a meeting of the minds

On his blog for the Atlantic Online today ("The Daily Dish"), conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan gives a shout out to Glenn Greenwald's new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs Evil Mentality Destroyed the American Presidency. (The book is available here and will be officially released on 26 June.)

Greenwald is certainly a leftist, and Sullivan, though I'm sure neoconservatives have labelled him as a liberal, is a prolific and well-respected conservative writer. And yet, very tellingly, they find common ground on this issue.

Here are some excerpts from Sullivan's post:

And yet this tale of Manicheanism gone awry, of a utopian vision ending in a dystopia, of the terrible dangers of any moral crusade that sanctifies "any method necessary" (in Giuliani's language) in its well-intentioned pursuit of evil is not a new story...

The genius of the American constitution, however, is that it provides the framework for such immoral moralism to be checked and moderated. Alas, we have also seen these past few years how dependent such a system is on the integrity and courage of the people in it.
It depends on an elite willing to stand up against their own power, and it depends on a people alert to the erosion of their freedom. Today, both guardrails against tyranny appear weakened, and the pushback against a radically authoritarian executive has been weak...[W]e have a people seemingly content to watch freedom being stripped from them - because, right now, it's mainly people with brown skin and funny names being railroaded by the executive branch. Al-Marri and Padilla can be distanced...

There is still a chance to repair the damage - but given how much we have lost since 9/11, the constitutional consequences of another major attack are likely to be terminal to the American experiment in liberty. If a Giuliani or a Cheney is in power on such a day, we can kiss goodbye to the constitution. If I sound overly alarmed by what has happened to American liberty, it's because I honestly didn't expect to see habeas corpus, the most basic freedom we have, so casually thrown away and torture so casually enshrined in the American system. I never believed an American president would not only claim but exercise the power to detain any person in America and jail and torture them with impunity - indefinitely. But these are the facts.

(Interesting thing I just learned, too - Andrew Sullivan was born and raised in the UK, and though he has been living in the US since 1984, he is unable to become an American citizen on the grounds that he is HIV positive. Nice policy.)