Tell it to the widows

Chris Christie's anti-libertarian populism

by Will Wilkinson

Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey and possibly the most popular conservative politician in America, yesterday characterised as "dangerous" the "strain of libertarianism that's going through both parties right now", and dismissed concerns about the National Security Agency's controversial spying programmes as "esoteric". When asked about the views of Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky and a possible competitor for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, Mr Christie said:

I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation... I'm very nervous about the direction this is moving in.

I think what we as a country have to decide is: Do we have amnesia? Because I don't. ... I remember what we felt like on Sept. 12, 2001.

Mr Christie's remarks are illuminating in the context of the ongoing debate over the promise of "libertarian populism" as an electoral strategy for the GOP. Mr Christie's cognition-arresting sentimental appeal to the grief of the "widows and orphans" of 9/11 and his exploitation of irrational, deep-seated fears of further terrorist calamity could hardly be more "populist". And what could be less libertarian than to straightforwardly suggest that "libertarianism", of all things, threatens to enable terrorism and increase the supply of American orphans and widows? Mr Christie, a politician who knows something about charming the public, has probably not committed a blunder. Sadly, his explicitly anti-libertarian fearmongering probably remains the more potent populism.

Of course, on the substance of the matter, Mr Paul's tweet in response to Mr Christie's comments is correct: 

But what about those 9/11 widows? What about the children?

Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic gives it a crack in an imaginary address to the victims of our era's defining violent geopolitical event. Mr Friedersdorf would tell the widows and orphans of 9/11 that, by sacrificing our humanitarian values and constitutional liberties for the sake of a specious sense of safety, and charging fecklessly into a war, Americans have handed al-Qaeda a victory it never could have won on its own. However, he goes on, we can yet claim ultimate victory by refusing from here on to be cowed by fear, by refusing henceforth to allow the memories of the 9/11 dead to be exploited as a rhetorical trump, and by reclaiming our constitutional liberties, all the while assuring our safety by "good, old-fashioned police work".

I've done some violence to Mr Friedersdorf's fine message by condensing it so much, but that's the gist. I agree with all of it, but I don't know that this is what I would say. I don't think this is a very persuasive message without first establishing that 9/11 was an extremely unusual event, unlikely to be repeated. Because the threat of terrorism is so insignificant, it merits no special defensive measures, and certainly not the abrogation of our basic rights. Curtailing our liberties cannot not make us significantly safer simply because we are not actually in very serious danger. But that's perhaps the last thing one wants to say to the victims of 9/11. Not that one shouldn't say it, just that one should perhaps save it for last. 

What do the families of victims want? Justice. They want to balance the scales. I think Mr Friedersdorf misses in his remarks the psychological and moral centrality of retributive justice. As it happens, America has succeeded rather brilliantly in taking down the bastards who conspired to take down the World Trade Center. And wasn't that always the real task? Now that justice has been done, and the honour of our dead thereby secured, we must restore our political order to normality and get on with our lives. When there is murder, we bring the murderer to justice and carry on with the dignity of our ideals intact. We do not panic. We do not lose our heads in craven desperation for total safety. We do not declare an indefinite "war on murder", and use the small but ever-present threat of murder to justify, say, the comprehensive monitoring of communications and, thereby, the abolition of private life. We don't do that. To do so would exceed the demands of justice, and amount to a fresh and monstrous injustice. To use the memory of a terrible crime to perpetrate further crime is to dishonour the original victim and ourselves. To demand that the NSA simmer down and rein it in is not to dismiss or minimise the suffering of, or injustice done to, the victims of terrorism, but is to defend the honour of their memory and the dignity of their survivors, which the rights of our constitution were instituted to secure. To enable the gutting of basic constitutional protections by insinuating that those who would defend them are somehow the allies of terror, and therefore need to explain themselves to the victims of terrorism, is a revolting inversion. It is Mr Christie who needs to explain to the survivors of 9/11 why he insists on overshooting the mark of justice, churning the mass grave of the honoured dead, and suggesting that those who have suffered and lost, because they have suffered and lost, can be counted on to abet the theft of their own rights.

That's what I think. I'd like to believe a good number of conservatives would rally around this sort of message, but I certainly don't understand the conservative mind as well as Mr Christie does, and I fear that America remains the sort of place in which this sort of table-turning effort might be received by a popular conservative politician less as a challenge than as a gift.