Legal Commentary

Has there been a secular trend over the last fifteen years towards political hysteria on both Right and Left? Perhaps Richard Hofstadter was correct that we Americans have always been addicted to conspiracy theories and hyperventilated political hyperbole. (As examples of over-wrought rhetoric, the Anti-Federalists? pamphlets surely had no peer). Sometimes, however, I think that general paranoia have been on a steady rise since, say, the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy peddled the ?Vince-Foster-Was-Murdered? theory, only to be matched by the Leftwing Bonkerists? ?Iraq-War-Was-An-Inside-Job? delusion.

But nowadays over-the-top jeremiads about American politics are not confined to the uneducated. Here?s an example from Brian Leiter who endorses a bizarrely bitter indictment of the Obama Administration from Ralph Nader. Leiter argues that ?the Republocrat Administration of Barack Obama? occupies a space between ?between the crypto-fascist right and what in the rest of the civilized world would be thought centrism.? Why, exactly? Leiter gives no reasons for this odd view beyond quoting Chris Hedges? quoting Nader who sighs that political protests are muted because the people ?have bought into the belief that if it [sic] protests it will be brutalized by the police. If they have Muslim names they will be subjected to Patriot Act treatment. This has scared the hell out of the underclass. They will be called terrorists.?

So Brian believes that the Obama Administration ?- or American law more generally -- lies somewhere between Angela Merkel and, say, Le Pen, because "the rest of the civilized world" has more lenient policies on resident aliens and or more generous civil liberties than the United States? That will be news to the Muslims who are banned from wearing head scarves in French universities or Turkish guest workers in Germany who only recently (during the 1990s) obtained a limited form of soil citizenship for their children ?- a sort of internationalism that we Yanks have enjoyed since 1868 in much more robust form. I am not expert, but French laws on detention and wire-tapping hardly seem more libertarian to my untrained eyes than our own American laws, Patriot Act notwithstanding.

But I gather than Brian?s endorsement of policies in "the rest of the civilized world" over Obama's policies is more a rhetorical gesture than a seriously defended position ?- a sort of academic?s tea-bagging party. When a prominent Nietzsche scholar and distinguished law prof feels the need to feel his oats in this manner, does it not speak volumes for the spirit of our times?