Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America.

• Author: Russett, Bruce
• Position: Book review

Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America

By Darren W. Davis

New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.

Pp. xv, 276. $35.00.

Wartime almost inevitably calls forth claims to restrict civil liberties in the name of ensuring national security. This theme was the centerpiece of Harold Lasswell's classic i941 article "The Garrison State" (reprinted in Jay Stanley, ed., Essays on the Garrison State [New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1997]) and later in the dramatic form of the never-ending war in George Orwell's 1984. Now, more than seven years into what may be an endless war against terror, this trade-off remains a matter of great concern. Candidates and their surrogates deride one another for insufficient toughness on national security, and craven legislators fear to be labeled as "weak on terror." Opportunistic administration figures seize a chance to increase their power, playing the terror card in ways that range from the ridiculous to the malign. (For the ridiculous, note the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's insistence that state governments spend funds on preventing attack with Iraq-style improvised explosive devices, and the numerous examples given in John Mueller's fine book Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them [New York: Free Press, 2006].) Now, with Darren Davis's book, we have not an essay or a novel, but a highly informative empirical analysis of how the American public has perceived this trade-off since 9/11.

Davis gives us a mass of empirical material: many national surveys of citizens' attitudes in the aggregate over time; his own three-stage panel time-series analysis that enables him to track how each individual's perceptions and preferences changed; and experiments in which he presents individuals with arguments and counterarguments to discover which ones are persuasive. These analyses of individual views are much more informative and persuasive than the aggregate trends on which popular commentary so often focuses. Davis's prose is sometimes too much that of the academic political scientist as he reviews a great body of scholarly literature, but that quality should not deter the general reader, who will find much fascinating and perhaps unexpected material in the book.

Davis examines answers to a wide range of questions that evoke restrictions on particular civil rights. Some attitudes, such as those on racial...