Sorrow

29 September 2006, 0340 EDT

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye so to them; for this is the law and the prophets. –Matthew 7:12

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary. – Talmud, Shabbat 3id

I have little to add to the cogent analysis of those who still believe in the bedrock principles of the United States.

The bill that passed the Senate, by definition, establishes tyranny.

Not the kind of tyranny that settles like a haze over our daily lives or leaves us, like subjects in a totalitarian state, afraid to speak our minds.

This is the kind of tyranny the vast majority of us can safely ignore, knowing full well that we will never be declared “enemy combatants” and, in an instant, stripped of all our rights and protections.

But if that sense of security leads us to do nothing — or worse, to declare this abomination “just” and “good” because it might make us every so slightly safer — then we must confront the fact that we are complicit; that we are morally culpable.

We have sold the soul of our once-great nation (let it be great again) at the altars of greed, power, and fear.

(image source: https://www.kent.edu/photoessays/Sep2002/images/Photo2.jpg)

Filed as: tyranny

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.