Are Civil Liberties Too, Well, Civil for Un-civil Times?

In "Blair's Big Brother Legacy" in the July Vanity Fair, British writer Henry Porter reports on Tony Blair's Bush-like erosions of civil liberties. He quotes Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics on the British public.

"People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights [italics mine]."

Presumably Davies means that the public has lost touches with its tyrannical roots at home and Nazism, fascism, and communism abroad. He continues:

"Whenever government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively. . . . The U.S. must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

How generous of him to assume we haven't.

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