Here's something I wrote for my political science class today, thought you guys might enjoy it.
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America Is Liberty
America simply would not exist without liberty. Without the rebellion from England in favor of freedom for the people to choose for themselves, America as the melting pot for all ethnicities, creeds and culture simply would not exist. That is to say, without liberty, America would not be America. Perhaps the name would be the same, but the representation behind the name would be different. Having rebelled against England and failing to establish a nation that guarantees freedom for all, another rebellion would occur. In fact, a civil war took place over the very notion of whether people have the right of the states to choose what their own laws were going to be or whether a select group of men in a faraway location would make the laws for them. Although the war has been over for many years, the issue between the rights of the individual and the necessities of the state remains a contentious one. It is my claim that the rights of the individual must come first.
America is made up of 50 states. Each state is made up of several counties. Each county is made up of towns or cities (for the most part). Towns and cities are made up of residential districts. These districts are compromised by individual people. Therefore, it may safely be said that America is constituted of individuals. There is no entity known as America which exists irrespective of the people living in it. Moreover, the same is true of government. At every level of government, the constituent parts can be broken down to show that the process behind which laws are made, enforced and interpreted is made up of individual people.
Therefore, if the rights of the individual are not protected first and foremost, America itself is not protected. The individuals who now make up the government are not hereditary inheritors, nor are they nebulous appointments. Instead, at some point in their lives, each one of them began as private citizens- individuals who made up a part of the country. Whether they were born into wealth, or had to make their own based on their own merit, everyone lives as a part of America. The electoral process is only true if the results are made public in good faith and the elections are not fixed to favor one candidate over another. This is one definition of how America is liberty. We as a nation have the power to choose who runs our government. Although the choices may appear to be the lesser of two evils at times, the system actually does not lack for third-party candidates and if such candidates have no real chance in any election, it is because no one votes for them.
In recent years, liberty has been curtailed. The argument in favor of this has been that an imminent danger is being posed to the country and to safeguard the lives of the citizens, certain rights must be denied to those suspected of terrorist activity. I say suspected here because for the most part, President Bush's Patriot Act did not allow for actual proof of wrongdoing to be presented before suspects were imprisoned. A person may have connections to a terrorist organization or they may not; however, until such a person commits a crime, they are not guilty. No danger can ever be so grave as to go against the laws on which this nation was founded and undermine all the principles the Framers set forth when they created America. In fact, if those principles are undermined or cast aside, what we then have is not America anymore, but something else. We have a nation that is little better than a police state- a nation in which it is permissible to use racial profiling as a means to determine suspects and apply laws to one group and not another. We then have a nation in which the rule of law is thrown to one side and whatever a person in power wants to do, he can do. For those smart enough, rich enough and fortunate enough to reach the presidency, a justification to use such power would not be hard to find. In fact, because people tend to believe that what they are doing is right simply because they are doing it, a society that does not restrain the powers of its nominal leader will shortly find itself a society oppressed by an increasingly security-minded state who believes that Patrick Henry was a fool when he said: "Give me liberty or give me death!"
The problem facing American society today is: now a precedent has been set. Now one person has got away with going too far in the name of national security (which, incidentally, means whatever the executive branch wants it to mean). The general population- who decide which people go into office and which do not- is largely uninformed and will remain so for the foreseeable future. C-SPAN is simply too boring. CNN Headline News appears to have no direct relevancy to a person's daily life. The Fox News Channel can only provide news as a mean of entertainment. Although we do live in the information age, a great many people prefer to spend their time on things other than informing themselves on what happens in government. CNN's most successful program is the Larry King show, which often features celebrity guest stars, rather than a representative from the state of Illinois who has an interesting idea about solar power. People also tend to think that something which happened a long time ago has no relevance on the events of today. They will say, "Oh, that's a bad thing that happened way back when, but we know better now." There is always, and will continue to be, a fallacy in the mindset of human beings that as time passes, they have learned more and become better people and are thus less susceptible to the mistakes made in years previous. For this reason, the people as a whole cannot be relied upon to make informed decisions concerning their government. They simply will not know which person is more likely to become corrupt and which person will be a good public servant. As such, political power must never be allowed to go too far, no matter what the crisis, no matter what the situation, no matter how pressing the need at the time seems to be. Given the choice between being unlawfully detained without due process for an indefinite period of time or fighting back and dying at a young age, most Americans- I believe- would choose to fight. As long as that remains true, government can best prevent a rebellion aimed at removing them from power by limiting their own power- which at face value, appears to run counter to the personal preferences of those in government.
Limiting the power of government officials must also necessarily mean empowering the public. These two are not mutually exclusive because a power vacuum tends to fill itself with something before long. Given a chance to obtain power, the people as a whole will generally choose to obtain it rather than refuse it. They will then (after the vacuum has been filled) select one among them who they feel is best suited to lead them into the future. This may be determined by meritocracy or by popularity. But in either case, it is not guaranteed that the new leader will be any better than the old one. In fact, he may be much worse. Consequently, a stable government with a system that everyone understands is to be preferred over one that changes all the time and which people simply do not understand or have no say in creating. So when limits are placed on government, they must not be too great or too few. Going in either direction would be a detriment to the populace at large which would eventually mean a detriment to the government itself.
The success or failure of any government depends on how they treat its people. A nation cannot succeed through a government alone. A President cannot go into the White House all by himself and issue decrees to an empty room and expect the universe to magically re-arrange itself according to his wishes. There must be people to listen to him. There must be people telling him what to do. People must believe they have the freedom to act in whatever manner they see fit or the entire country will not succeed. An economy that operates through government preferment and party doctrine cannot succeed. This also means that the leader of government is viewed as a failure because the economy of the country did not do well. Whether such a leader actually has any control whatever over the economy or not is inconsequential. People think he does, so the perception that will fall upon him will be that of a failure. Given that governmental leaders are often concerned with their place in history, it is then in their own best interests to promote liberty throughout the country and to make or maintain a system which guarantees the rights of the individual as a first priority. This is the easiest explanation for why George W. Bush became an unpopular president- not only did the economy fail while Bush had little to no answer for it, not only did the war that Bush began turn into a disaster, but most importantly, the curtailing of personal liberties hurt Bush's popularity so that he is now viewed as one of the worst presidents in the history of the nation- primarily because he went against the founding principles of the nation itself. It may be seen then, that if liberty is abridged, America itself is abridged and the reaction to such abridgement will not be favorable.
Bush's argument in favor of these laws was the lives of American citizens at risk by terrorists. In retrospect, this seems like an ironic statement considering that the lives of American soldiers were lost with no real gain to be made in the end. However, the threat from terrorists continues to be real and will remain so for a long time to come. Although Muslims believe that the best way to live is according the will of Allah, they also believe- fallaciously- that Americans will never able to accept these laws if they are explained to them and that their actions condemn them. From a strictly Muslim point of view, a terrorist action to take the lives of Westerners deprives them of any chance at redemption and sends them straight to hell. This is the sort of irrationality that President Bush had to deal with. The way in which he dealt with it was to believe that suspects were guilty and that they should not be given the same chance to be proven innocent as normal American citizens would. Bush's actions seem to imply that being American means you are a member of an exclusive club and that anyone outside it is not entitled to the same rights as those on the inside. The phrase "all men are created equal" apparently did not apply with Bush. Moreover, it is hard to determine just how many lives were saved as a result of Bush's actions. How many would have been captured anyway? How many would have continued to spout propaganda and never do anything? How many suspects were actually innocent? How moral were such arrests anyway? If the Framers are to be believed, then we must say that Muslims are created the same as Americans and depriving a Muslim person of his rights he is born with is not a step that is very far removed from depriving American citizens of such rights. People, the Framers tell us, are all the same in the eyes of God.
This is how America will not exist without liberty, and this is why government must at all times be protected against itself to do what it believes is right but is actually grossly wrong. Human beings, by their very nature, tend to seek freedom and this is a condition which is shared by every nationality, creed and culture. America is not simply a piece of land within two borders. It is, instead, an idea. It is an idea that all men (and women) should receive fair and just treatment. It is an idea that arose from a departure of tyranny. To introduce tyranny once again in America is to destroy it. It only takes a leader that is inept, stubborn and arrogant enough to pursue his own policies no matter the cost just because it seems like the best thing to do at any given moment. It takes a leader without foresight and without the ability to accept criticism as being an honest analysis of his position. In other words, it takes someone like George W. Bush to destroy what is at the heart of America. The biggest reason why the Republican party lost all across the board in 2008 was because Bush had not done his duty by the nation. The enthusiasm for Barack Obama was not for Obama himself, it was for the fact that Bush would not be around anymore. If one such leader as Bush were to be followed by another such as him and then another, if by some strange chance America voted in a lot bad presidents in a row, then the outrage of the people would make itself known and it may even come to pass that there wouldn't be a president anymore. Thus do all government officials- not just the president, but all of them- need to err on the side of liberty as long as such liberty does not exceed what the Framers had intended. The freedom to murder someone should not be allowed, but the freedom to request a trial and to know the reason for your own imprisonment should be allowed. Any government official who forgets this fact not only runs contrary to the health of the nation, but his own political survival as well.
