Hello, all. I'm very happy to be joining the conversation on the greatest public day of my life so far. I'll say more about that when I anchor the Wednesday discussion on Community. For the Liberty topic: The reforms that Geof recommends strike me as depending on a more basic change: a national recognition that we have to - we inevitably do - accept a certain level of terrorist threat. Conceptually, this is just a logical prerequisite of balancing the cost to security against the cost to public openness in weighing a proposed concealment of information, whether in a specific decision (whether to classify information under the Freedom of Information Act) or in legislative line-drawing (in enacting the State Secrets Protection Act). Politically, though, openly weighing national security against other values would be an explicit departure from a mostly implicit premise of Bush Administration talk around terrorism: that no level of terrorist threat is acceptable, so any openness or liberty value that runs up against any front of the War on Terror has to give way.

The Bush-era conceit that we accept no level of terrorist threat is, as philosopher John Searle once said about Jacques Derrida's work, the kind of bullshit that gives bullshit a bad name. The Bush administration couldn't zero out the threat by purporting to pull out all stops, nor could it ever avoid, in practice, trading off national security against other interests, such as maintaining open flows of money, information, and commerce. But by cultivating the impression that it yielded nothing nothing nothing in preventing terror, it gave an illusory absolutism real political currency. The concrete political effect was that anyone willing to be explicit about balancing national security against other values could be accused of gratuitously endangering Americans (as Justice Antonin Scalia basically accused his Supreme Court colleagues of doing when they declined to strip Guantanamo detainees of all procedural rights). That vulnerability goes way up for a Democratic administration that's willing to acknowledge that it weighs civil liberties and public openness alongside national security, and that sometimes security yields. If an attack gets through on that administration's watch - and an actuarial hunch suggests it's not so unlikely - all the professional demagogues of the right will be waiting to jump on the Democrats' "weakness" and lack of "realism." So anyone who cares about getting the liberty-security relationship right has to care about whether the country repudiates the Bush conceit. And leadership in that repudiation is almost certainly going to have to come from the top, in the form of a clear and candid discussion that tests whether smart really is the new cool.

There are two things I'm not saying. First, I don't think Barack Obama should try to have this conversation right away. People should hear this from someone they trust to get the judgment right, and that's more likely to be true once he's governed (let's hope) successfully through a crisis or two. (Can anyone think of one or two, offhand?) He'll choose the moment, or it will choose him. Second, and this is really important, I haven't said there's an "acceptable" level of terrorist threat, and neither should he. It may be rational in one way to lump terrorism in with traffic accidents and trans-fats as just another way for Americans to lose quality-adjusted life years; but that public-health take on terrorism is superficially smart, profoundly obtuse. Terrorism strikes at a government's capacity to protect its people from organized violence. That protection is one of the most basic reasons to have government at all. Terrorism is a glimpse of Hobbes's State of Nature, the antithesis of political society, in a way that the worst traffic accident or artery-clogging restaurant chain can never be. But to say that it's never "acceptable" doesn't mean either (1) that we can always prevent it or (2) that we should sacrifice other core values in trying. The fact that we can't perfectly prevent it is tragic, literally - the product of a clash of irreconcilable values, and of flaws in the formation of the world - but imagining that because it's evil, we can stop it altogether, is the kind of magical thinking that gives magical thinking a bad name.