The Soft-on-Security Issue Returns

The Soft-on-Security Issue Returns

Can liberals be trusted to fight the real world's threats from urban crime and overseas terrorism?

By Daniel Henninger

 

Sometimes the planets of politics align. Within days of President Obama's decision last week to appoint a civil-liberties "adversary" inside the U.S.'s antiterrorism surveillance program, a federal judge created a "monitor" to oversee the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk anticrime program. Both these decisions, if allowed to take full effect, run a significant risk that violence will return or increase—as the terrorism of al Qaeda or as murder and assault in New York City.

If that happens—and don't bet against it—a liberal president and a liberal federal judge will have brought back to life one of modern liberalism's worst nightmares: the belief that Democrats can't be trusted with national security or the control of violent crime. They're soft on security.

In New York City a handful of Democrats—canaries in the party's mine shaft—are competing to succeed Mike Bloomberg. For months, New Yorkers of all political persuasions have been asking sotto voce if the city's 20-year miracle of urban tranquility under Rudy Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg will vanish if a left-wing Democrat (the city allows no other kind) becomes mayor.

The subject can't be avoided because the city's irrepressible, activist left made weakening the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policies a litmus test for winning the Democratic primary next month. All the Democratic candidates have saluted the movement to downgrade stop-and-frisk.

A liberal Democratic mayor is unsettling for New Yorkers who've lived in the city long enough not to have to Google the meaning of "Bernhard Goetz" or explain the legendary New York Post headline—"Dave, Do Something!" (shown nearby).

Mr. Goetz was the vigilante who shot several muggers on a subway train in 1984. "Dave" was Mayor David Dinkins, who in the early 1990s presided over a city in the grip of civic disorder.

A totemic figure from this dystopian period was an Upper West Side mental patient named Larry Hogue. I've always thought that Larry Hogue got Rudy Giuliani elected. Hogue, a deinstitutionalized psychotic, prowled the famously liberal Upper West Side streets off and on for 20 years, hurling concrete at car windshields and once shoving a girl in front of a truck. The city couldn't or wouldn't do anything about him. There's no way former federal prosecutor Giuliani could have become mayor in 1994 unless a lot of Upper West Siders voted for Rudy—then walked outside to tell their friends, "Of course, I voted for Dinkins."

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin decided not to wait for the November mayoral election to bring back the 1980s, or even the 1960s. That's when criticism of liberal belief on security matters emerged, notably in Richard Nixon's victorious 1968 "law and order" campaign. This critique argues that when liberals weigh the reality of physical threat to home and hearth against hyper-abstract interpretations of constitutional rights, abstraction wins. The Scheindlin decision, handed down Monday, is a classic of liberal abstraction on security.

New York has its lowest murder rate since the early 1960s, a big reason for the city's 50 million meandering tourists last year. This tranquility of pedestrian life is presumably one point of an effective policing strategy. Ask Chicago. Not so for Judge Scheindlin, who discusses murder in footnote 210. She describes a "17% drop in index crime reports between 2003 and 2012, and a 30% drop in reported murders." No matter. "I emphasize again," the judge insists, "that this Opinion takes no position on whether stop and frisk contributed to the decline in crime." And why is that, one might ask? Judge Scheindlin explains: "This court's mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool."

That's a cue for the umpteenth citation of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson's dictum that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But why bother? This divide between liberal principle and life on the street—or foreign danger —will never be bridged. Rather than strike a balance, a modus vivendi, liberals compulsively pull back too far on security. That's what Judge Scheindlin has done on urban crime and what Mr. Obama now looks to be doing on terror.

First came the president's May speech at the National Defense College, of all places, which next-day reports described as winding down the war on terror, specifically by suggesting an end to Congress's formal 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force against terrorists.

Then, in last Friday's announcement on surveillance, Mr. Obama said he would work with Congress, civil libertarians, a privacy advocate and an outside task force to achieve "constraints" on the surveillance program and the Patriot Act. As if commanded by DNA, a liberal president takes his inevitable plunge into national-security abstraction (with random conservative philosophes hanging on for the swan dive).

Except at the far left and right, people believe security is government's first obligation. In the 1990s, New York City's voters tossed out Democrats ideologically unable to provide security. Voters know that crime and terror are real. And that unopposed, violent crime and terror always return. Judge Scheindlin and President Obama have answered the liberal siren song of a world without violence. Come 2016, the last thing voters may be looking for is a Democrat, no matter who she is.

A version of this article appeared August 15, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Soft-on-Security Issue Returns.