Although rarely couched in similar terms, both Left and Right agree on the Slippery Slope Hypothesis. For the Left, any increase in government power during Republican administrations is considered a danger to civil liberties and fought assiduously. For the Right, any expansion of government scope and size during a Democratic administration is considered a danger to basic freedoms and fought with an almost mirror image intensity.
[Interestingly, the usual response when there is a change of administration from one party to the other is for the previously passionately held positions to be quietly shifted into the shadows, few government powers are ceded, and the once unacceptable expansion of government becomes the new baseline. A classic example is how all of the "fascist" incursions into civil liberties during the Bush administration have become, some only after rather feeble attempts at retreat, SOP for the Obama administration. In fact, many of the Bush era threats to our freedoms have been expanded by the Obama administration, most notably the use of extra-judicial assassination, including of American citizens outside the boundaries of the United States.]
Because the Slippery Slope Hypothesis is accepted by all the players, the ability to make reasonable distinctions and the existence of "gray areas" is ignored by the ideologues, often with untoward effects.
For the true believer, the Slippery Slope means that any compromise is dangerous. Such a stand can lead to completely foolish, though consistent, positions:
Rand Paul, telling the truth
If we use "gaffe" in its proper, Kinsleyan form, that's what U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul issued to NPR yesterday, and that's what he defended on Rachel Maddow's show last night. He told the truth about his stance on the Civil Rights Act. I've posted the video and transcript below the fold, because I find it fascinating to watch Paul stand by his philosophical and legal stance and refuse to dissemble in a way that would, you know, get people to stop accusing him of some archaic form of racism. It reminds me of the way his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), stuck by his belief that the Civil War didn't need to be fought even when he appeared on "Meet the Press." The stakes were lower for Ron Paul, though -- he stood no chance of winning the GOP's presidential nomination, while Rand Paul stands a good chance of being elected to Senate.
So is Rand Paul a racist? No, and it's irritating to watch his out-of-context quotes -- this and a comment about how golf was no longer for elitists because Tiger Woods plays golf -- splashed on the Web to make that point. Paul believes, as many conservatives believe, that the government should ban bias in all of its institutions but cannot intervene in the policies of private businesses. Those businesses, as Paul argues, take a risk by maintaining, in this example, racist policies. Patrons can decide whether or not to give them their money, or whether or not to make a fuss about their policies. That, not government regulation and intervention, is how bias should be eliminated in the private sector. And in this belief Paul is joined by some conservatives who resent that liberals seek government intervention for every unequal outcome.
The full transcript of Rand Paul's appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show accompanies David Weigel's article. What is notable is that Rand Paul offers principled and almost reasonable arguments for why government intervention in private business is unwise, yet such a stance completely ignores the reality which necessitated the Civil Rights Act. The South was segregated and only Federal intervention was going to change that in any meaningful time frame. Rand Paul, in his efforts to avoid the Slippery Slope has gone off the cliff (though he has since walked himself back from the edge; Allah has a nice summary of some of the issues involved.)
Glenn Greenwald offers an example of someone on the Left who maintains a consistent ideological pressure against the Slippery Slope (referred to as "the policy ratchet" by John Quiggin) and is willing to ride his position right off the cliff:
A primary reason Bush and Cheney succeeded in their radical erosion of core liberties is because they focused their assault on non-citizens with foreign-sounding names, [this is merely a variant of the apparently obligatory meme that what primarily motivates Republicans is racism-SW] casting the appearance that none of what they were doing would ever affect the average American. There were several exceptions to that tactic -- the due-process-free imprisonment of Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the abuse of the "material witness" statute to detain American Muslims, the eavesdropping on Americans' communications without warrants -- but the vast bulk of the abuses were aimed at non-citizens. That is now clearly changing.
The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack). A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations. Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind. The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow "public safety" exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino -- while noting (correctly) that Holder's Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive -- today demand that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).
This shift in focus from non-citizens to citizens is as glaring as it is dangerous. As Digby put it last week:
The frighting reality is that not even Dick Cheney thought of stripping Americans of their citizenship so that you could torture and imprison them forever --- even right after 9/11 when the whole country was petrified and he could have gotten away with anything. You'll recall even John Walker Lindh, who was literally captured on the battlefield fighting with the Taliban, was tried in civilian court. They even read him his rights.
I think this says something fairly alarming about the current state of our politics.
...
It is not hyperbole to observe that all of the above-cited recent examples are designed to formally exempt a certain class of American citizens -- those accused of being Terrorists and arrested on U.S. soil -- from the most basic legal protections. They're all intended, in the name of Scary Terrorists, to rewrite the core rules of our justice system in order to increase the already-vast detention powers of the U.S. Government and further minimize the remaining safeguards against abuse. The most disgraceful episodes in American history have been about exempting classes of Americans from core rights, and that is exactly what these recent, Terrorism-justified proposals do as well. Anyone who believes that these sorts of abusive powers will be exercised only in narrow and magnanimous ways should just read a little bit of history, or just look at what has happened with the always-expanding police powers vested in the name of the never-ending War on Drugs, the precursor to the never-ending War on Terrorism in so many ways.
There is actually much to agree with in Greenwald's post and he is one of the few on the Left who is at least minimally consistent. (The conspicuous silence of so many on the Left to what were once intolerable assaults on our Rights, not to mention to the ongoing Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is telling.) There is a real danger that our fear of terrorist attacks may lead us to undermine civil rights in dangerous ways. Where he slides off the cliff is in not recognizing that the single greatest threat to our civil liberties would be another successful terrorist attack that produces mass casualties. By allowing reasonable impingements on our absolutist reading of legal protections we make successful attacks less likely and preserve our fundamental rights. If we offer Miranda Rights to all terrorist suspects and as a result a successful, preventable attack takes place, our Constitutional Protections are liable to be suspended in a much more global manner than is currently being done on the margins.
Unfortunately, because of the fears of being seen as sliding down the Slippery Slope, many of the relaxations of legal protections are being promulgated without any discussion and without any consideration of due process. For example, I have no problem with using drone attacks to kill terrorist, even if they are American citizens residing in foreign countries; I do have a problem with such a policy being unilaterally adopted by the Executive without Congressional involvement.
One of President Bush's great failings was in not involving Congress in decisions concerning terrorist prisoners of war. Temporary abrogations, in limited circumstances, of Constitutional Rights in the service of the preservation of our Rights, needs to be adopted in a transparent process involving our Legislative and Executive branch. This would prevent the kinds of unilateral and often unacknowledged, ie secret, abrogations of Rights that can most easily lead us down the Slippery Slope.
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