Tom's Civil Liberties Blog

If you've been following recent statements by Rep. Allen West (R-FL) to the effect that "there are 78 to 81" socialists in the U.S. House, and that President Obama is a "low-level socialist agitator," you may be getting a strange feeling of deja vú. West's remarks seem to be an intentional callback to the life and career of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the most infamous investigator of alleged socialism in congressional history--and a man whose image has been, in the eyes of the Tea Party movement, completely rehabilitated over the past ten years.

Ann Coulter was the first major Republican pundit to advocate McCarthyism in the public sphere, arguing in 2003 that:

[During the McCarthy era], half the country realized liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies. In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges. Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of "McCarthyism." They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.

These two points have formed the basis of McCarthy's rehabilitation, so it makes sense to examine them separately:

• "half the country realized liberals were lying": False. This does not line up with McCarthy's contemporaneous 35% approval rating.
• "The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges": False. While the Venona cables do point to Soviet attempts to infiltrate the U.S. government, they do not reinforce the majority of McCarthy's accusations.

What made McCarthy unique was not that he believed there were Soviet spies in the United States; it was that he baselessly accused a vast number of individual Americans of being Soviet spies, and did so for his own political gain. The effects on his political career were devastating, and the effects on his legacy--despite recent efforts to rehabilitate his image--are likely to endure. Rep. West, and others who find the general spirit of his political career inspiring, should not be so eager to follow in his footsteps.

Related Timeline: History of McCarthyism

Before the murder of Trayvon Martin and subsequent police coverup rightly became the most-covered news story of 2012, conservative bloggers criticized Barack Obama for his history of supporting Derrick Bell two decades ago, when Harvard came under fire for a lack of diversity in its hiring practices.

The idea that got Bell in trouble was the idea that racism has been a permanent part of American culture--and that it is unlikely to disappear overnight. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the persistence of segregation. Justice Thurgood Marshall's words in 1991 remain true today:

Whether this 'vestige' of state-sponsored segregation will persist cannot simply be ignored at the point where a district court is contemplating the dissolution of a desegregation decree. In a district with a history of state-sponsored school segregation, racial separation, in my view, remains inherently unequal.

You've probably been following the Rush Limbaugh misogyny scandal, and you've probably also seen at least a link to the viral video calling for the capture of Ugandan terrorist and child-killer Joseph Kony. But did you know these two stories are connected?

Limbaugh is Kony's most vocal supporter in the United States, describing Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) as "Christian, fighting Muslims in Sudan" and has accused Obama of complicity in anti-Christian genocide for attempting to use U.S. forces in an effort to assist with Kony's capture.

This is the guy from whom none of the 2012 Republican presidential candidates want to distance themselves--and that's a problem for U.S. human rights policy.

Related: History of the Tea Party Movement

As I was writing a definition of human rights, I remembered a conversation I'd had with several Indonesian human rights activists who asked, understandably, why the U.S. human rights debate so seldom seemed to actually involve the phrase "human rights." If someone is beaten by a police officer, or their free speech rights are restricted, we tend to say that their civil rights or civil liberties are being violated. We don't tend to say that their human rights are being violated.

One exception is when we encounter an issue from America's past, where our culture tells us - correctly or otherwise - that the controversy belongs to another place or another era. It would be strange to talk about slavery as a civil rights or civil liberties issue today, for example, because it is no longer under debate in the United States. Our country has accepted that slavery, at least when it is explicitly and uncontroversially agreed-upon as such, is a very bad thing. For this reason, we see it as an external problem - which makes it a human rights controversy rather than a civil liberties controversy.

As a corollary, issues that are provincial do not adapt as easily to the language of human rights. When we're talking about a specific cultural context, as we are when we discuss Muslim-American civil liberties or the civil liberties implications of the Tea Party movement, or the specific U.S. incarnation of the right to die movement, we are not talking about issues that rise to the level of scope that we would tend to associate with the phrase "human rights."

Neither of these words are especially well-established. Just asserting that there are human rights, without having a shared explanation regarding where they come from, can be controversial. And it should come as no surprise to any of us that talking about civil liberties in this political climate can sometimes provoke a hostile response, even in a country that purportedly treasures them.

I can't easily answer my Indonesian friends' question. I'm not completely satisfied with the answer I gave them at the time, but it's still the best answer I have.

I've expanded my coverage of the history of civil liberties by addressing interracial marriage laws, the history of the NAACP, the history of the Religious Right, and sex as a civil liberties issue.

In most contexts, civil liberties are protected by precedent and institutional memory. The executive branch respects the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court not because the Supreme Court has its own army with which to enforce them, but because it has historically done so in the past - and because failing to do so would signify instability. The principle of stare decisis governs not only rulings, but also adherence to them.

Activism, too, can benefit from institutional memory. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than politicians' enduring fear of Saul Alinsky, a community organizer who died four decades ago and never held public office. May all of us leave such a noble, and gentle, mark on history.

Like many people who have written about Ron Paul's presidential candidacy over the past two election cycles, I've been so impressed with the consistency and uniqueness of his paleoconservative philosophy that I've often overlooked the fact that, if he became president, his policy agenda would actually be pretty horrifying. I explore this in my new feature on 6 rights a President Ron Paul would take away. I know the Ron Paul movement is very net-savvy, so please do post any corrections that you feel are warranted under "Comments" below.

The increasing complexity of the conservative movement in the Tea Party era means that I need to look more carefully at where the contemporary Republican Party came from. Expect a series of biographies of early figures in the Religious Right, beginning with my short pieces on Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell.

I hope all of you have a wonderful 2012.

Benjamin Wittes' excellent article "NDAA: A Guide for the Perplexed" begins: "The volume of sheer, unadulterated nonsense zipping around the internet about the NDAA boggles the mind." It does. (Wittes' article is, I think, a necessary antidote.) But the question of why it's so hard for the blogosphere to get the basic details right cuts to the heart of why civil liberties is becoming an issue in the 2012 election, and in several distinct ways:

1. It reveals Obama's betrayal of his original platform. Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 as somebody who was going to end extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention, shut down the gulag at Guantanamo Bay, reduce immigrant deportations, end raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, and limit the power of the executive branch. He has done none of these things, and it's understandable for some of his supporters to become angry enough about this betrayal that they're likely to read things into the NDAA that aren't actually there. (Glenn Greenwald, who has his own take on NDAA, seems to be reframing his entire career around this.)
2. It provides an opportunity for Republicans. While the Bush administration pioneered unconstitutional post-9/11 antiterrorism policy, GOP candidates can now cite Obama's unwillingness to reverse them as a campaign issue. So far, only Ron Paul has done so--though, as I'll explain in tomorrow's blog entry, Rep. Paul has problems of his own--but the more Obama is associated with post-9/11 indefinite detention policies, the easier it is to present "big government" as an all-encompassing issue involving both fiscal policy and civil liberties.
3. It allows Occupy supporters, and others on the left who are apprehensive about Obama, to clearly distance themselves from the political establishment. This is necessary in order for a broader, independent progressive policy agenda to emerge as a force in 2012--and Obama does need to encounter resistance from within his own party, or NDAA-style concessions will become more frequent and more severe. That's not a slam on Obama in particular; it would be foolish to expect more from a politician.

Some of the best coverage of NDAA has come from Amnesty International's blog, which is well worth bookmarking. They've dealt with these issues globally for decades, and this is a case where the international human rights community can probably bring meaningful pressure to bear on the U.S. government.

Related: A Documentary History of Human Rights

I've added six new historical timelines exploring the history of specific civil liberties issues:

• The Death Penalty
• Freedom of Speech
• Indecency and the FCC
• Marijuana Laws
• Obscenity>
• Sodomy Laws

For more timelines, check out my timelines update from last month.

October 25, 2011 marks 40 years since Philip Zimbardo reported the results of his Stanford Prison Experiment to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary. While the ethical and scientific validity of the experiment has been and should be called into question, it does illustrate how power differentials can corrupt human behavior and suppress empathy. As About.com: Psychology Guide Kendra Cherry explains:

While the prisoners and guards were allowed to interact in any way they wanted, the interactions were generally hostile or even dehumanizing ...

Even the researchers themselves began to lose sight of the reality of the situation. Zimbardo, who acted as the prison warden, overlooked the abusive behavior of the prison guards until graduate student Christina Maslach voiced objections to the conditions in the simulated prison and the morality of continuing the experiment.

"Only a few people were able to resist the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance while maintaining some semblance of morality and decency; obviously I was not among that noble class," Zimbardo later wrote in his book The Lucifer Effect.

Even if the Stanford Prison Experiment had never taken place, we can see its findings replicated - in less controlled settings - wherever one group of human beings is given unchecked power over others. The recent suspension of two police officers at the University of California - Davis, who assaulted a group of seated nonviolent protesters with pepper spray, proves Zimbardo's point better than his own research did.

Related: Where Do We Get Our Rights?

Alabama attorney general Luther Strange has refused to comply with a U.S. Department of Homeland Security request dealing with the number of public school students receiving English-language assistance, including citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants.

As About.com: Immigration Issues Dan Moffatt writes:

[Strange] said he was "perplexed and troubled" that the federal government was sticking its nose in the state's classrooms.

Alabama is no stranger to controversies involving public schools, racial segregation, and federal authority. As U.S. Government Info Guide Robert Longley writes:

In June of 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in front of the doors of the University of Alabama preventing black students from entering and challenging the federal government to intervene.

Because the demographic data has no direct relationship with immigration status, Strange's refusal to provide the demographic data amounts to ethnic profiling--and he appears to be basing his political future on the possibility that Alabama voters will reward his decision to stand in front of the schoolhouse doors.

Related: A Short Timeline History of State's Rights and Civil Liberties