“We should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty”.

-Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 564 a

This December, as many Americans attended to their rituals of shopping, spectator sports and celebrity voyeurism, the 2012 fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It has now been signed into law by President Obama. This legislation has attracted some controversy, if characteristically muted, thanks to one of its provisions in particular. The U.S. military will be granted the power to detain citizens on the soil of the Land of the Free for indefinite periods of time. All that’s needed to do away with due process is the suspicion of involvement with “terrorism,” an activity elastically defined[1].

Well-meaning commentators have expressed some shock at the passage of an act that enables martial law and interminable vacations to Guantanamo. America was founded on the concept of inalienable rights! Critics and opponents of the liberal order, however, are in no way surprised at this development, for it was decades in the making. With the NDAA, our policy elites have appropriated a mask of legality to manage the chaos they themselves engineered. The rights once upheld as inalienable were ultimately a fanciful construct, a fiction employed in the service of enlightened government.

As Western democracy evolves and extends its power across the world, its ascendance must be secured and made absolute. Serious resistance abroad and at home will surely be crushed. With hearty approval of the new act, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that America had now assumed its place as a segment of a much larger battlefield for freedom. Old fairy tales of civic virtue have outlived their usefulness in an age of globalism; the new narrative of universal terror assures us liberty and equality forever. A CIA officer-turned-security consultant explains the need for ubiquitous surveillance and government intrusion into all spheres of life:

If we watch – in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, the U.K. – things are constantly at a low boil and we always need to be on our guard…This can take place just about anywhere.

Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakistani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.