Balkinization  

Sunday, August 20, 2006

The 1% solution and the marginalization of civil liberties

Sandy Levinson

An article in today's New York Times by a British writer, Christopher Caldwell, is, I suspect, symptomatic of the declining support for civil liberties even among elites. The key part of his article comes toward the end: "Blair’s opponents equate today’s civil liberties protections with core British values." Caldwell appears to believe that they are best conceived only as "temporary adjustments that were useful under certain specific circumstances in part of Europe between World War II and the late 20th century.

"Even before Sept. 11, social critics noted that our culture has tended to mistake relatively ephemeral 20th-century phenomena for eternal truths. " Caldwell offers an analogy to modernism in art, borrowed from the writings of art historian T.J. Clark. "Modernism, after all, was presented to every educated Westerner born after 1930 as a new canon that would permanently overshadow the old one. But one could infer from Clark’s reading that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, much of 20th-century art and culture would be revealed as a timebound fad, albeit a big and influential one. As indeed it was. "

"Some of Britain’s Muslim leaders may also be susceptible to this mistake. Muslims have, after all, been present in Europe en masse for only a very few decades. Many community leaders have rightly understood that contemporary Britain’s commitment to multiculturalism and tolerance hardly amounts to a license of lawlessness. But not all. The sharp-tongued chairman of the Birmingham Central Mosque, Mohammad Naseem, greeted the worries about the potential mass murder of flying civilians with a cavalierness almost unbelievable under the circumstances. “With the track record of the police,” Naseem told The Guardian, “one doesn’t have much faith in the basis on which people are detained. And it poses the question whether the arrests are part of a political objective, by using Muslims as a target, using the perception of terrorism to usurp all our civil liberties and get more and more control while moving towards a totalitarian state.” Until five years ago, this kind of talk might have won him a few allies, as well as enemies. Now it is hard even to understand. If Naseem thinks that the rights of defendants are a cause around which 21st-century Britons will rally, he is making a minor misjudgment. If he thinks that the Britain he is addressing is the same Britain that existed from the 1940’s until a few years ago, eager to build bridges between communities and classes, no matter the cost, he is making a major one."

Perhaps one should commend the Times for opening its pages to all points of view. But Caldwell is not contributing the equivalent of an op-ed. He is a "contributing editor" of the Times Magazine, and one presumes that he is viewed as someone whose perceptions about politics should be taken with due seriousness. So the bottom line is whether Caldwell would just as easily condemn Judge Taylor and Laurence Tribe for believing that 21st century Americans should really care about rights of defendants and/or people suspected of complicity with terror. But we should ask ourselves what the right language of response is to Caldwell. Do we make arguments along the lines that we have to bear certain risks (including increasing the probability of serious terrorist incidents) in order to maintain a free society? Or do we say that respecting civil liberties does not in fact increase such risks? Is the latter argument really plausible? (Isn't it like arguing that criminals do not in fact ever go free (merely) because the constable blundered, to quote Cardozo's critique of exclusionary rules?) If we must address the former argument, how do we frankly confront what level of risk is worth running? (Regular readers of Balkinization will recognize the structural similarity of the argument to the debate about torture and whether there are ever any costs (as well as obvious moral gains) to an absolute prohibition on torture.)

This, then, brings me to my title and its reference to the 1% solution, which has gained currency because of its use--and implicit criticism--in Ron Suskind's recent book about the "Cheney doctrine," which is that we must engage in pre-emptive attacks whenever there is a 1% risk of something truly untoward happening. Many of Cheney's critics attacked that notion because of the way it leads to a paranoid form of politics. But don't we all engage in such analysis, depending on the magnitude of the risks involved? Lawyers in the audience will recognize this as the question posed by Learned Hand in his opinion in the Dennis case, in which he reconfigured the "clear and present danger" test to include a multiplication of the probability p by the gravity g of the risk. Obviously, if g approaches infinity, then the weighted number is very high even if p is quite low, including only 1%.

As Cass Sunstein and others have pointed out, many environmentalists, writing about global warming, embrace the "precautionary principle," which suggests that quite drastic action be taken even if there is only a relatively low risk of, say, rising ocean levels and the like. The strong appeal of Al Gore's movie, which I was much impressed by, ultimately rests on a version of the "1% solutioin."

So, returning to Caldwell, how do we decide what incursions on our liberties are worth paying, given very low p's but quite high g's? And how do we weigh in our analyses the costs c to individuals whose liberties are being infringed? Consider the triviality of no longer being able to bring toothpaste onto airplanes in carryons. For many, including myself, this is a considerable inconvenience that imposes considerable costs on each and every traveller in terms of time spent either checking (and then waiting around for) one's bag or having to purchase toothpaste whenever one arrives at one's destination. Presumably we accept the inconvenience because the cost to the "innocent" individual is very low. But what if c is considerably higher, involving deprivation of liberty for, say, 28 days, without a lawyer and confronting police interrogation? And so on. Caldwell apparently believes that the gravity of a blown-up plane is sufficiently close to, say, a Nazi takeover of Europe so that it justifies a similar decline in respect for civil liberties. Is he correct? As Bruce Ackerman argues in his new book, no one can seriously argue that al Qaeda is trying to displace the US government. But is an attempt functionally to shut down much of American society as we ordinary conceive it, including readily available air travel, to be dismissed "merely' because bin Laden is making no effort to march onto Washington and take over the White House?

I ask these as genuine questions. They are obviously linked to the rise of the National Surveillance State about which Jack and I have begun writing. How is what Foucault called the "gaze" of the state being "renormalized" to make decidedly "old-fashioned" the kind of respect for civil liberties, including the necessity for a decisive congressional role in their diminution, displayed in Judge Taylor's opinioni and Professor Tribe's defense?

A final analogy: Frank Michelman's perhaps best known article is his 1968 piece in the Harvard Law Review "Protecting the Poor Through the Fourteenth Amendment," in which he set out the basic arguments for "constitutionalizing" the welfare state. Cass Sunstein has recently argued that if Hubert Humphrey had won the 1968 election, then it is altogether possible that Michelman's vision (and FDR's call for a "Second Bill of Rights in 1944) would have been realized with the replacement of Warren, Fortas, Harlan and Black by judges quite diferent from Burger, Blackmun, Rehnquist and Powell. That obviously did not happen, and Michelman's arguments were decisively rejected by the Supreme Court in 1973. But the real point is that by the 1990s, Michelman's arguments were basically "unsayable," at least by "mainstream" law professors (including Michelman himself). Ronald Dworkin seemed almost to take delight in pointing out in 1996 that his "moral reading" of the Constitution didn't include anything so outlandish as "welfare rights," and most liberal law professors spent most of their time, like Dworkin, in demonstrating how the Constitution, properly read, protected sexual autonomy and reproductive choice. And, of course, it ws Clinton himself who led the attack on the "welfare system as we knew it." Similarly, if Bill Clinton had an agenda in his appointments to the bench, it was making sure that Roe would be protected (even though some of us believe that that has in fact worked contrary to the institutional interest of the Democratic Party). He might also have been concerned to protect affirmative action. Otherwise, he certainly exhibited no interest in the judicial expansion of welfare rights and was, moreover, the most anti-civil libertarian president since World War II, as seen in his willingness to support and sign various "anti-terrorism" legislation that basically eviscerated habeas corpus as a meaningful protection for criminal defendants deprived of their constitutional rights in state and federal courts.

So at what point will the "standard-form" ACLU arguments on civil liberties become equally marginalized and sound anachronistic? When will proponents of such views be told, dismissively, that they are sooo 20th century? And, more to the point, when will the proponents accept their own marginalization and stop making them? We're clearly not at that point yet. But, frankly, Professor Tribe, like myself, is now a "senior citizen," socialized in a different era. There are clearly some younger professors who are admirably continuing in that tradition. I think especially of David Cole and Neal Katyal. But how representative are they? And how representative are Christopher Caldwell and the legal academics who almost certainly share his views, including, say, Eric Posner and Adrien Vermeule? Who will more successfully shape the views of the next generation of lawyers (and law-oriented journalists and pundits)?

Comments:

I found jeff faux's "global class warfare" a real eye opener in addressing issues of the general form "what is the cost-benefit trade for this proposed course of action". to summarize and trivialize his thesis, the super "haves" are operating with such different weights that their cost-benefit analyses have nothing to do with those of the rest of us. bush-cheney-gonzales et al know that whatever happens to the social fabric, the economy, US world reputation, foreign populations, etc, they'll do just fine, thank you. so the cost-benefit trade implicit in the 1% solution will always come out favoring an extreme action with any benefit because for them the cost will be vanishingly small.

for example, any washington denizen (especially one with financial interests in the defense industry) will realize a huge benefit from deterring successful "nuculer" attacks on US cities. some will actually benefit from limitations on civil rights (think secrecy in government). but the economic/political elite have few if any family or friends likely to be in combat. so, their benefits from dramatic measures to prevent terrorist attacks are substantial and the costs to them are negligible.

this applies loosely to the issue raised about young lawyers and their commitment to equal opportunity/civil liberties. they probably also assume they will prosper in the society no matter what (abundance may be all they've ever known). those of us who were young in the 40s and 50s often had direct (altho not necessarily personal) experience with some deprivation (in my case, minor - humble but comfortable origins in segregated texas, though white) and could easily empathize with the less fortunate even as affluence enveloped us; ie, visceral sensitivity to the "cost" of inaction in providing equal opportunity, and strong appreciation of the "benefit" of opportunities largely undeserved (after all, one doesn't "choose" to be smart enough to qualify for scholarships, and admissions then were much less competitive). having little contact with contemporary youth, I don't know what their cost-benefit weights might be, but I have experienced many seemingly young blog commenters who apparently feel that whatever your station in life, it's "deserved" in some sense (or in my view, nonsense) of distorted libertarianism.
 

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If the ACLU doesn't want to be marginalized, I think the first step should be for it to stop marginalizing itself, by dropping the transparent rationalizations it has been resorting to, in order to avoid defending those civil liberties it happens to not like.

I can never look at the NRA's membership statistics, without reflecting that if the ACLU had made a different choice some years back, the NRA would still be a club for sportsmen, and the ACLU would be the several million member strong lobbying juggernaut, with a firm footing on both ends of the political spectrum.
 

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Christopher Caldwell, just to note, is an American, here in DC and a good friend. He is probably best described as a very nondoctrinaire conservative of the small l libertarian variety. He was roommates at Harvard with, as I recall, Jamin Raskin. Long before the terrorism stuff became an issue, Christopher made a career decision to do what few were doing and become expert on Western Europe. As the big papers were shrinking down their bureaus in Berlin and elsewhere in Western Europe, Christopher undertook very serious, long study of the culture and economics of the EU. He was one of the very few American journalists, even among those who supposedly covered Europe, who could speak with authority on internal politics in Germany, Italy, or Spain. Meanwhile, for most of the media, Western Europe became a sort of arts & culture beat - this is what it still is for the NYT. After 9-11, Christopher's was in great demand, in large part because he had been following the question of Muslim assimiliation in Europe in a way that even few European journalists were doing. His series of long articles on assimilations issues that appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Weekly Standard, and elsewhere are superb - one senior French journalist friend told me that he regards Caldwell's stuff as among the best written and researched, in English or French. Kenneth Anderson
 

Ghirlandaio, there's precious little "principle" involved in the ACLU's decision not to defend the 2nd amendment, including it's persistant defense of an untenable "interpretation" of that amendment in order to rationalize the failure.

According to Ira Glasser, who spoke at a supper club I was part of back in the early 80's, the decision was motivated by the threat of some major donors to defund the ACLU if it dared to defend that amendment. I suspect he was in a position to know.

Principled? Not on your life!
 

On the substance of Sandy's final question re changes in generations ... well, my daughter is thirteen years old, a student at National Cathedral School in DC, where she is rather bravely one of the few girls in that bastion of sternly Epicopalian multiculturalist claptrap who will admit to being a conservative and a Republican. This causes my exceedingly lefty wife some level of embarrassment, if not heartburn.

I asked my kid once why she was a conservative, when she takes after her mother in so much else. She said, that's easy, it was sitting at the National Cathedral, the highest hill in DC, on September 11 and watching the Pentagon burn. 9-11 is her living political memory. I then asked what she didn't like about liberals. Again, her answer was immediate - I'm sure she had honed it in arguments at school, usually, I would venture, with her teachers rather than fellow students.

I don't like liberals, she said, because they want to run your life on the one hand, and tell you what to do about everything, but then, on the other hand, they'll put you at risk and let the terrorists blow you up.

My darling daughter probably wouldn't know how articulate this, but I suspect she suspects that the rational for the two things she instinctively dislikes in liberals - the nanny state that bosses you around while failing to protect you - is really the same thing - ideologies of civil liberties and civil liberties that have somehow, in the lifetimes of both Sandy and me, morphed. I have long conversations to point out to her that the police are not always the good guys, that 24's Jack Bauer is not a good person and only on TV do his calculations about the value of torture always pay off; mean old Dad made her read 1984 and Brave New World this summer to make sure she understood that the state is not always good, and Daddy is a conservative.

(It's probably no surprise that the two books Renee has read the most times are Pride and Prejudice and the libertarian Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.) Meet the rising 9-11 generation. Ken Anderson
 

I have to agree with several of those above who find this post too accepting of Caldwell's thesis.

The idea that civil liberties are a modern fashion is, in the first place, ahistorical. The irony is that it is Caldwell, and not those he criticizes, who is blowing with the winds of fashion.

Geof Stone's brilliant history "Perilous Times" painstakingly documents how many times we have plowed the present ground--what is now said to be undiscovered country, unique, sui generis, the world of "everything-changed-after-9/11," is just old political exigency dressed up in new clothes.

The present crisis is always worse than and different from any prior crisis. So we are always told, in order to justify the truncating of basic freedoms. And always, always, always to our detriment.
 

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Many thanks to all who have responded (so far). I offer a few observations:

1) I am glad to be corrected by my friend Ken Anderson as to Caldwell's nationality. (I hope that you don't link me with George Allen in reckless imputations of "unAmericanness"!)

2) I tried to make it (relatively) clear that I remain a strong advocate of civil liberties. But it seems to me that those of us who do view ourselves as ardent defenders must concede that they are not "costless," even as we should extremely wary of accepting the cost-benefit analyses of those who simply underestimate the costs of suppression. That leads to the next point:

3) Cass Sunstein, in his very interesting book on the precautionary principle, indeed emphasized that one problem with it is that people who say there's a 1% chance of X and therefore we must act to prevent it often fail to take into account the costs of the suggested action itself. This, I think it is fair to say, is amply demonstrated by Iraq itself. One can condemn Cheney for his ostensible principle per se, or one can condemn him for his indefensible reliance on "best case" thinking and failing to take into account the potential costs of his own policies. But that doesn't affect the point that if a potential gravity g is high enough, then it is indeed rational to engage in highly costly measures even with only a 1% likelihood of the event's taking place. Richard Posner in his book Catastrophe offers the example of learning that an asteroid might come close to earth. Surely we would not dismiss doing some fairly drastic things to forestall a potential crash even if they were quite costly indeed. Which then leads to

5) We must be more candid in our estimation of the gravity of possible events. One of the first things I learned in the best course I ever had, Marc Franklin's torts class at the Stanford Law School in 1970, was that we factor in what Guido Calebresi called the "costs of accidents" into our decisions to set speed limits higher than the might be, to build bridges, skyscrapers, and the like. X numbers of "statistical deaths" just aren't a sufficient cost to forego the activities in question. We expect people to buy insurance, etc. There is no such thing as zero defects and perfect security. John Kerry, for one brief shining moment, actually tried to initiate a conversation about accepting that the "war on terrorism" would never be won and, therefore, that there would always be a certain amount of scary stuff in the world--the kind that Ken Anderson's daughter alluded to--but,characteristically, he didn't have the gumption to stay with it.

Finally, I am not "giving up" on maintaining a robust form of civil liberties. But Caldwell is surely right that that form does not pre-date the New Deal and, really, post-World War II in the US. Louis Brandeis had no trouble, apparently, upholding sending Eugene Debs to jail for opposing WWI, and the Supreme Court did nothing to prevent the similar jailing of top Communist leaders in 1951. So we have to ask ourselves what are the conditions under which a "civil liberties consciousness" arose and what conditions are necessary to maintain it. I do believe that it wil not be maintained if people get the impression that defenders of strong civil liberties simply don't recognize the potential risks run in protecting some people we have very good reason to believe are quite bad indeed. We need to explain better than we seem to be doing right now why those risks are acceptable.
 

I seldom post on law blogs because I am not an attorney. And I am a particular admirer of Sandy Levinson. But I must take exception to one statement:

"The strong appeal of Al Gore's movie, which I was much impressed by, ultimately rests on a version of the "1% [solution]."

No. Vice President Gore's movie rests on as near a certainty as science has to offer. There is no serious disagreement in the scientific community (apart from those whose livelihood depends on being contrarian) that global warming is happening and will continue to happen... no disagreement at all. All practicing climate scientists who once objected to the concept have retracted their reservations. Only the politically and financially motivated remain. Think what you will of Gore; his thesis in An Inconvenient Truth is unimpeachable. Call it the 99.9 percent solution, not the 1 percent solution.

That said, I have no intention of compromising on civil liberties, however "quaint" they may become. My age has not diminished, and will not diminish, my commitment.
 

Maintaining your "robust form of civil liberties," whatever that means, is different from having any concern about civil liberties at all. Concern about civil liberties has been an issue since and before the nation's founding. To take 2 19th century examples, there were protests of the Sedition Act during the Adams administration and the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War.

Pointing out andecdotal examples of violations of civil liberties in the 1910s and 1950s is not evidence of a present or recent golden age of civil liberties. One can point out such violations in any decade since then (such as the black bag jobs done by the FBI against the Weatherman Underground in the 1970s). Caldwell's and Levinson's myopia prevent them from seeing that this tension between security and civil liberties has always been around, and will always be around.
 

What Steve Bates said about crediting Sunstein with having made a point. Gore's precautionary principle to address a 99% risk of constant planet-wide environmental trouble is to be contrasted, not likened, to Cheney's precautionary principle to address a 1% risk of isolated sporadic WMD trouble. Sunstein's climatology is as religio-politically derived as his biology. Read his take on the Kitzmiller decision.
 

I am not "giving up" on maintaining a robust form of civil liberties. But Caldwell is surely right that that form does not pre-date the New Deal and, really, post-World War II in the US.

The same could be said of racial integration of public schools. So what? The fundamental principle goes back to the founding documents of the nation, and before.
 

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I agree that I made a mistake in analogizing global warming to a "1% solution." The evidence is far stronger than that. I do think that some environmentalists on some occasions engage in such rhetoric, but Al Gore and global warming is not one of them.

I also agree that there have always been committed civil libertarians throughout our history. Only in the relatively recent past, though, did they have enough social and political clout to capture the courts and mold general public sentiment.

Finally, the analogy to racial segregation is double-edged. Isn't it clear that the movement for genuinely moving toward integration, which, among other things, required busing and the consolidation of urban school districts, did not survive the 1970s, when the Supreme Court basically threw in the towel. I do not believe we are in any danger of returning to a formal regime of pre-Brown segregation--and one can point to much genuine progress that has been made in the past six decades since Harry Truman's courageous decision to desegregate the armed forces (at least as important, in my estimation, as Brown). But we obviously shouldn't be complacent about the state of race relations in the US today, and there is no particular reason to believe that the future wil be better.

I'm not sure why I'm being joined with Caldwell, except inasmuch as I believe that his column raises argument that civil libertarians must confront, not least because, as I argued, a "contributing editor" to the NYTimes Magazine (and a frequent contributor, I gather, to the Weekly Standard, an't be dismissed as an insignificant crank. I suspect I am willing for society to accept considerably more risks, re potential terrorist activity, than he is (and only in part becauses suppression of civil liberties, in addition to raising important questions per se, also may end up increasing risks because of the resentment in will create among people who might otherwise be friendly to us), but there does come a point when the risks could be too high. That, after all, is the premise behind accepting limits on the freedom of newspapers to publish upcoming troop movements and missions and the like. For the record, I think the Times was right to publish their various articles, but I take it that most of us would condemn--and possibly even support punishment of--the Times had it, for example, published an article naming a mole we had placed in al Qaeda. Am I off the mark in this last surmise?
 

What do we value?

"In today's Wall Street Journal, Judge Richard Posner laments the fact that the federal courts are available to adjudicate whether the President's methods of fighting the war on terror are consistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States."
 

I very much appreciate Steve Farrar's contribution. I think he asks exactly the right questions, including the all-important "who checks the homework" question at the end. One old-fashioned response, which, as I've argued in other postings, is now out-of-date, is Congress, at least when controlled by the President's own party. We've seen a complete and utter failure to do any checking. So we should try to figure out how to reconstruct a system of "fact checking" in the absence of sufficient congressional oversight. Rick Pildes and Daryl Levinson, in their recent Harvard article, have suggested that intelligence committees be controlled by the non-presidential party, in order to create an incentive to check the math. Or one could create special committees of the National Academy of Science or similar such bodies. But I completely agree tht there is no reason whatsoever to trust the calculations not only of this particular Administration, but of any administration that could have an incentive to overrate gravity or probability in order to serve its crass political objectives of being re-elected to office.
 

I must agree with commenter Gee who said "The idea that civil liberties are a modern fashion is, in the first place, ahistorical."

Prior to the founding of your country Ben Franklin said "Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Ben, you will have to agree, is a pre-20th century figure.
 

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