Tuesday night’s national security debate featured a timeless clash of worldviews between Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The contrast was on full display when Paul said, “I think the Patriot Act is unpatriotic because it undermines our liberty … Timothy McVeigh was a vicious terrorist. He was arrested” — and Gingrich shot back, saying, “Timothy McVeigh succeeded. That’s the whole point.”
“I don’t want a law that says after we lose a major American city, we’re sure going to come and find you,” Gingrich added. “I want a law that says, you try to take out an American city, we’re going to stop you.”
This clash between Americans who favor a small central government which promotes greater individual liberty and those who favor a stronger national government in order to project strength and defend its citizens goes back further than just 9-11; it’s been around since the inception of our nation.
It was an 18th century fight against radical Islam, for example, that paved the way for trading in the Articles of Confederation for a more centralized national government.
Casting themselves as mujahideen — holy warriors — the Barbary pirates preyed on American vessels seeking to engage in Mediterranean trade. No longer protected by Great Britain, American ships were vulnerable to such attacks — which often resulted in entire crews being enslaved.
The desire to fend off these pirates (as opposed to paying them tribute — or simply tolerating them) heavily factored into the rationale of creating a strong central government, thus empowering congress to declare war and maintain a navy.
As Michael B. Oren notes in “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present,”
Though downplayed during the Constitutional Convention, the connection between the Middle East and the American federation figured prominently in the impassioned state-level debates on ratifying the proposed Constitution. The Reverend Thomas Thatcher reminded the Massachusetts convention that the enslavement of “our sailors … in Algiers is enough to convince the most skeptical among us, of the want of general government.” Nathaniel Sargeant said it was “preposterous” to think that the United States could continue under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation and still defend itself from “piracies and felonies on ye high seas”…
The comparison, of course, isn’t an original observation. But I think it is important to remind ourselves that the challenges we face are not entirely unique. In many cases, we are simply confronting the modern equivalent of an old problem.
The GOP field is fortunate to include disparate voices like Paul and Gingrich, eloquently arguing their side of the debate. America has always had to make adjustments along the way in order to preserve the maximum amount of ordered liberty for her citizens. It has been this way from the beginning.