Setting Limits on Tolerance

Eugene Volokh has done a paper on slippery slopes, on which I aim to comment one day. But Charles Krauthammer yesterday did a column, Setting Limits on Tolerance, in which he said this:

"Call it situational libertarianism: Liberties should be as unlimited as possible -- unless and until there arises a real threat to the open society. Neo-Nazis are pathetic losers. Why curtail civil liberties to stop them? But when a real threat -- such as jihadism -- arises, a liberal democratic society must deploy every resource, including the repressive powers of the state, to deter and defeat those who would abolish liberal democracy.

Civil libertarians go crazy when you make this argument. Beware the slippery slope, they warn. You start with a snoop in a library, and you end up with Big Brother in your living room.

The problem with this argument is that it is refuted by American history. There is no slippery slope, only a shifting line between liberty and security that responds to existential threats."

I hope to start a dialog between the two conservative/libertarian types, particularly given Volokh's post today on First Amendment rights on which I commented. J.S.Mills observed somewhere that it's easy to be tolerant of those obviously in error and too weak to pose a threat. The test, he thought, was when your opponent was formidable.

I suspect Krauthammer is right as a matter of history--we do waver back and forth on the bounds of tolerance. Volokh may be right that as a matter of intellectual rigor and honesty, there should be a slippery slope. But people are neither rigorous nor honest.