Since 9/11, Fear Has Driven Our Politics. Don’t Let It Drive The Next 25 Years.

from the fear-sucks dept

Twenty-five years ago today I was woken up by a phone call from a close friend, who, like me, grew up in New York and, like me, was now living in California. She told me that something horrible had happened in New York and to turn on the TV. She said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center, and I assumed it was a small Cessna or something that went horribly off-course. It was only once I turned on the TV news (and started searching the internet) that I began to comprehend what was happening.

I’m guessing there aren’t many Techdirt readers from back then still reading today, but after a few hours of staring blankly at the TV — scared by what had happened and already uneasy about what the world would do in response — I put up a post saying that I had nothing else to say and wouldn’t be posting (other than to link to some resources). The next day, I was already expressing concern about how the world would respond, and calling out the people rushing to play the blame game. I pointed to a quote from a New Yorker saying “we aren’t in a state of war, we’re in a state of mourning.” But it wasn’t difficult to see where things were heading. Late that night I warned (in a poorly written, rambling post) about how people blindly reacting via ignorance was going to lead to bad outcomes, and how mass surveillance of the internet was likely coming.

A few days later, I pointed to a satirical piece on a now defunct website, entitled: “Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics,” which can be found here in the Internet Archive. It does a great job of showing how basically everyone saw the attack as a chance to push forward their own existing political views:

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being. Those people who have different political views from me ought to be ashamed of themselves for thinking of cheap partisan point-scoring at a time like this. In any case, what this tragedy really shows us is that, so far from putting into practice political views other than my own, it is precisely my political agenda which ought to be advanced.

Not only are my political views vindicated by this terrible tragedy, but also the status of my profession. Furthermore, it is only in the context of a national and international tragedy like this that we are reminded of the very special status of my hobby, and its particular claim to legislative protection. My religious and spiritual views also have much to teach us about the appropriate reaction to these truly terrible events.

That satirical take turned out to have been pretty prescient, right? The politics that won out almost immediately was the pure politics of fear from power-hungry politicians, many of whom squeezed 9/11 for every political desire they had already wished for regarding surveillance, control, and expanded governmental powers. They had plans ready to go in a drawer, and pointed to 9/11 as the reason they had to be enacted. And quick. And much of that is still with us, leading to a much greater cynicism and distrust in government.

That alone helped the grievance politics of MAGA succeed — though, as I’ll get to below, the Mamdani administration in NYC is demonstrating something that’s been sorely lacking for years: a politics that doesn’t need you to be afraid of anything and is built on real love for the place and its inhabitants.

Still, it was obvious from the day it happened that the attacks were going to set in motion a bunch of horrible ideas from the political class. The always thoughtful Radley Balko has a piece in the NY Times looking back at the past 25 years, and noting that almost every prediction made by those warning about how the political reaction would erode our civil liberties turned out to be true.

Civil libertarians questioned these new powers’ connection to the 2001 attacks. Some provisions had long been on the wish lists of federal law enforcement agencies, and it was not clear that the new powers would have prevented the attacks. They also cautioned that if history was any indication, the government would use the new powers primarily for routine law enforcement. They urged Americans to imagine those powers in the hands not of an altruistic and conscientious president, but one with little respect for norms, institutions or democratic principles.

The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, “lone wolves” — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters. With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.

And, as he notes, we’ve arrived at the worst-case scenario: a president handed every one of those powers by a frightened nation, abusing them at every opportunity. Many of us who warned about the PATRIOT Act and the surveillance apparatus it made possible were dismissed and ignored. When we pushed back on centralized monitor and control points of the internet, the “adults in charge” mocked us as “internet shut-ins.” But, as Balko points out, the internet shut-ins had a point. As he says, “welcome to the worst-case scenario” that lots of us were, in fact, worried about.

The piece is long and thorough, and we’re only scratching the surface here. But Balko draws a straight line from the entirely predictable overreaction of September 2001 to today: the media and the political class sold a narrative of fear, Congress handed over a sweeping set of powers without even the slightest concern for potential risks, and those powers have since curdled into one abuse after another.

If the ratcheting diminishment of our liberties came slowly and sometimes without much outcry under Presidents Bush, Obama and Joe Biden, the consequences of all those years of expanded presidential power are plainly visible now. Mr. Trump is using every authority we have given the president since Sept. 11, 2001, and some we haven’t, in ways the civil libertarians had tried to warn us about at the start.

Mr. Trump has used the president’s post-9/11 “national emergency” loopholes more than any other president. He claimed the country faced an emergency caused by crime to justify sending National Guard troops to Washington, and he used a 1903 law concerning “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” to deploy them to Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles. (He also sent active-duty Marines to Los Angeles.) It was the first time since the civil rights era that a president had sent troops over the objections of a state governor. When Mr. Trump tried to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants to a notoriously inhumane prison in El Salvador, a federal judge asked for information about deportation flights and Mr. Trump invoked the State Secrets Privilege.

Mr. Trump has tried to categorize leftist activists, as well as advocacy and funding groups, as terrorism supporters in an effort to use antiterror tools to shut them down, despite no evidence that those groups have any ties to terrorism. The administration has called Americans protesting against the deployment of militarized ICE officers “domestic terrorists.” It has claimed that activities protected by the First Amendment, including criticizing, naming and recording ICE officers, are acts of terrorism.

Mr. Trump and his team are taking full advantage of the immunity granted by the courts. The administration’s summary executions of suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean have been denounced by legal scholars as illegal under both domestic and international law, and as likely crimes against humanity. The strikes have not only continued; the administration celebrates them. Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, according to multiple reports, has openly encouraged immigration officers to use more violence and force more confrontation with protesters while regularly reminding them of their “immunity,” even after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. After Ms. Good’s death the “border czar,” Tom Homan, went on Fox News to warn that “there’s still gonna be more bloodshed” unless ICE critics “shut their mouth,” a threat that’s likely a First Amendment violation in and of itself.

These are the abuses of post-9/11 powers we know about; there are almost certainly more that we don’t. The expanded surveillance authorities have such restrictive rules for disclosure that only a handful of people will know if they are being deployed against Americans. Mr. Trump’s handpicked prosecutors are going after the kinds of leaks that helped reveal abuses in prior administrations, which means more disclosure today is even less likely. And under Mr. Trump, the intelligence agencies have at times abandoned the post-Watergate practice of telling Congress what secret powers they are using.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it’s a good reminder of why we’ve spent so much of the last two and a half decades calling out these issues, and warning about further government control and intrusion into platforms and attacks on our privacy. It’s why we were concerned about draconian command-and-control copyright laws fifteen years ago just as much as we’re concerned about age verification laws today.

They’re all tools for control and surveillance, built to shrink what the public can do and expand what the government can get away with. And every single one of them was sold to the American public based on fear.

But there’s an important thing to understand about a ratchet built entirely out of fear: it only turns as long as people stay afraid. Which brings me back around to New York City. This past week there has been an entirely ridiculous and fabricated culture war-driven dispute regarding whether or not NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani should attend NYC’s commemorations of 9/11. There is no fathomable reason for him not to attend other than rank ignorance and bigotry against him for being Muslim.

For all the fuss and fear — much of it driven by a former NYC mayor who spent many years (including while mayor) leading by spreading fear across the city — the whole spectacle is the post-9/11 playbook running one more time, just scaled down: declare an out-group, never quite say that they did wrong, and insist that “they” are inherently opposed to “us.”

But also, Mamdani is running a fundamentally different kind of politics than the one 9/11 left us with. He has quite high approval ratings, in part because he is governing from a position of love for New York City and all its residents and visitors, rather than one of fear. This is what we saw during his campaign, when he did things like run a massive, fun, and educational scavenger hunt across NYC. But campaigning like that is one thing; carrying it into an actual administration is quite another — and somehow he’s done it.

Over and over again Mamdani has focused on what’s amazing about NYC and the ways he can and is improving it on a daily basis, from the little things to the big things. After years and years of expecting politicians to try to scare you into supporting them with “only I can protect you” rhetoric, it’s astounding to be reminded of what politics of love and community can actually be like. Sometimes it looks like this:

Or this:

You can argue Mamdani is a once-in-a-generation political talent, and that what works for him won’t work for everyone. Fine. But plenty of what he’s doing is entirely replicable, and the rest of the political class should be taking notes. He clearly loves New York City and the people there, and still believes in ways to make it better, not through fearmongering and hate, but through putting in the hard work of actually listening to people and helping them with real problems. It’s also a reminder of what good government can look like.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I had two fears: what had just happened in NY and DC, and what the world was going to do about it. The second one was the one that stuck. Over the past twenty-five years, that fear has helped write dangerous laws, many of which are still on the books, and drive more and more division in our society. And where we’re at now is that a uniquely dangerous president has all those tools at his disposal, and is using them to anger and divide us further.

NYC’s mayor can’t repeal those laws. He can’t stop a president hell-bent on rancid politics of hate and fear. But that ratchet only ever turned because enough Americans were scared enough to let it, and because no one was offering them anything else as an alternative. This week, in the very city that was the primary target that morning, the guy running the city isn’t telling anyone to be afraid of anything. He’s showing up, doing the work, and reminding us of what’s good.

Twenty-five years is a long time to be told that’s naive.

May the next twenty-five years be more the politics of community building and hope, over the politics of fear and division.

Filed Under: 9/11, donald trump, nyc, politics, surveillance, tragedy, zohran mamdani