President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I don't think America lost its mind. At least to the extent that we have always had a tortured (no pun intended) relationship with civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, pretty much from the Alien and Sedition Acts all the way through to today.

9/11 was a very traumatic event, and there was no way the emotion it brought out wasn't going to bring about something of a reactionary response. It is a human nature thing, and I think it was to be expected, even if it was wrong to a large degree. So no, I don't think we lost our minds.

The problem, of course, is that when you give a little on civil liberties as people were willing to, there are always those who are going to try to turn the inch into a foot and the foot into a yard. 18 years later, we are still grappling with that unfortunately, whether it's the ridiculous kabuki dance any of us needs to do to get through an airport or customs, or the Orwellian Patriot Act provisions still in effect (even the ridiculous name used to sell it) that have eroded the 4th Amendment, and all kinds of other things where our liberties have really been eroded. Many of Trump's luddite attempts to hate monger under the auspices of government authority are extensions of that barn door having been opened up after 9/11.

The reason I say America didn't lose its mind, though, is that this push pull between individual liberty and fascist-like government control (often in the name of security) isn't an entirely new thing. The fact that an authoritarian vs. individual rights thing has cropped up over and over again throughout history would suggest that there is something in our nature that makes this a particular difficult thing for people to reconcile.