Ross Douthat: In 2006, Gallup asked the public whether the government posed an "immediate threat" to Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans agreed, versus 57 percent of Democrats. In 2010, they asked again. This time, 21 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent of Republicans.
It's a mistake to characterize the survey results in the way that Douthat has done here. According to their framework, shifts in public concern are akin to the way someone might temporarily lose interest in football when their favorite team has a bad year, only to return with great enthusiasm when the team turns things around. I don't think public concern for civil liberties waxes and wanes like this -- it's more like a permanent slump. It's just not something that drives people to the polls, which is in no small part what drives elections in this country. In 2003, you commented on the Jose Padilla case: The public pressure on this is the reason they had to go public. Hopefully this will serve as a lesson in the future to those whose family members may be detained without reason. The Internet is your friend. Get as many eyes on the situation as possible. You now have the power to do that.
But clearly it's not something that motivates a critical mass of voters; this was shown just this month in the case of Russ Feingold, whose leadership on civil liberties failed to move his constituents to action: Incidentally, the "libertarians" are out showing their true colors on the Reason blog, talking about how it's "almost" a shame and ignorantly overemphasizing Citizen's United in favor of the countless times Feingold has stood for individual rights - likely because none of those people actually cares about individual rights enough to have ever followed a Congressional debate on that subject closely enough to recognize his name or understand his actual position.
The variation expressed by the Gallup surveys is attributable to the subject's utility as a weapon of the opposition party. But it's a blunt weapon -- more like a relay baton, really, or one of those toy rifles that a majorette or color guard might use in their routines. Other policy issues surely exhibit similar patterns (of shifting to the opposition party). By analyzing large scale, fine-grained temporal data, such as the time devoted to a topic on TV news, I'd expect you could find additional sub-patterns relating to shifts in interest relative to the election cycle. Consider Obama's presidential campaign as the opposition candidate -- The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting.
-- and then his first acts as President ("We Will Close Gitmo!", "We Will Hold Trials!"). And now look at where we are: Despite clearly promising to grant habeas to enemy combatants, Holder and Obama now insist that they never intended to do any such thing. Only the prisoners who happen to be housed in Guantanamo, they say, have a right to court. Prisoners who were shipped anywhere else have an entirely different set of legal rights -- which is to say, none at all.
See also, from the archive, the late Tony Judt: Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren't normally short. It isn't a useful attribute. Steadily from the 1950s onwards the influence of the street, of the media, newspapers, public opinion, of ideology, was pushed further and further away from the actual decision-making processes. In the end it wouldn't matter very much anymore if you threw out the government since it wouldn't change the fundamental policies, institutions, laws of the country or direction of the majority of the issues of public policy. It's only now that we are really seeing the results of a process that has been going on for a long time.
Civil Liberties As A Pet Concern of the Opposition | 
