like to have some company?”

I said no, and got away from her quick. The Romanian government was famous for using its intelligence agents as prostitutes. The woman had the hotel staked out, hoping to gather information from visitors or to entice them into behavior that could be videotaped and used to betray them.

I checked into my room, which looked like it was custom-designed for surveillance. I flipped on the TV set and saw choruses of peasants and workers in overalls listlessly waving flags and singing the praises of Ceauşescu, the self-proclaimed “Genius of the Carpathians,” as the camera zoomed in for close-ups of the great man’s face.

Fascinating stuff, but the plot line was a bit flat, so I sought entertainment elsewhere.

When I visit a new city I love to spend hours walking around—getting a feel for the turf. I stopped at the concierge desk at the Hilton and asked for a street map of downtown Bucharest. I figured it might have a walking guide to the Greatest Triumphs of Ceauşescu-ism within an eight-block radius of Communist Party headquarters.

The guy grimaced and eyed me like I had asked for a detonator for a bomb strapped underneath my overcoat.

“For what do you need a map?”

“Because I want to see the city’s landmarks.”

“We have no maps. If there is some place you want to go, you tell me what it is and I will tell you how to get there.”

“Where is the old part of the city?” I asked, knowing that most of it had been razed to make room for the ugliest “socialist realism” monoliths outside of North Korea.

The concierge scowled and muttered something—perhaps the Romanian slur for vexatious foreigners. My hunch was this guy didn’t make a living from tips.

On the street many people darted their eyes away—as if looking at foreigners might cause leprosy. I had heard that it was a crime for Romanians to talk to strangers. But a few people summoned up a hodgepodge of broken English, pleading for a pack of Kent cigarettes to bribe doctors to treat their sick children. The Romanian currency was practically worthless. The only things with value were western goods, like those Kents, which circulated as a black-market currency.

I stepped into the largest department store in Bucharest; it was dark, dank, and miserable. Sales clerks lounged on piles of new clothing heaped on the floor. One of the main attractions in the store: incredibly rickety baby carriages—the kind to use when you want to kill your kid and sue the pants off somebody. Except that this government never had any liability to its victims, no matter how many perished from its products or policies.

I passed by the boarded-up front door of an ancient church, standing naked amidst construction projects that had razed its surroundings. Many Romanians fretfully crossed themselves as they passed the church.

The U.S. embassy was surrounded by Romanian troops with machine guns to prevent Romanians from entering and asking for asylum.

Like other communist regimes, Romania was an economic theocracy. The government used its iron fist to make sure everything happened according to the Plan. For instance, the 1986-90 five-year plan decreed that Romanian scientists would make 4,015 discoveries, of which 2,423 would result in new products by Romanian businesses. It’s not surprising that the regime “planned” creativity, since it considered itself omniscient.

Romania was one of the World Bank’s favorite regimes, receiving more than $2 billion between 1974 and 1982. It predicted in 1979 that Romania would “continue to enjoy one of the highest growth rates among developing countries over the next decade . . . and become an industrialized economy by 1990.” But much of Romania’s apparent economic growth was the result of World Bank aid. The more handouts it gives a country, the easier it becomes to portray the nation as a success story. Then-World Bank president Robert McNamara cited Romania to tout his own “faith in the financial morality of socialist countries.”

Human Resources

The World Bank also praised the Romanian regime for its ability to “mobilize the resources” required to boost economic growth. In reality this merely meant that the government could brutalize its subjects to squeeze out “surpluses” to lavish funds on World Bank-approved industrial enterprises. Ceauşescu was doing the same thing Stalin did in the 1930s, when he starved up to ten million peasants to squeeze farmers to generate surpluses to build new factories.

The Romanian regime also “mobilized resources” by pawning its ethnic German and Jewish inhabitants. (West Germany would pay money for each ethnic German released from Romania). International agreements banned slave trading in the nineteenth century, but selling human beings in the twentieth century was okay if the receipts went for progressive purposes.

The World Bank never cut Ceauşescu off; instead, he ceased borrowing after he became convinced that western debt was a curse on his country.

As I knocked around Bucharest I assumed I was being followed. Roughly one in 15 Romanians was working as a government informant.

From my experience elsewhere in the East Bloc, I knew that pulling out a notebook set off the alarm bells. Instead, I jotted down notes on the palm of my hand. Such behavior was likely to be seen as merely weird not menacing. Single words served me as pegs to later pull up a strand of facts and thoughts.

Late the next afternoon I arrived at Bucharest’s main airport to fly to Frankfurt. I noticed that most of the businessmen ahead of me were openly giving a pack of Kents to each guard or other dreg at the four different security checkpoints.

I had bought a couple cartons of Kents before going to Romania, and I was soon passing out cigarette packs to airport guards like an old widow tossing candy to kids on Halloween.

I saw one or two German businessmen yanked aside for more invasive searches. As I passed the last checkpoint, I thanked my lucky stars that I had avoided such depredations.

That Lufthansa jet on the tarmac was the prettiest thing I had seen since the Orient Express crossed the Romanian border.

There was one graying soldier standing about 20 yards from the plane. I held up my passport, and he waved me on.

I had almost reached the gangway when I heard: HALT!

I turned and saw the guard running toward me, his submachine gun bouncing off his ample belly.

Puffing a bit, he caught up to me, grabbed my left arm, yanked it back, and pointing at my palm, demanded to know:

“WHAT IS THIS?!!!?”

I looked at my hand, then I looked at the guard.

“It’s ink.”

He paused, squinted, nodded his head knowingly, and then waved me on to the plane.

Two years later, 5,000 Romanians were killed during an uprising that overthrew the government. When Ceauşescu and his wife were summarily executed on December 25, 1989, it was probably the best Christmas present Romanians ever received.

The Friends of Leviathan are once again encouraging people to forget about freedom. In a May op-ed piece in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks announced, “The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individualfreedom. Political leaders have to also talk about . . . ‘the whole way we live our lives.’ ”

Brooks, the “liberal” media’s favorite “conservative,” has long sought to place a halo over Big Government. In 1996 he urged Americans to forget their fears of politicians and embrace “national greatness.” He proclaimed that “energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project.” Brooks’s paean to government was almost indistinguishable from a 1932 tribute by Benito Mussolini, who declared, “It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity; harmonizing their various interests through justice, and transmitting to future generations the mental conquests of science, of art, of law, of human solidarity.”

But fascist ideas are not tolerated in the United States—if they are labeled fascistic.

In last May’s article Brooks gushed over how British conservatives are placing “more emphasis on environmental issues, civility, assimilation and the moral climate.” When Brooks talks about “moral climate,” he presumably means politicians lecturing citizens about the need to act responsibly. Brooks ignores the fact that the greatest irresponsibility comes from politicians. Consider his reaction to one of the worst abuses of the Bush presidency.

Brooks was a gung-ho advocate of invading Iraq. In the days after the Abu Ghraib torture photos appeared in May 2004, he bewailed; “We were so sure we were using our might for noble purposes. . . . Far from being blinded by greed, we were blinded by idealism.” Brooks and other pundits congratulated themselves for having swallowed politicians’ hokum and leading their readers and the nation over a cliff.

His response to the torture scandal epitomizes how he wants Americans to view government. People are supposed to believe wonderful things about it. Then, when government commits atrocities, people are supposed to “move along because there is nothing to see here.” Instead, it is on to the next opportunity to put government on a pedestal and urge everyone to bow down to it.

The great political issue of our times is not liberalism versus conservatism, or capitalism versus socialism, but statism—the belief that government is inherently superior to the citizenry, that progress consists of extending the realm of compulsion, that vesting arbitrary power in government officials will make the people happy eventually. What type of entity is the state? Is it a highly efficient, purring engine, like a hovercraft sailing deftly above the lives of ordinary citizens? Or is it a lumbering giant bulldozer that rips open the soil and ends up clear-cutting the lives of people it was created to help?

The issue of government coercion has been taken off the radar screen of politically correct thought. The more government power has grown, the more unfashionable it becomes to discuss or recognize the abuses, as though it were bad form to count the dead from government interventions. There seems to be a gentleman’s agreement among many pundits and political scientists to pretend that government is something loftier than it actually is and to wear white gloves when discussing the nature of the state.

Government Without Romance

Unfortunately, individuals often are unaware of government’s true record because the media are working hand in glove with the ruling class.

Statists rely on political arithmetic that begins by erasing all of government’s abuses from the ledger. Instead, people should begin by pretending that Leviathan doesn’t exist—and then ask what politicians can do to make the masses happy.

Modern political thinking largely consists of glorifying poorly functioning political machinery—the threats, bribes, and legislative cattle prods by which some people are made to submit to other people. It is a delusion to think of the state as something loftier than all the edicts, penalties, prison sentences, and taxes it imposes.

Like Tom Sawyer persuading his friends to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence, modern politicians expect people to be grateful for the chance to pay for the fetters that government attaches to them. Even though the average family now pays more in taxes than it spends for housing, clothing, and food combined, tax burdens are not an issue for most American political commentators.

To call for government intervention is to demand that some people be given the power to compel others to submit. But coercion is a blunt instrument that produces many ill effects aside from the purported government goal. To rely on coercion to achieve progress is like relying on bulldozers and steamrollers for routine transit. The question is not whether a person can eventually reach a goal driving a steamroller, but how much damage is left in his wake and how much faster the destination could be reached without crushing everything along the way.

Americans and Washington

Many people in Washington believe that Americans are so helpless that they cannot be fulfilled unless their rulers give them a reason to live. Brooks proclaimed in 1996 that “ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington.” He did not explain where exactly in the memos, meetings, and machinations which engross the capital that “American purpose” arises. Brooks warned that Americans’ mental health depends on the feds proclaiming a purpose for the people: “Without vigorous national vision, we are plagued by anxiety and disquiet.”

Recent opinion polls show that much of the anxiety in this nation is the result of the follies and deceits of the federal government. It was government and politicians, not freedom, that failed Americans in the new century. It was not freedom that wrecked the U.S. dollar. It was not freedom that made federal spending explode. It was not freedom that spurred a foreign war that has already left tens of thousands of Americans dead and maimed, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead. It was not freedom which announced that the Constitution and the statute book no longer bind the president.

Brooks became a media darling in part because of his vehement warnings about the danger of cynicism. But it is not cynical to have more faith in freedom than in subjugation. It is not cynical to have more faith in individuals vested with rights than in bureaucrats armed with power. It is not cynical to suspect that governments which have cheated so often in the past may not be dealing straight today.

Trust no intellectual who tells you not to worry about Leviathan.

Unfortunately, this is no longer a hypothetical question. Many Americans who claim to support individual freedom also favor permitting the government to torture suspected terrorists or other purported enemies of the United States.

This controversy is reminiscent of a disagreement between the famous economists F. A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) brilliantly restated the classical warnings on Leviathan, showing the similarities in trends between Nazi Germany and Western democracies. Keynes claimed that Hayek had gone too far in his criticism because “dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.”

Many Americans have embraced Keynes’s assumption in the post-9/11 era. They have accepted that a democratic government should be permitted to unleash itself if the rulers promise to do good things. They have ignored or shrugged off the specific methods used because of their confidence that politicians “think and feel rightly.”

President George W. Bush exploited this confidence by invoking American values in response to his critics. Shortly after the Abu Ghraib prison photos were published, Bush brushed aside a question about his personal responsibility by assuring a French interviewer that “America is a great and generous and decent country.” After Amnesty International declared that the United States had become “a leading purveyor and practitioner” of torture, Bush sought to refute the charge by invoking American moral greatness: “The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world.” Much of the American media continued praising Bush as a visionary idealist long after the evidence of grave abuses had surfaced.

Usurping Law

The Bush administration’s invocation of freedom to justify its interrogation policies is premised on the assumption that the U.S. government could never be a threat to Americans’ freedom. The Founding Fathers recognized that individual liberty depends on a “government of laws, not of men.” Unfortunately, the Bush administration decided after 9/11 that the law could not be permitted to impede its war against terrorism.

Justice Department lawyers busied themselves creating legal pretexts for the President to scorn the federal Anti-Torture Act and the Geneva Conventions. A secret 2002 memo written by Justice Department official John Yoo proclaimed that “the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces. . . . [W]e will not read a criminal statute as infringing on the President’s ultimate authority in these areas.” White House counsel Alberto Gonzales publicly declared that Bush had a “commander-in-chief override.” Thus the statute book no longer applied to the nation’s Supreme Leader.

Bush and his defenders continually portray the torture scandal as problems caused by a “few bad apples” or simply the equivalent of college-fraternity hazing. In reality, the abuses ranged from the endless high-volume repetition of a “Meow Mix” cat-food commercial at Guantanamo to tearing out toenails in Afghanistan to compulsory enemas for recalcitrant prisoners to beating people to death in Iraq and kicking them to death outside Kabul to illegally sending detainees to foreign governments to be tortured by proxy and creating a system of “ghost prisoners” worthy of a banana republic. U.S. torture has been confirmed by FBI agents, former U.S. military interrogators, a Department of Defense Inspector General report, and court cases around the globe.

Presidential Supremacy

Yale law professor Jack Balkin wrote, “The President has created a new regime in which he is a law unto himself on issues of prisoner interrogations. He decides whether he has violated the laws, and he decides whether to prosecute the people he in turn urges to break the law.”

After 9/11 the CIA constructed an interrogation program by “consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods,” the New York Times noted last year. The United States had long condemned Soviet, Egyptian, and Saudi torture. But interrogation systems designed to compel victims to sign false confessions provided the model for protecting America in the new millennium. Torture regimes crafted to perpetuate repressive systems suddenly became engines of freedom—at least in the eyes of some Bush supporters.

The Justice Department produced a secret legal opinion in 2005 permitting CIA interrogators to use “combined effects” on detainees, including head slapping, simulated drownings (“waterboarding”), frigid temperatures, manacling people for many hours in stress positions, and blasting them with loud music to ensure sleep deprivation. The New York Times, which published the leaked memo, labeled it an “expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The memo signaled that the Bush administration explicitly rejected the definition of torture that had been used by the U.S. government for the previous century.

From the time when the first Abu Ghraib photographs were published, President Bush emphatically denied that the U.S. government ever used or approved of torture. But this past April, ABC News revealed that Vice President Dick Cheney and other top Bush administration officials would sit around a table in the White House and specify the precise extreme interrogation methods that would be used on Muslim detainees. ABC noted: “The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed . . . some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” Thus the number of times each prisoner could be whacked upside the head or almost drowned—or how many hours he could be shackled in a painful position—were decreed by the administration’s top officials. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was among the loudest apologists for Bush power grabs, warned, “History will not judge this kindly.” Bush later confirmed that he was aware that his top officials were dictating exactly how brutal the interrogations would become.

The torture scandal has made clear how little protection American laws provide to U.S. victims. Lawyers for four British citizens who had been locked up at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2004 sued U.S. officials, seeking damages for the illegal detention and torture they suffered. In January 2008 federal Judge Karen Henderson rejected their lawsuit, declaring that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” A federal appeals court ruled: “It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably ‘seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.” The court ruled that the officials could not be sued because they were merely carrying out their official duties. The fact that they were following Bush’s orders gave them legal immunity in American courts—a tacit revocation of the Nuremberg doctrines established in the war-crimes trials after World War II. Eric Lewis, the detainees’ lawyer, lamented, “It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when a court finds that torture is all in a day’s work for the secretary of defense and senior generals.”

In recent years, the U.S. government has appropriated the title of the Supreme Defender of World Freedom, akin to the Catholic Church’s role as the defender of the true faith in earlier centuries. During the Inquisition, torture was justified to rid the world of heresy. Bush, who promised to “rid the world of evil,” perhaps feels justified in using torture to achieve his transcendent goal.

But this is where one of the problems arises. In the days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush talked about al Qaeda as the target of U.S. efforts. The target list soon expanded to include the Taliban, the Afghan rulers who had provided sanctuary to al Qaeda. Bush later added “radicals” and “extremists” to the list of enemies. Attorney General Gonzales declared in 2006 that it is “essential that we continue to develop the tools we need to investigate . . . and prosecute those who travel down the road of radicalization.” There is nothing to constrain a politician from labeling his opponents “radicals”—as has happened repeatedly in American history.

Total Discretion in Labeling Enemies

Some people support torture because they are confident that the government will only barbarize foreigners. This was how Bush’s power to designate enemy combatants was first sold to the public—as something that would only be applied to foreign perils. But after José Padilla was arrested in Chicago in 2002, his American citizenship did not save him from brutality while incarcerated in South Carolina and elsewhere in the United States. Once the government decrees that someone has no rights, it is a small step to declare that there will be no limits on how the government treats that person.

Some Americans support torture because of their distrust or hostility to Muslims, the usual target of contemporary extreme American interrogation methods. But the government claims the right to designate as enemy combatants (and thus eligible for torture) alleged members or supporters of any designated terrorist group. Irish Americans could be at risk of torture if the feds alleged they were linked to the Real Irish Republican Army, and Jews could face similar perils if the feds alleged their connection to the Sword of David or American Friends of the United Yeshiva Movement. Human Rights Watch warned in 2005 that the government’s terrorist-group designation process has been “challenged in the courts for being vague, overbroad, and for there being no transparent criteria for listing entities on the lists or removing entities from the lists.”

Torture supposedly saves lives by providing the surest way to get the evidence of a “ticking time bomb.” There are no good verified examples of that from American experience. However, it was torture that produced “evidence” that spurred the American public to support Bush’s rush to war against Iraq. The “smoking gun” linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein came from an al Qaeda operative captured in Afghanistan, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on al-Libi’s information for his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council. However, Powell did not know that al-Libi had been tortured in Egypt—where he was “renditioned” by U.S. agents.

Had it not been for the torture of al-Libi, thousands of American soldiers might still be alive, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would not have perished in the 2003 invasion and the subsequent civil war.

Torture is not a “bleeding heart” issue; instead, it is simply a question of whether a president will have absolute power. In reality, the Bush administration’s torture policies are simply the most vivid example of its belief that the president is now permitted to do as he pleases. Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury declared in 2006: “Under the law of war, the president is always right.” Bradbury also informed a closed congressional committee in 2006 that Bush has the authority on his own to order killings of suspected terrorists within the United States. Bradbury’s assertion stirred zero controversy—despite the administration’s long record of false accusations of terrorist connections. The vast majority of people charged in federal terrorist investigations have not been convicted on terrorism charges.

To Zealously Defend the Constitution

The genius of the Founding Fathers was to recognize that the existence of perils cannot justify absolute power. The Constitution was created by a generation of men who had fought a war against the most powerful government in the world. At the same time, it was also a civil war, thanks to the pervasive Tory sympathizers in many parts of the colonies. The Constitution was not made for sunny days and smooth sailing. Instead, it was crafted for hard times, with many provisions for dealing with deadly threats to the nation’s survival. For a contemporary president to effectively claim that he can no longer be bound by the Constitution is an insult to the Founding Fathers who survived far harsher tests in their time than America did on and after 9/11.

In the era of the Founding Fathers, government was fairly simple and straightforward. But in the last 70 years government has become far more complex, powerful, and seemingly impossible to leash. Rather than a republic, we have a Leviathan Democracy. The U.S. government still has the formal trappings of the old republic—candidates, elections, congressional proceedings, judges draped in long black robes. But hollow forms offer little solace to citizens caught in bureaucratic crosshairs.

And, unfortunately, most citizens know little about the system that domineers their lives. Most Americans do not know the name of their congressman, the length of terms of House or Senate members, or what the Bill of Rights purportedly guarantees. A survey after the 2002 congressional election revealed that less than a third of Americans knew “that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives prior to the election.” Almost two-thirds of Americans cannot name a single Supreme Court justice. Almost 60 percent of Americans cannot name a single cabinet department in the federal government.

Since voters routinely do not know what their rulers are doing, those rulers cannot claim they are following the people’s will when they impose new taxes and penalties. Instead of being a triumph of the people’s will, government action becomes old-time exploitation and repression. The whole thing looks a bit unseemly, at least to those who see politics as potentially uplifting.

As polls have shown that more Americans distrust government, professors have searched for the holy grail— a way to give legitimacy to Leviathan Democracy. “Deliberative Democracy” is the latest fix from the halls of academia.

Deliberative Democracy is different things to different people—but the common thread is that we will gather and be coached on how to discuss politics. Supposedly, if citizens meet and use “public reason” to deliberate on the major issues of the day, government policies will achieve new legitimacy and citizens will again trust Washington .

Deliberative Democracy is a favorite of Ivy League professors and editorial writers. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, is hailed as a visionary for invoking Deliberative Democracy. In his latest bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, Obama declared that all the Constitution’s “elaborate machinery—its separation of powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights—are designed to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy,’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view and building shifting alliances of consent.”

In one sense, Obama’s comment is typical of the rhetorical clouds that blanket the landscape when Deliberative Democracy is raised. His comment has little or nothing to do with how government works in the real world. Many citizens don’t test their views against external reality, and most people don’t go beyond calling a talk radio show and shouting into the phone to persuade others of their point of view.

In their 1996 book, Democracy and Disagreement, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson declared that the core of modern democracy should consist of lofty debates about issues such as whether abortion should be legal, whether welfare should be provided, and whether racial hiring quotas should be imposed. According to Gutmann and Thompson, “Of the challenges that American democracy faces today, none is more formidable than the problem of moral disagreement.” Gay marriage is perhaps the preeminent contemporary issue for Deliberative-Democracy advocates. Discussion cures all: “Deliberation is not only a means to an end, but also a means for deciding what means are morally required to pursue our common ends.”

Writing in 1993, Gutmann, now president of the University of Pennsylvania, declared, “Deliberative democracy legitimates the collective judgment resulting from deliberative procedures.” Gutmann and Thompson propose that citizens should agree to be bound by certain deliberative principles, which, they suggest, “would promote extensive moral argument about the merits of public policies in public forums, with the aim of reaching provisional moral agreement and maintaining mutual respect.”

“Public reason” is the key to Deliberative Democracy. What is public reason? Whatever the professors say it is. Professors “explicate” public reason, with results akin to an Iraqi sandstorm. University of Virginia law professor Micah Schwartzman, in his article “The Completeness of Public Reason,” revealed: “The purpose of public reason is not to end reasonable disagreement. Rather, it is to provide a suitable framework of values and principles within which citizens may resolve their moral and political differences.” Schwartzman stressed that “the indeterminacy of public reason is much less common than its inconclusiveness . . . and there are second-order decision-making strategies that may enable citizens to cope with cases of indeterminacy.”

Professor Fred Frohock, author of Public Reason: Mediated Authority in the Liberal State, proffered a different vision of public reason, stressing “the redemptive powers of uncoerced dialogue on both subjects and participants . . . where the norms of self governance are in the mediated speech acts of public reason rather than in a republican sense of common substantive values and ideals [are] a powerful force to unify persons. This force can make whole the citizens of a liberal democracy. . . . The final magic of establishing a set of processes for resolving differences among individuals and groups may be that the effort can yield a political community with benign rather than malicious powers of union.”

Thomas Jefferson warned, “In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” But the Constitution has as much restraining effect on politicians these days as Miss Manners’ book of etiquette has on a drunken football fan.

And what do the professors propose in lieu of a Constitution?

The “magic” of a “set of processes.” Will repeating “magic” formulas be like waving a magic wand over the rump of Leviathan Democracy?

The doctrine of “public reason” provides a pretext for professors to wag their fingers at average citizens and chastise them for “not reasoning right.” The fact that average citizens often reason badly about politics is no proof that professors reason wisely.

Some Deliberative-Democracy books and articles read like medieval scholastic tracts compared to the lucidity of the Federalist Papers. What profound guidance can we expect from professors whose political experience may be limited to clashes in the faculty senate over the ratio of male-to-female bathroom stalls in a new campus office building?

The Fatal Good-Faith Assumption

Deliberative-Democracy advocates stress the need to assume good motives and good faith in deliberations about government. People are supposed to begin by assuming that politicians are honest and benevolent, and then discuss how much additional power they should receive to improve other people’s lives.

To assume that politicians are acting and talking in good faith is to assume that they pose little or no peril to citizens. The Founding Fathers would have burst out laughing at such an absurd notion. Jefferson observed in 1820, “Whenever a man casts a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” Citizens are somehow obliged to presume far more good faith in politicians than the government shows in how it treats citizens.

Political scientists almost always understate the perfidy of politicians. It is their occupational blindness, the pervasive error that allows them to masquerade as scientists and not as accomplices. Deliberative Democracy suffers from a white-gloves mentality. But the more important preserving propriety becomes, the easier it becomes for politicians to bury the truth.

Advocates of Deliberative Democracy sound at times as if the citizen discussions would be free-range. But a closer reading of their recommendations shows that professors or their graduate assistants would be waiting to blow their whistle at any comment or question they considered indecorous. “We don’t go there” would be the response time and again to citizens complaining about government abuses.

How would a topic like Waco be properly discussed in a Deliberative-Democracy setting?

“Given that we all know that the attorney general loves children . . .

“Given that the FBI are the experts in hostage rescue . . .

“Given that guns are very dangerous except when government agents are pointing them . . .

“What lessons can we draw when people disobey the government and commit mass suicide? And how should we respond to the threats of cultists?”

The “correct” answer would be to boost the FBI budget (which is exactly what Congress did after the April 1993 debacle). The vast majority of political scientists and “public intellectuals” had no criticism of federal action at Waco. This was a problem not of democracy but of disobedience.

And how would a right-reasoning deliberation on the IRS proceed? Can someone say taxation is theft? That would certainly ruin the evening. Instead, the group leader would guide the discussion to how reforms in the Internal Revenue code can reduce the terrible disparity between the rich and the poor. Perhaps there would be a set of questions pre-approved by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

From Social Security to farm subsidies to taxation, the U.S. government has grossly and intentionally misled the American people time and again. George Washington University history professor Leo Ribuffo noted in 1998, “Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve established almost a common-law right to do so.” Unfortunately, most political scientists are as nonchalant about government dishonesty as is the White House press corps. But no amount of deliberation can substitute for the truth.

If people cannot say that politicians or the government is lying, then “deliberations” merely make them complicit in whatever frauds their rulers perpetrate. An assumption of “good faith” is simply the triumph of hope over experience. And why would politicians suddenly cease lying because citizens are deliberating?

Another Full-Employment Scheme

Professors would set up the rules, and anyone who breached them would be tarred as unreasonable, if not undemocratic. As Harvard professor Peter Berkowitz commented, “Since it shifts power from the people to the best deliberators among them, deliberative democracy . . . is, in effect, an aristocracy of intellectuals. In practice, power is likely to flow to the deans and the directors, the professors and the pundits, and all those who . . . can persuade others of their prowess in high deliberative arts.”

Yet the political scientists who would ride shotgun on citizens’ deliberations have little or no understanding of the vast majority of U.S. government interventions.

Ask the Deliberative-Democracy advocates to explain how the cotton-subsidy program works, and the result will almost surely be an awkward silence, perhaps accompanied by some paper shuffling.

Ask them the rationale for the Small Business Administration’s showering money on politically connected wheelers-dealers, and they would probably offer something that a first-year economics student could shred in a New York minute.

Ask them why the U.S. government continues giving foreign aid when studies prove that government-to-government handouts breed corruption and oppression, and their eyes may glaze over—until they recite some phrases about the duty to help humanity or similar bunkum.

But mastery of political-science jargon is all the experts need—as if the latest phrases were the same as a mystic incantation that permits them to see into the soul of the body politic.

Deliberative Democracy would be a No Political Scientist Left Behind Act. The Deliberative-Democracy fad is a reminder of the circular nature of much of political science. Someone comes up with a phrase—others watch and see that it “flies”—and then the race is on to milk the slogan for as many journal articles and books as possible—to use it to snare funding for conferences and, ideally, even for research institutes dedicated to the notion.

Deliberative Democracy is a home run on all counts. The 2005 conference of the American Political Science Association featured presentations on “The Role of Empathy in Deliberative Democracy,” “Why Deliberation? Three Fallacies of Aggregative Democracy and Efficiency,” and “Emotions and Deliberative Democracy.” Academic centers for hyping Deliberative Democracy are spreading like crabgrass, including the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University, Carnegie Mellon University ‘s Southwestern Pennsylvania Program for Deliberative Democracy, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, Res Publica (“a community of public sector professionals dedicated to promoting good governance, civic virtue and deliberative democracy”). The boom is also spurring derivatives—including jumbo-sized studies on “discursive democracy,” “decisionist democracy,” “deliberational democracy” ad nauseam.

Britain has gone far further along the Deliberative-Democracy path than has the United States. Though Britain has no Constitution or Bill of Rights, the government wants to make people feel they are making the decisions—or at least approving what the government has done. Foreign Minister Jack Straw bragged last year: “We have pioneered deliberative democracy within government—and found the public crying out for more.”

In January many Brits were outraged after the government announced plans to allow its agencies to easily transfer confidential personal data on citizens among themselves to “improve the efficiency of public services and make life easier for the public,” as the Financial Times reported. Responding to denunciations of Big Brotherism, Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the creation of “citizens’ panels” to discuss the proposal. The Financial Times noted, “The government is hoping that its ‘citizens’ forum’ will see the common sense of its data-sharing project, rather than worry about the civil liberties implications, and thereby confer some legitimacy on it.” And who will likely control the information the citizens’ forum uses to judge the plan? The same government agencies doing the spying.

The British government can surveil almost whomever it pleases. At the same time, the government uses the Official Secrets Act to prohibit citizens from learning what the government is doing. (Several British government officials have been threatened with prosecution for leaks that revealed government falsehoods about the Iraq war, as well as President Bush’s suggestion to bomb Al Jazeera television headquarters in Doha.) The British government could even wiretap the members of the panels to find out who fed them information exposing government falsehoods.

Deliberative Democracy in America

Some advocates assume that deliberation by itself is ennobling. But if deliberation was actually a panacea, then Congress would not be so contemptible. Deliberative Democracy works badly in places where people lavishly pay themselves to deliberate.

“Mutual respect” is one of the most common themes that professors would require citizens to show in deliberations. But what about the politicians? Each political party has rightfully condemned the other for severe abuses of fair play.

In 2005 the Democratic members of the House Rules Committee issued a report entitled, “Broken Promises: The Death of Deliberative Democracy.” They condemned the Republican majority for concocting rules that “severely restrict or sometimes even totally block the minority’s ability to debate or amend” major legislation. The report condemned the GOP leadership for “stifling deliberation and quashing dissent.” Then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi declared that “the House Republican leadership is working feverishly to undermine democracy here at home.”

The Democrats were treading hallowed ground. A dozen years earlier, House Republicans issued their own report indicting the Democratic majority for the same crime. Republican Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.) declared, “The Republican Leadership Task Force on Deliberative Democracy in the House is here today to expose a dirty little secret to the American people, and that is that 248-million Americans have been disenfranchised from full participation in their House of Representatives this year.” Solomon was indignant because Republicans were blocked from offering amendments to legislation: “What we are saying in this report is that when you lose the ability to deliberate in a democracy, to be fully informed, and to fully debate and amend legislation so that it is representative of this body and the country, then you have lost the very essence of our constitutional system of government.”

Both the Republican minority in 1993 and the Democratic minority in 2005 had legitimate complaints. But the fact that Republicans so quickly copied the abuses of their predecessors is a reminder that herds of politicians will trample whatever they can.

The behavior of congressmen at a typical hearing would get a juror fined and jailed for contempt of court at a trial. Most congressmen do not show up for most hearings, and those who do show up attend sporadically, wandering in and out like bus-station patrons searching for a restroom. Most hearings, especially in the House, showcase members often awkwardly reading questions written out by their aides. An intelligent, spontaneous, piercing follow-up question is as rare as a federal agency requesting a reduction in its budget.

But the hearings are like sagacious philosophic dialogues compared to floor debates. Congressmen from different sides take turns strutting up to microphones stumbling through texts badly written by their staffers. They rarely respond to the other side. They endlessly repeat each other because almost no one attends the floor debates—they simply show up for their scheduled five minutes’ bloviating. Anyone who watches a floor “debate” easily gets the impression that Attention Deficit Disorder is rampant in Washington .

Illusion of Control

Professors imply that Deliberative Democracy would allow citizens the chance to take the reins of state. However, Deliberative Democracy is more like the toy dashboard controls with which children pretend to drive.

If government were simply a matter of paperwork or moral calisthenics, then mere deliberations might solve political problems. But the chance to vent at public meetings is scant consolation for the havoc wreaked by government policies. The number of government agencies that can accost, prohibit, penalize, tax, impound, impede, detain, subpoena, confiscate, search, indict, fine, audit, interrogate, levy, wiretap, sanction, and otherwise harass and subjugate the citizen and/or his property has skyrocketed. Few, if any, of the advocates of Deliberative Democracy seem aware that government fires real ammunition into the lives of innocent citizens—from speed traps, to seatbelt checkpoints, to bogus child-abuse investigations, to arresting almost a million marijuana smokers a year.

It is absurd to expect that discussions will resolve differences between people who wish to live as they please and others who demand the power to bring them to their knees. The more power government possesses, the more fruitless deliberations become between aggressors and victims. And yet Deliberative-Democracy sessions are supposed to assume that people who advocate government action are disinterested—as if such issues were the equivalent of choosing among possibilities for a Boy Scout troop project. According to the professors, citizens are obliged to act as if those who want to confiscate their guns or raze their houses are merely misguided—not malicious. Suppose the teachers union takes over the local school board (as has happened in many local school-board elections). What if the school board decrees that parents who homeschool their kids are criminals and should be jailed?

Most of the college professors who have rattled on for years about “public reason” and “deliberative democracy” did nothing to oppose the passage of the Military Commissions Act, which effectively legalized torture and suspended habeas corpus for noncitizens. If the Act had had some sub-clause potentially affecting academic freedom or gay marriage, the professors might have rushed to the ramparts. But common, garden-variety dictatorial measures have failed to hold their interest. Neither liberty nor Leviathan are “moral issues” for the vast majority of political scientists.

The town meetings of early 1800s New England, chronicled by Tocqueville and others, were effective because the sphere of government was narrow. The local governments didn’t have SWAT teams to send after critics. They did not have a massive statute book that they could throw against anyone who displeased them. They could not wiretap phones and pilfer bank records on a whim. But the more power government captures, the more contempt it can show for citizens.

And how will politicians react to deliberations? At this point in American history, an election victory means whatever the winning politicians say it does. If their oath of office—if their sacred pledge to uphold the Constitution—has no effect on them, why would a committee letter from Butte, Montana, make a difference?

Insofar as government is involved in running the Deliberative-Democracy sessions, they will be as corrupting as high-school civics classes. This is where many Americans learn that government automatically serves them and that it has grown so large because people have so many unmet needs. Government involvement with Deliberative Democracy will assure that people receive one more dose of “Officer Friendly” propaganda.

William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania , wrote in 1693: “Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.” The greatest danger of Deliberative Democracy is that it creates the illusion of popular control of Leviathan. At best, it would be another way to con people into thinking that they control the government that skewers them. “You had the chance to deliberate, didn’t you?” will be the new version of the old refrain: “You had the chance to vote, didn’t you?”

Deliberative Democracy is a recipe for docility masquerading as a formula for activism. Deliberative Democracy aims to pacify citizens, not leash politicians. Being permitted to talk about politics is no substitute for being free.

Dignifying the political process is one of the worst evils of the Deliberative-Democracy proponents. If some reform does not provide a useful effective means for citizens to leash their rulers, then it is worse than useless—it is a sop, not a fix. Anything that increases docility breeds oppression.

Deliberative Democracy is a good example of how pretenses of idealism can sanctify servitude. “Lofty thinking” works out well for professors while common citizens fall into the manholes their schemes leave open. The professors’ latest fix is little more than “attitude adjustment” for the American people. Deliberative Democracy will not lighten their chains, but will permit them to initialize their own fetters.

Deliberative Democracy aims to prop up the curtain around the Wizard of Oz—to deter people from seeing or recognizing the iron fist that increasingly domineers their lives.

Unless there is a way to curb politicians’ power grabs, then all the talk in the world isn’t worth a wooden nickel. The types of deliberations most likely to protect citizens are those of a jury deciding whether a politician or other government official is guilty of high crimes or misdemeanors.

A democratic government that respects no limits on its power is a ticking time bomb, waiting to destroy the rights it was created to protect. There is no substitute for more Americans with the wisdom and the courage to demand that government obey the Constitution and respect their rights.

There are few more dangerous errors in political thinking than to equate democracy with liberty. Unfortunately, this is one of the most widespread errors in America —and a key reason why there are few leashes left on government power. As Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek observed in a 1976 speech, “The magic word democracy has become so all-powerful that all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before it. . . . It is unlimited democracy, not just democracy, which is the problem today.”¹

People have long been encouraged to confuse self-government of their own lives with “self-government” via majority rule over everyone. Because abusive rule by foreigners or a king personified oppression, many presumed that rule by people of one’s own nationality meant freedom. Boston pastor Benjamin Church proclaimed in 1773 that liberty was “the happiness of living under laws of our own making. Therefore, the liberty of the people is exactly proportioned to the share the body of the people have in the legislature.”² However, the rampages of state and local majorities during and after the American Revolution debunked this naïve faith in majorities.

Americans quickly recognized that liberty meant lack of coercion—especially lack of government coercion. “The Restraint of Government is the True Liberty and Freedom of the People” was a popular motto of the late 1700s.³ John Phillip Reid, in his seminal work, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, observed that liberty in the eighteenth century was “largely thought of as freedom from arbitrary government. . . . The less a law restrained the citizen, and the more it restrained government, the better the law.”⁴ This concept of freedom continued into the early part of the twentieth century. 

But as time passed, enthusiasm for government power returned and different concepts of freedom arose to again vindicate awarding unlimited power to the majority. Progressive Herbert Croly, one of President Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite writers, declared in 1909, “Individual freedom is important, but more important still is the freedom of a whole people to dispose of its own destiny.”⁵ However, in practice, this means the “freedom of the whole people” to dispose of individuals’ rights, property, and lives. 

This confusion has prospered in part because, throughout Western history, tyrants and tyrant apologists have sought to browbeat citizens into obedience by telling them that they are only obeying themselves. The eighteenth-century French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau used this bait and switch to sanctify democracy. Rousseau wrote: “Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody. . . . Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”⁶ The general will is “infallible,” and “to express the general will is to express each man’s real will.” Rousseau taught that people need not fear a government animated by the general will because each citizen would be “obeying only myself.”⁷ And because the people’s will would actuate government, the classical warnings on the danger of government power became null and void. The horrors of the French Revolution cast Rousseau’s doctrines into temporary disrepute, but his intellectual contortions permeated subsequent thinking on democracy and government.

Some U.S. presidents who have been most enthusiastic on seizing power have exonerated themselves by claiming that “the people did it.” FDR declared in 1938, “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us,”⁸ and Bill Clinton declared in 1996 that “The Government is just the people, acting together. . . .”⁹ In his 1989 farewell address, Ronald Reagan asserted, “ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do, it doesn’t tell us. ‘We the people’ are the driver—the government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast.”¹⁰ But the American people did not choose to drive into Beirut and get hundreds of Marines blown up, or choose to run up the largest budget deficits in American history, or provide thousands of antitank weapons to Ayatollah Khomeni, or have a slew of top political appointees either lie or get caught in conflicts of interest or other abuses of power or ethical quandaries between 1981 and 1988.

Invoking “the government is the people” is one of the easiest ways for a politician to shirk responsibility for his actions. This doctrine makes sense only if one assumes that government’s victims are subconscious masochists and government is only fulfilling their secret wishes when it messes up their lives.

The notion that democracy automatically produces liberty hinges on the delusion that “people are obeying themselves.” But, as Freeman editor Sheldon Richman commented, “When you rushed to finish your income tax return at the last minute on April 15, were you in fear of yourself and your fellow Americans or the IRS?”¹¹ People who exceed the speed limit are not “self-ticketed.” People who fail to recycle their beer bottles are not self-fined, as if the recycling police were a mere apparition of a guilty conscience.

Is a citizen governing herself when she is arrested for possessing a handgun in her own home for self-defense in a crime-ridden District of Columbia neighborhood where police long since ceased providing minimum protection? Is a 20-year-old citizen governing himself when he is arrested in his own home by police for drinking a beer? The fact that a majority—or, more likely, a majority of the minority who bothered to vote—may have sanctioned such laws and government powers has nothing to do with the self-government by each citizen of his own life. 

Yet by assuring people that they are the government, this makes all the coercion, all the expropriation, all the intrusive searches, all the prison sentences for victimless crimes irrelevant. At least for the theoreticians and apologists of democracy.

Praising Democracy to Unleash Government

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans’ rights. Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth-century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.¹² He swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly closed hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed “that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

President Woodrow Wilson pioneered the democracy-as-salvation bosh. Yet his administration had the worst civil rights record since the Civil War—imposing Jim Crow restrictions on federal employees that resulted in the mass firing of black civil servants. After taking the nation into World War I, Wilson rammed a Sedition Act through Congress that empowered the feds to imprison anyone who muttered a kind word for the Kaiser.¹³ Wilson pushed conscription through Congress—as if his goal of having “a seat at the table” at the postwar peace conferences entitled him to dispose of a hundred thousand American lives. Wilson ‘s constant invocation of democracy shielded him against a popular backlash, at least until the fraud of the peace settlement became widely recognized.

Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency was the clearest turning point in the American understanding of freedom. In a 1937 speech on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, FDR declared that “even some of our own people may wonder whether democracy can match dictatorship in giving this generation the things it wants from government.” FDR’s comment was part of his attack on those who opposed his seizure of power over property, wages, and contracts. Earlier that year, in his second inaugural address, he bragged, “In these last four years, we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public’s government.” When the Supreme Court found many of Roosevelt ‘s power grabs unconstitutional, he announced plans to wreck the power of the Court by stacking it with new appointees—showing his contempt for any limits on his power. “FDR freedom” meant presidential supremacy—and nothing else. 

In his 1941 State of the Union address, FDR announced the “four freedoms”—“freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world”; “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world”; “freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world;” and “freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.” FDR’s revised freedoms ignored most of all the specific limitations on government power contained in the Bill of Rights. Now, instead of a liberty for each to live his own life and go his own way, Roosevelt offered freedom from fear and freedom from want—“freedoms” that require omnipresent government surveillance and perpetual government intervention. Roosevelt perennially invoked freedom as a pretext to increase government power. His promises of freedom for the entire world distracted attention from how his administration was subjugating Americans. Partly because Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s were less politically astute than those of the Founding era, FDR’s bait and switch worked like a charm—and was canonized into American folklore by Norman Rockwell and others.

Complacent about Liberty

Freedom became increasingly bastardized in the decades after FDR. President Nixon, like most of his predecessors, encouraged Americans to be complacent about their liberty. In 1973, in his second inaugural address, he declared: “Let us be proud that our system has produced and provided more freedom and more abundance, more widely shared, than any other system in the history of the world.” Americans later learned that, at the time of Nixon’s statement, the FBI was involved in a massive campaign to suppress opposition to the government and to the Vietnam War, and Nixon himself was involved in obstructing the investigation of the Watergate break-in and related crimes. But Nixon may not have seen such actions as a violation of liberty because, as he explained to interviewer David Frost in 1977, “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” Frost, somewhat dumbfounded, replied, “By definition?” Nixon answered, “Exactly. Exactly.”¹⁴ 

President Clinton openly scapegoated freedom for many problems caused by government (such as welfare programs). In a 1994 interview with MTV he declared, “When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. . . . What’s happened in America today is, too many people live in areas where there’s no family structure, no community structure, and no work structure. And so there’s a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there’s too much personal freedom. When personal freedom’s being abused, you have to move to limit it.”¹⁵ 

But the Bill of Rights did not give freedom to Americans; instead, it was a solemn pledge by the government that it recognized and would not violate the pre-existing rights of individuals. The Bill of Rights was not “radical” according to the beliefs of Americans of that era; it codified rights both long recognized in English common law and purchased in blood during the Revolution. The Founding Fathers had difficulty getting the Constitution approved in many states not because it was “radical” in giving people rights—but because it was perceived as concentrating too much power to violate rights within the federal government. Yet by painting freedom as a gift of the government, Clinton distracted people from recognizing the threat that any government—democratic or otherwise—poses to their rights.

President George W. Bush uses freedom and democracy interchangeably, as if they were two sides of the same wooden nickel. Bush explained to a Dutch journalist in May 2005: “ Holland is a free country. It’s a country where the people get to decide the policy. The Government just reflects the will of the people. That’s what democracies are all about.”¹⁶ Later that day he was questioned by another Dutch journalist:

Q. How do you define freedom?

The President. Freedom, democracy? 

Q. Freedom as such.

The President. Well, I view freedom as where government doesn’t dictate. Government is responsive to the needs of people. . . . That’s what freedom—government is of the people. We say ‘‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And a free society is one if the people don’t like what is going on, they can get new leaders. . . . That’s free society, society responsive to people.¹⁷

And as long as government claims to respond to the people, the people are free, no matter how much the government abuses them.

Bush Freedom hinges on government as the savior of freedom. Debates over the Patriot Act provided further opportunity for degrading the American vocabulary. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft titled the August 2003 launch speech of his national Patriot Act promotion tour “Securing Our Liberty: How America Is Winning the War on Terror.” Earlier in 2003 Ashcroft characterized Justice Department antiterrorist deliberations this way: “Every day we are asking each other, what can we do to be more successful in securing the freedoms of America and sustaining the liberty, the tolerance, the human dignity that America represents.”¹⁸

Ashcroft’s successor, Alberto Gonzales, used the same rhetoric to sanctify the Patriot Act: “Congress did a good job in striking the appropriate balance between protecting our country and securing our liberties.”¹⁹ The Patriot Act authorized confiscations of travelers’ money (in violation of a Supreme Court ruling), the use of new surveillance software that could vacuum up millions of people’s e-mails without a search warrant, nationwide “roving wiretaps,” and seizing library, bookstore, and other business and financial records based solely on subpoenas issued by FBI field offices on the flimsiest of pretexts.²⁰ After the Patriot Act was signed, there was a hundredfold increase in the number of emergency spying warrants issued solely on the Attorney General’s command—and later rubber-stamped by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.²¹ But all the violations of Americans’ rights and liberties by federal agents are irrelevant because the proclaimed intent of the Patriot Act is to “secure liberty.” There is no freedom without security, and no security without absolute power.

Intellectuals Join In

It is not only politicians who seek to confuse people about the reality of liberty. Intellectuals who should know better join in the circus shell game. Former federal judge and Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1996 called for “a constitutional amendment making any federal or state court decision subject to being overruled by a majority vote of each House of Congress.” Bork appealed to “our most precious freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves democratically.”²² According to this view, the greatest danger to freedom is having frustrated legislators.

What are the mechanics by which majority-mandated shackles liberate the individual? How does a shackle supported by 51 percent of the populace affect an individual differently from one endorsed by a mere 49 percent? Is the secret to democracy some law of inverse political gravity—so that the more people who support imposing a shackle, the less it weighs? Are citizens obliged to pretend that any restriction favored by the majority is not a restraint but instead a badge of freedom? Shackles are shackles are shackles, regardless of what rhetorical holy water they are blessed with.

People are taught that, thanks to democracy, coercion is no longer dangerous because people get to vote on who coerces them. Because people are permitted a role in choosing who will be in charge of the penal code, they are free. Being permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom. But it takes more than voting to make coercion benign.

The fiction of majority rule has become a license to impose nearly unlimited controls on the majority and everybody else. The doctrine of “majority rule equals freedom” is custom-made to turn mobs of voters into spoiled children with a divine right to plunder the candy store. The only way to equate submission to majority-sanctioned decrees with individual freedom is to assume that individuals have no right to live in any way that displeases the majority. 

The more confused people’s thinking becomes, the easier it is for rulers to invoke democracy to destroy freedom. The issue is not simply Lincoln ‘s, Roosevelt’s, Clinton’s or Bush’s absurd statements on freedom but a cultural–intellectual smog in which politicians have unlimited leeway to redefine freedom. If politicians can redefine freedom at their whim, then they can raze limits on their own power.

It is better that government be representative than nonrepresentative. But it is more important that governments respect people’s rights than fulfill some people’s wishes to oppress other people. The rules that a person must obey are more important than the identity of the nominal rulers. Herbert Spencer wrote in 1857, “The liberty which a citizen enjoys is to be measured, not by the nature of the governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or not, but by the relative paucity of the restraints it imposes on him.”²³ The existence of democracy does not change the meaning of individual liberty. A person is free or not free, regardless of how many people approve his fetters.

The Founding Fathers fought for a government that would respect their rights, not for a government that would allow them to forcibly micromanage the lives of their fellow citizens. The only way to claim that democracy automatically protects liberty is to say that the only freedom that matters is “freedom for the government to rule in the name of the people.”

Reconciling Democracy with Liberty

The scope of majority rule should be limited to those issues and areas in which common standards must prevail to preserve public peace. Democracy is a relatively good method for reaching agreement on a system of roads, but is a lousy method for dictating where each citizen must go. Democracy can be a good method for reaching agreement on standards of weights and measurements used in commerce, but is a poor method for dictating wages and prices. Democracy should be a system of government based on common agreement on issues that must be agreed upon, and tolerance—however grudging—on all other differences. 

“Whenever majority rule is unnecessarily substituted for individual choice, democracy is in conflict with individual freedom,” wrote Italian professor Bruno Leoni in his 1961 classic, Freedom and the Law.²⁴ Majority rule is a means not an end. There is nothing superior in majorities running (or thinking they run) a government compared to an individual running his own life. Collective rule will always be inferior to the self-rule of a citizen in his own life. 

The fact that democratic governments violate liberty does not prove that democracy is uniquely or inherently evil. This is simply what governments do. In the same way that a political candidate’s lies don’t create a presumption that his opponent is honest, the fact that democracies routinely violate rights and liberties creates no presumption that other forms of government would not be worse.

1. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Essence of Hayek (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), p. 352. 
2. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic , 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 24.
3. John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 65. 
4. Ibid., pp. 65, 114.
5. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993 [1909]), p. 442.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (New York: Dutton, 1950), p. 14. 
7. Ibid., p. 87. 
8. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1938 (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 489 (emphasis added). 
9. “Remarks to Business Leaders in Stamford , Connecticut ,” Public Papers of the Presidents, October 7, 1996, p. 1999.
10. “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Public Papers of the Presidents, January 11, 1989, p. 53.
11. Sheldon Richman, “Government Is Not ‘Us’,” Future of Freedom Foundation, June 2, 2004.
12. See Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), and Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln (New York: Random House, 2003).
13. Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory ( New York : Basic Books, 2003), p. 382.
14. “Nixon’s Views on Presidential Power: Excerpts from an Interview with David Frost,” www.landmarkcases.org/nixon/_nixonview.html.
15. “Remarks by the President in MTV’s ‘Enough is Enough’ Forum on Crime,” Office of the Press Secretary, White House, April 19, 1994.
16. “Interview with Dutch TV NOS,” Public Papers of the Presidents, May 5, 2005.
17. “Interview with Foreign Print Journalists,” in ibid.
18. Gene R. Nichol, “Ashcroft Wants Even More,” Raleigh News and Observer, February 20, 2003.
19. “Conversation with U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Preview of President Bush’s Speech—Part 1,” Charlie Rose Show Transcripts, June 27, 2005.
20. Ibid., pp. 145–46, 137–40.
21. Ibid., p. 144.
22. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 115, 117.
23. Gary Doherty and Tim Gray, “Herbert Spencer and the Relations Between Economic and Political Liberty ,” History of Political Thought, Autumn 1993, p. 475.
24. Bruno Leoni, Freedom and the Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, 1991 [1961]), p. 131.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s crown jewel. Unfortunately, the heavily subsidized insurance bribes people to scorn common sense, damages the environment, and creates staggering liabilities for taxpayers. Federal flood insurance illustrates how selling at a loss can be politically profitable. The horrendous damage from Hurricane Katrina in late August is in part a tribute to the folly of politicians “managing” risk. This is one more reminder why people should not trust the government to save them.

At the time that the United States was founded, there was no expectation that federal bureaucrats would compensate people for flooded basements or washed-away front porches. Until 1917 disaster response was handled almost entirely by state and local governments and by private charities. In that year President Wilson pushed through a bill to provide limited federal aid for flood relief. Unlike nowadays, there was no “automatic pilot” system that allowed the president almost unlimited discretion and control over disaster spending. Disaster relief proved a popular pork barrel, and aid was gradually expanded over the decades.

The NFIP was created in 1968 to lower the costs of federal disaster assistance. Politicians at that time claimed that selling federal insurance for flood damage would help cover the cost of repairing and rebuilding after floods.² Instead, Uncle Sam’s subsidized insurance provided a green light for far more building in river flood plains and coastal areas long favored by hurricanes. FEMA ran a national ad telling viewers: “We can’t replace your memories, but we can help you build new ones.” Unfortunately, FEMA and the NFIP have long been inducing people to build homes in areas where their memories get swept away.

A 1997 Idaho Statesman report on a Boise river flood concluded that the NFIP “has backfired—bringing more people into harm’s way” and has made risky development “look not only possible, but attractive.”³ Doug Hardman, Boise-Ada County emergency services coordinator, observed that subsidized flood insurance “did exactly the opposite of what it was designed to do. It has encouraged people to move there and encouraged developers to develop there.”⁴ The NFIP amounts to a type of anti-environmental socialism. Scott Faber of American Rivers, a conservation organization, observed, “Prior to the 1960s, you didn’t have much development in flood-prone areas because you couldn’t find any insurer crazy enough to underwrite it. But the federal government came along and said it is okay—we are going to make it financially possible for you to live in a flood plain. The effect of this has been much more dramatic in coastal areas, where we have seen a huge boom in coastal development in the last 30 years.”⁵

The primary effect of federal flood insurance is that far more property is now damaged by floods than would have occurred if the insurance had not made it possible to build in flood-prone areas.The Long Island Regional Planning Board in 1989 complained that federal flood insurance “in effect encourages a cycle of repeated flood losses and policy claims.”⁶ And, especially in places like Long Island, the program underwrites the vacation homes of the wealthy.

Consider the experience of Topsail Island, a 26-mile island off the North Carolina coast right in the middle of “hurricane alley.” At a time when North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt was trying to discourage rebuilding on the island, FEMA came in and deluged the area with more than $100 million to rebuild private and public facilities after two hurricanes hit the island in 1996. In 1998, the island was hit by another hurricane—and FEMA rushed in to spend another $10 million to repair things. The 1998 damage was greater than it otherwise would have been because FEMA had extended the sewer system after the previous hurricane, thus opening the door to new development.⁷ Federal relief spending over a three-year period amounted to more than $10,000 for each permanent resident on the island.⁸ “The original development wasn’t sound, and now for the third time in three years, we’re going to have to come in and provide assistance. There’s very little common sense,’’ observed Kevin Moody of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.⁹ FEMA paid almost the entire cost of rebuilding local government buildings and infrastructure, and federal flood insurance paid the large majority of the cost of rebuilding private homes. The News and Observer in Raleigh noted that “the taxpayer-financed [FEMA] bailout [after the preceding hurricane] has reimbursed resort towns for just about any piece of public property that blew away in the storm. . . . [It] has undermined years of efforts to discourage unwise development.”¹⁰

FEMA pretends that merely shifting the cost of flood damage from a homeowner to taxpayers in general is almost as good as preventing a flood. In the late 1990s it ran a national television advertising campaign (titled “Cover America”) urging Americans to buy into the NFIP. President Clinton’s FEMA director, James Lee Witt, declared: “The greater the coverage we can achieve, the healthier the flood insurance program will be, and there will be less of a burden on the disaster program.”¹¹

However, it is scant consolation for taxpayers whether they get boarhawged for disaster relief directly or for payouts under an insurance program designed to reward risky behavior. According to one FEMA analyst, “The way they advertise the flood insurance is disgusting. It is a Ponzi scheme—and they have to replenish that sucker because it is running dry. The NFIP is amazingly generous: you are talking of up to $250,000 for property damage coverage for only a few hundreds a year. . . . That is absurd.”¹² Private insurance companies in some cases would charge a $10,000 annual premium for many of the insurance policies which FEMA gives away for chickenfeed.

Misleading the Public

FEMA has continually sought to mislead the American public about the nature of its flood “insurance.” In 1997, in response to an article of mine whacking the NFIP in the Los Angeles Times, FEMA chief Witt declared that I was wrong when I said flood insurance was “subsidized.” Witt explained: The NFIP is a self-supporting program; claims and operating expenses are paid from policyholder premiums, not taxpayer dollars.”¹³ But the NFIP has repeatedly been bailed out by Congress, thus creating a fiction that the program is not an actuarial rat hole. Since FEMA is subsidizing many, if not most, of the people who buy the policies, the more policies FEMA sells, the greater the financial crash-and-burn will be when Mother Nature catches up with the agency.

Witt claimed that communities are required to “enforce sound flood plain management in exchange for the availability of affordable flood insurance.”¹⁴ But since FEMA is anxious to sign up as many people as possible for the NFIP, the agency is grossly negligent at requiring sound policies in return. Beth Milleman of Coastal Alliance, an environmental activist group, scorned FEMA’s campaign to get more flood-insurance enrollees: “They are merrily skipping around the country tossing subsidized insurance policies at anyone who has a damn bathtub.” Milleman observed that the flood insurance “encourages people to rebuild in harm’s way, which is also bad for the coastal environment. What disaster relief and flood insurance wind up doing is giving people the financial means to build or rebuild in exactly the same spot that we know is disaster prone. And it is no strings attached nine times out of ten.”¹⁵

FEMA claims that the flood-insurance program encourages responsible behavior because, unless a person gets the insurance contract, the agency will only give him one bailout of up to $10,000 to cover his losses from a flood—next time he is out of luck. However, even this Wiffle-ball penalty provision is a mirage. The agency’s inspector general reported, “FEMA regional staff generally were not effective in identifying ineligible applicants who received grants during previous disasters but did not comply with flood insurance purchase and maintenance requirements.” The report also noted, “Neither FEMA nor most states maintain records of who purchased insurance and if they maintained it for the required time.Without such records, it is not possible to monitor compliance.”¹⁶

Flood insurance has been horribly managed for decades. “Forget and forgive” is FEMA’s attitude towards repeat claimants. Roughly 1 percent of insured properties “have cost the program 38 percent of the claims since 1978, because they repeatedly flood,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.¹⁷ A National Wildlife Foundation study estimated that 2 percent of properties covered by federal flood insurance had “multiple losses accounting for 60 percent of the program’s total claims.”¹⁸ Almost $3 billion has been spent in the last two decades “repairing and rebuilding the same structures two, three and four times.”¹⁹ One Houston home suffered 16 floods; its owner collected more than $800,000 in compensation for repair costs.²⁰ The flood-insurance program paid $200,000 to repair and rebuild a Louisiana home, hit by 15 floods, that was worth only $30,000. The Houston Chronicle reported the case of “a modest $49,300 home in Canton, Miss., which was flooded 25 times and brought $161,279 in insurance payments.”²¹

While the federal government heavily subsidizes flood insurance, it also has dozens of programs to prevent a shortage of floods. As Sierra Magazine noted,“More than 40 separate federal programs and agencies, governing everything from highway construction to farm export policy, encourage building and farming on flood plains and wetlands. In 1996 alone . . . over $7 billion was poured into ten programs that aggravate flooding.”²²

Bush Team Perpetuates the Fictions

Bureaucrats cannot be counted on to make sound decisions on other people’s scarce resources. In congressional testimony in March 2004, then-FEMA chief Michael Brown declared,“The number of NFIP policies will be increased by 5 percent.”²³ This is a typical Soviet-bloc accounting mentality—as if the goal was simply to have more customers—not to make a profit or achieve something more than bureaucratic bragging rights. Brown assured a Senate appropriations subcommittee:“ The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) has a significant impact on reducing and indemnifying this Nation’s flood losses. Prior to the creation of the NFIP, floodplain management as a practice was not well established, and only a few states and several hundred communities actually regulated floodplain development.” This is simply repeating the same fictions by which NFIP subsidies have been justified for two generations.

Brown told the Senate that FEMA’s “Flood Map Modernization Program provides the capability to broaden the scope of risk management. . . . Communities, lenders, insurance agents, and others use the maps and the flood data approximately 20 million times a year to make critical decisions on land development, community redevelopment, insurance coverage, and insurance premiums.”²⁴

Brown neglected to mention that FEMA’s flood maps are often hopelessly out of date. FEMA is currently using floodplain maps as old as 1979—despite the vast changes in coastal areas, watersheds, and development. FEMA set up a helpline, but up to 40,000 people in one year were given responses that may have included “significant errors,” which may have resulted in “significant financial loss to the customer, including but not limited to wrongful denial of insurance coverage at the time of the loss.”²⁵ Callers were often falsely assured that they did not live in a floodplain and thus did not need flood insurance. An audit report in early 2005 titled “FEMA Call Center Assessment” was so damning that the agency tried to suppress it. (A copy leaked out to ABC News.) Robert James, the author of the report, said of FEMA’s call-takers: “Most of them, as far as work experience, had fast food, Wendy’s, pizza places.”²⁶

The 2005 Knockout Combo

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita shattered whatever pretense of fiscal responsibility the NFIP once possessed. As of early October 2005 the program was estimated to go $20 billion into the red as a result of claims from the two hurricanes that hammered the Gulf Coast. The NFIP collects only about $2 billion a year in premiums—thus guaranteeing the program would go belly up. Except that politicians cannot resist restocking the program’s coffers with cash.

In November FEMA announced that it was suspending payments for flood-insurance damage claims, effectively, if temporarily, defaulting on its promises to claim holders. Congress responded by rushing to pass legislation entitling the NFIP to siphon off $18.5 billion from the U.S. Treasury to pay off its claims. The action is labeled “borrowing”—but anyone who expects FEMA to repay the Treasury (and taxpayers) is naïve enough to buy Florida swampland. President Bush’s signature on the bailout was barely dry before David Maurstad, the acting NFIP chief, announced that “FEMA will continue to work with lawmakers on securing additional borrowing authority.” FEMA is expected to pay out roughly $23 billion for claims related to the major hurricanes of 2005.

Not surprisingly, congressmen are anxious to exploit the flood-insurance program to camouflage the welfare they give to often affluent voters. After Katrina clobbered Mississippi, Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi introduced a bill titled the “Buy-In Act” to permit people to buy flood insurance retroactively. If some private company permitted people to retroactively buy fire insurance after their homes burnt down, and then backdated the policies to hide the retroactive sleight of hand, the company officials would almost certainly be sent to prison for fraud. However, when the U.S. Congress does the same thing, it is public service. The fact that congressmen would even talk of people retroactively buying insurance is testament to the congressmen’s gauge of the stupidity of the American public.

The massive flood-insurance payouts caused by the hurricanes are spurring the usual calls to reform the program. But, with much fanfare, Congress had already enacted legislation early in 2005 to reform the program. The Bunning-Bereuter-Blumenauer Flood Insurance Reform Act sought to curb the repeated bailouts of property owners. Naturally, Congress sought to solve the problem by throwing more money at the people who had already pilfered the Treasury. The new law obliges FEMA to offer to pay much of the cost of “mitigation” — such as raising a house above likely flood levels. How did it become your or my responsibility to pay to have some homeowner’s vacation place raised? If a homeowner with flood insurance refuses the government’s handout offer, the feds can raise his floor insurance premium by up to 150 percent. However, if somebody is already getting a de facto 90 percent subsidy on his insurance rates, a 150 percent increase would still leave him massively subsidized—and would continue to encourage him to live and rebuild in harm’s way. Thus, the “reform act” was simply another in a long series of frauds.

The only sound way to reform federal flood insurance is to abolish the National Flood Insurance Program. Politicians and bureaucrats cannot be trusted to make policies or set rates in ways that will serve the public. But there is no way to reform the incentives or boost the responsibility of members of Congress. Thus whatever paper reforms are made to the flood-insurance program will almost certainly be transient—overturned at the first viable opportunity by members of Congress waiting to jigger the system to subsidize constituents. There is no way that a program can run well in the long term when the primary incentive is for congressmen to sabotage its soundness in the short term. Congressmen win votes for boondoggles, not for judicious management.

Some private insurance companies are beginning to offer insurance policies for luxury homes on the coast. This is a niche that can be filled by private enterprise. Professor Rob Young of Western Carolina University declared after Katrina: “If coastal development is such an economic powerhouse that it is essential to the viability of a locality or a state, then let’s let the free market decide. No more federal money for rebuilding infrastructure. No more federally subsidized flood insurance.”²⁷ It is no loss to the nation if people build houses a mile or 10 miles out of harm’s way.

The political windfall profits that follow a natural disaster epitomize how politicians’ and citizens’ interests are antithetical. The more citizens suffer, the more politicians profit by throwing money and promises in all directions. The only concept of “disaster” guiding federal policy now is the horror that politicians may miss a chance to use tax dollars to buy themselves more votes.

Footnotes:

1.“Laugh Lines,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1997.
2. John Riley, “Shoreline in Peril/Flood Of Claims,” Newsday, August 18, 1998.
3. Rocky Barker, “The Flood—Next Time,” Idaho Statesman, March 19, 1997.
4. Ibid.
5. Author interview with Scott Faber, July 8, 1996.
6.  Riley.
7. “How Often Should Taxpayers Foot Bill for Coastal Rebuilding?”
Associated Press, August 30, 1998.
8. Ibid.
9. Greg Jaffe and Motoko Rich, “N.C. Island Attracts Tourists,
Hurricanes, Federal Disaster Aid,” Palm Beach Post, September 6, 1998.
10. George M. Stephens, “Let States Finance Their Own Disasters,”
News and Observer, November 24, 1996.
11. “Prepared Statement of the Honorable James L.Witt, Director
Federal Emergency Management Agency, before the House
Committee in Appropriations VA, HUD and Independent Agencies
Subcommittee,” Federal News Service,April 30, 1996.
12. Author interview with a FEMA employee who wished to remain anonymous, August 1, 1996.
13. James Lee Witt,“Federal Flood Insurance,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1997.
14. “Testimony of James L.Witt, Director Federal Emergency
Management Agency, Senate Appropriations,VA, HUD, and Independent
Agencies, FY98 VA HUD Appropriations,” Federal Document
Clearinghouse, March 18, 1997.
15. Author interview with Beth Milleman, August 2, 1996.
16. FEMA Inspector General, “Audit of the Enforcement of Flood Insurance Purchase Requirements for Disaster Aid Recipients,” FEMA IG, H-14-95, July 1995.
17. Cory Reiss, “Flood Funds Drying up Fast,” Sarasota Herald-
Tribune, October 3, 2005.
18. James Toedtman, “Curbing Coastal Development/Officials
Recommend Revamp of Insurance Policy,” Newsday,April 11, 1999.
19. Gene Marlowe, “Agency Fed up with Rebuilding Flood Zones,” Tampa Tribune, June 15, 1998.
20. “Seeking an End to a Flood of Claims,” National Wildlife
Federation, July 1, 1999.
21. Rad Sallee, “Federal Flood Payoffs Crest Here, Study Says,”
Houston Chronicle, July 22, 1998.
22. Bob Schildgen, “Unnatural Disasters; Areas That Suffer Repeat Flooding Yet Continue To Rebuild,” Sierra Magazine, May 1999.
23. Statement of Michael D. Brown, House Committee on
Appropriations: Homeland Security Subcommittee, March 24, 2004,
www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/2004_h/.
24. Testimony of The Honorable Michael Brown, Under Secretary,
Emergency Preparedness and Response, United States Senate Committee on Appropriations, February 26, 2004, www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/2004_h/040226-brown.htm.
25. Joshua Partlow, “Aid for Those in Flood Zones Fell Short,” Washington Post, September 26, 2005.
26. ABC News: “Inaccuracies Abound in FEMA’s Flood Insurance Program,”ABC News, October 4, 2004.
27. Rob Young,“Why Are We Building in Harm’s Way?” Asheville
Citizen-Times (North Carolina), September 25, 2005.

But the key to understanding new government intrusions is that horror stories do not surface in the first 72 hours after a new power is granted. The machinery of government takes time to deploy and expand. It takes time for the impact of precedents to expand, for the agents all along the line to get the message that they are not entitled to go much further than before. We must look to history to see what is likely to happen once the government is unleashed.

In May 2002, after revelations that the FBI missed many warning signs before 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he was effectively abolishing restrictions on FBI surveillance of Americans’ everyday life. Those restrictions were first imposed in 1976 after pervasive FBI abuses were revealed. At that time, Attorney General Edward Levi announced guidelines to curtail FBI agents’ intrusions into the lives of Americans who were not criminal suspects.

At his May 30 announcement Ashcroft declared that, after 9/11, “we in the leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice began a concerted effort to free the field agents—the brave men and women on the front lines—from the bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions and structures that hindered them from doing their jobs effectively.”¹ He complained that in the past FBI agents were required “to blind themselves to information that everyone else [was] free to see.”

However, as the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington non-profit organization, noted, “The FBI was never prohibited in the past from going to mosques, political rallies and other public places, to observe and record what was said, but in the past it had to be guided by the criminal nexus—in deciding what mosques to go to and what political meetings to record, it had to have some reason to believe that terrorism might be discussed.”² A New York Times editorial warned that the new guidelines “could mean that F.B.I. agents will show up at the doors of people who order politically unpopular books on Amazon.com or make phone calls to organizations critical of the government.”³

Ashcroft’s announcement concluded with the mandatory invocation of freedom consecrating each Bush power grab: “These guidelines will also be a resource to inform the American public and demonstrate that we seek to protect life and liberty from terrorism and other criminal violence with a scrupulous respect for civil rights and personal freedoms. The campaign against terrorism is a campaign to affirm the values of freedom and human dignity. . . . Called to the service of our nation, we are called to the defense of liberty for all men and women.” When Bush was asked about the new FBI guidelines at a photo opportunity that same day, he declared, “the initiative that the attorney general will be outlining today will guarantee our Constitution.”⁴

Ashcroft talked as if the old guidelines on FBI surveillance were simply the result of a long-ago outbreak of temporary insanity among liberals. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been . . . the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.”⁵

The 1976 guidelines were put in place in response to a report by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations that detailed many FBI abuses over the preceding decades. For 15 years, from 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Programs) to actively subvert groups and people that the FBI considered threats to national security or to the established political and social order. Over 2,300 separate operations were carried out to incite street warfare between violent groups, to wreck marriages, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, or other organizations.⁶ The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”⁷

Burglary Exposes Scandal

Throughout the COINTELPRO period, presidents, congressmen, and other high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, to break the biggest scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating documents to the media.⁸ The shocking material sparked congressional and news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s legendary ability to control its own image.

The 1976 Senate report noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were barred. . . . We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents. . . . [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.”⁹

The FBI sought to subvert many black civil-rights organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Deacons for Defense and Justice, and Congress of Racial Equality. FBI headquarters ordered field offices to, as the Senate report noted, “exploit conflicts within and between groups; to use news media contacts to disrupt, ridicule, or discredit groups; to preclude ‘violence-prone’ or ‘rabble rouser’ leaders of these groups from spreading their philosophy publicly; and to gather information on the ‘unsavory backgrounds’—immorality, subversive activity, and criminal activity—of group members.” FBI agents were also ordered to develop specific tactics to “prevent these groups from recruiting young people.”¹⁰

Almost any black organization could be targeted for wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.”¹¹ At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.¹²

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.).¹³ Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the rival group were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the U.S. headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.”

The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego. Although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this overall situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this program.”¹⁴

The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstores’ “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit.¹⁵

King Targeted

For most of the last five years of his life Martin Luther King was “the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader,” the Senate report noted. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in August 1963 was described by the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division as evidence that King had become “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” King’s home and office were wiretapped and, on 16 occasions, the FBI placed wiretaps in King’s motel rooms, seeking information on the “private activities of King and his advisers” to use to “completely discredit” them.

The FBI sent a copy of one tape recording directly to King along with a note “which Dr. King and his advisers interpreted as a threat to release the tape recording unless Dr. King committed suicide,” the Senate report noted. The FBI offered to play tapes from the hotel rooms for “friendly” reporters. It also sought to block the publication of articles that praised King. An FBI agent intervened with Francis Cardinal Spellman to seek to block a meeting between King and the pope.¹⁶

FBI informants also “set up a Klan organization intended to attract membership away from the United Klans of America. The Bureau paid the informants’ personal expenses in setting up the new organization, which had, at its height, 250 members.” During the six years Gary Rowe spent as an FBI informant with the Klan, he, along with other Klansmen, had “beaten people severely, had boarded buses and kicked people off; had went [sic] in restaurants and beaten them with blackjacks, chains, pistols.” Rowe testified how he and other Klansmen used “baseball bats, clubs, chains, and pistols” to attack Freedom Riders.¹⁷

The FBI continually expanded its racial-surveillance investigations, eventually targeting white people who were “known to sponsor demonstrations against integration and against the busing of Negro students to white schools.” The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program . . . to identify ‘demagogues.’”¹⁸

From 1967 to 1972 the FBI paid Howard Berry Godfrey to be an informant with a right-wing paramilitary group in the San Diego area known as the Secret Army. The Senate committee discovered that Godfrey or the Secret Army was involved in “firebombing, smashing windows . . . propelling lug nuts through windows with sling shots, and breaking and entering.” Godfrey took a Secret Army colleague with him to conduct surveillance of the home of a left-wing San Diego State University professor; the colleague fired several shots into the home, badly wounding a woman inside. The Senate report noted “even this shooting incident did not immediately terminate Godfrey as an [FBI] informant.” Godfrey subsequently sold explosive material to a subordinate in the Secret Army who bombed the Guild Theater in San Diego in 1972.¹⁹

One FBI informant infiltrated an antiwar group and helped it break into the Camden, New Jersey, Draft Board in 1970. The informant later testified: “Everything they learned about breaking into a building or climbing a wall or cutting glass or destroying lockers, I taught them. I taught them how to cut the glass, how to drill holes in the glass so you cannot hear it and stuff like that, and the FBI supplied me with the equipment needed. The stuff I did not have, the [FBI] got off their own agents.”²⁰ That sting led to a press conference in which J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell proudly announced the indictment of 20 people on an array of charges. After learning of the FBI’s role in the crime, a jury refused to convict any of the defendants.

Some COINTELPRO operations targeted the spouses of political activists, sending them letters asserting that their mates were unfaithful. “Anonymous letters were sent to, among others, a Klansman’s wife, informing her that her husband had ‘taken the flesh of another unto himself,’ the other person being a woman named Ruby, with her ‘lust filled eyes and smart aleck figure’; and to a ‘Black Nationalist’s’ wife saying that her husband ‘been maken it here’ with other women in his organization ‘and that he gives us this jive bout their better in bed then you.’”²¹

One FBI field office bragged that one such letter to a black activist’s wife produced the “tangible result” and “certainly contributed very strongly” to the marriage’s demise. The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in “intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise. . . . They are mostly against marriage, children, and other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports . . . to try to identify the background of every person there . . . [and] who they were sleeping with.” The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and violence.”²²

The Senate report also described the “snitch jacket” technique—neutralizing a target by labeling him a “snitch” or informant so that he would no longer be trusted—which was used in all COINTELPRO operations. The methods ranged from having an authentic informant start a rumor about the target member, to anonymous letters or phone calls, to faked informants’ reports. . . . The “snitch jacket” is a particularly nasty technique even when used in peaceful groups. It gains an added dimension of danger when it is used—as, indeed, it was—in groups known to have murdered informers.²³

Shotgun Approach

The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted:

The clearest examples of actions directly aimed at the exercise of constitutional rights are those targeting speakers, teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful demonstrations. Approximately 18 percent of all approved COINTELPRO proposals fell into these categories. The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to get university and high school teachers fired; to prevent targets from speaking on campus; to stop chapters of target groups from being formed; to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt news conferences; to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, including the SCLC’s Washington Spring Project and Poor People’s Campaign, and most of the large antiwar marches; and to deny facilities for meetings or conferences.²⁴

An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”

The FBI ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the “scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.”²⁵ The headquarters directive informed FBI agents across the land: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”²⁶

A major goal of the COINTELPRO against the New Left operations was to “counter the widespread charges of police brutality that invariably arise following student-police encounters.”²⁷ The FBI was especially incensed at criticisms that Chicago policemen used excessive force when they attacked demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The FBI thus launched an illegal program to smear people the FBI believed had made false assertions of police misconduct. As COINTELPRO continued, the FBI targeted more and more groups and used increasingly vicious tactics. The Senate report noted:

The White Hate COINTELPRO [that focused primarily on the Klan] used comparatively few techniques which carried a risk of serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets, while the Black Nationalist COINTELPRO used such techniques extensively. The New Left COINTELPRO, on the other hand, had the highest proportion of proposals aimed at preventing the exercise of free speech. Like the progression in targeting, the use of dangerous, degrading, or blatantly unconstitutional techniques also appears to have become less restrained with each subsequent program.

The FBI continually discovered new enemies. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston testified of the program’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.²⁸

Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith.²⁹

The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “The American people need to be assured that never again will an agency of the government be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order. Only a combination of legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again.”³⁰

The Ford administration derailed legislative reforms in 1976 by promising an administrative fix. Now, 26 years later, Attorney General Ashcroft has thrown the restraints out the window, pretending there was never a valid reason to rein in the FBI.

The more information government gathers on people, the more power it will have over them. The more power it has to monitor their peaceful activities, the more intimidated Americans will become. Regardless of the Bush administration’s intentions in its war on terrorism, the new federal powers threaten the rights and personal security of American citizens.

Notes

1. Remarks of Attorney General John Ashcroft,” Justice Department Office of Public Affairs, May 30, 2002.
2. Jerry Berman and James X. Dempsey, “CDT’s Guide to the FBI Guidelines: Impact on Civil Liberties and Security—The Need for Congressional Oversight,” Center for Democracy and Technology, June 26, 2002.
3. Editorial, “An Erosion of Civil Liberties,” New York Times, May 31, 2002.
4. Remarks By President George W. Bush during Photo Opportunity at Cabinet Meeting,” Federal News Service, May 30, 2002.
5. Remarks of Attorney General John Ashcroft,” Justice Department Office of Public Affairs, May 30, 2002.
6. Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 14, 1976.
7. Ibid.
8. Mark Wagenveld, “25 Years Ago, before Watergate, a Burglary Changed History,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 10, 1996.
9. “COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert Action Programs against American Citizens,” Final Report of the Senate Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, April 23, 1976.
10. Both quotes taken from ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, “The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration,” Georgetown Law Journal, December 1991, p. 309.
13. “The FBI’s Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panther Party,” Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate, Book III, April 23, 1976.
14. Ibid.
15. All quotes taken from “The Use of Informants in FBI Domestic Intelligence Investigations”—Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans—Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, April 23, 1976.
16. All quotes from “Intelligence Activities and the Rights Of Americans: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Case Study,” Book III of the “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities United States Senate,” April 23, 1976.
17. All quotes taken from “The Use of Informants.”
18. All quotes taken from ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
22. “COINTELPRO.”
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Wagenveld.
27. “COINTELPRO.”
28. Ibid.
29. “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
30. Ibid.

Herbert called for new restrictions on firearms sales in order to protect Americans from future attacks. But is there any reason to believe that new gun-restriction laws would provide any better protection to Americans than previous laws?

Herbert urged ballistics testing of all new guns sold. Ballistics testing as a crime cure has about as much reliability as the baldness cures sold at an old-time circus sideshow. Maryland imposed a new ballistics-test requirement for all guns sold after October 1, 2001. The mandate wreaked havoc on Maryland gun buyers and sellers. Despite this, Maryland prosecutors have yet to use any of the results in court. The test data for new guns are not of much value after the guns have been fired a few hundred times. And revolvers do not leave shell casings—thus making the new mandate almost completely pointless.

Herbert also lays into the “gun show loophole” as a major source of carnage in America. In recent years the gun-control lobby has used that term to define political battles in a way that creates a growing bias against the right to keep and bear arms. The “gun show loophole” is a fraud: federal firearms licensees who sell guns at gun shows must comply with the same federal requirements as for any other gun sale. A small number of citizens without licenses sell guns at gun shows in some states—but the same people can and do sell guns from their kitchen tables and garages. A Justice Department 2001 study estimated that only 1 percent of the guns used in crimes were acquired at gun shows. Yet prohibitionists seized on the imagery of gun shows to try to take a giant leap toward national gun registration.

Herbert invoked a 1999 report by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) denouncing the gun industry’s efforts “to market sniper rifles and the resulting subculture of sniper enthusiasts that have turned discussion of this weapon into a cottage industry of books, Web sites, computer games and even sniper schools.” But John Muhammad had spent years in the U.S. Army—had served in the Gulf War—and was trained by the U.S. government as an “expert marksman.”

Besides, relying on the VPC for dicta on firearms issue is like relying on the Ku Klux Klan for information on race relations. A November 2001 VPC report titled “Un-intended Consequences: Pro-Handgun Experts Prove that Handguns Are a Dangerous Choice for Self-Defense” purported to prove that guns are unsafe in almost any private hands. VPC warned that “there is no way to both safely store a handgun and yet keep it ready for instant use to defend oneself.” VPC asserted that the only alternative to storing a gun is to keep it with you at all times—and then sneered that “strapping on your shooting iron is impractical (not to mention embarrassingly foolish) for most people.” Strapping on a firearm may be “embarrassingly foolish” to “liberal” yuppies whose biggest daily risk is whether Starbucks will have a freshly brewed pot of their favorite flavor. But for the many millions of Americans who live in urban-hell neighborhoods or remote rural areas where law enforcement cannot promptly respond, there is no blushing about taking responsibility for preserving one’s own life.

The titles of VPC press releases over the years vivify the jihad-nature of the center’s work. On March 5, 2001, after a 15-year-old student killed two classmates and wounded many others in the boys’ bathroom, VPC issued a release titled “Santana High School Shooting Latest Proof of Need for Handgun Ban.” On February 7, 2001, after a former IRS auditor brandished and fired a gun near the White House and was shot by Secret Service agents, VPC issued a release titled “White House Shooting Latest Proof of Need for Handgun Ban.” On April 25, 2000, after a gang-banger wounded bystanders in an inept attempt to shoot his enemies, VPC issued a release: “Shooting at National Zoo Latest Proof of Need for Handgun Ban.” VPC Executive Director Josh Sugarman wrote a book called Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.

Dependent on Government

The more successful gun control is in disarming citizens, the more dependent people become on government officials for protection. Columnist Herbert denounces “the terrible toll that guns in the wrong hands are taking.” It is ironic that Herbert would hit this theme to justify new restrictions on private gun ownership. Herbert has done some of the best writing in America on police misconduct—on wrongful police killings of innocent Americans—and on police department cover-ups of their carnage. Further restricting private gun ownership would not make police more trustworthy or less trigger-happy.

Gun bans don’t ban guns; rather, they ban citizens from legally defending themselves with guns, which at present they do some two and a half million times a year. The more difficult government makes it for law-abiding citizens to get guns, the more power armed criminals will have. Gun bans destroy the possibility of a balance of firepower between law-abiding citizens and violent criminals.

Politicians perennially react to the police’s total failure to control crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. The more government fails to control crime, the less able each individual citizen is to defend himself.

Banning guns in response to high crime rates is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. For the average citizen walking down a dark street late at night, a promise from a politician is worth far less than a .38 Special.

—James Bovard

Author, Lost Rights: The Destruction
of American Liberty