[grandalf]

I think you ask an interesting question... But it's important to consider that during the civil war the US was still largely pre-industrial and there was very little Federal power.

I think a good example of the general trend I mention is from WW2 when the US decided to set up internment camps for peaceful Americans of Japanese descent.

We did the same thing immediately after 9/11 but this time the victims were mostly immigrants who were minor immigration law violators.... but the spirit was the same.

In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.

Many of the criticisms of China that I've read seem to entail that Chinese citizens are dully unaware of the benefits of free speech, or that they are hapless victims of their government. Neither is a particularly flattering picture of the Chinese as human beings... and I'd argue such criticisms amount to dehumanization and early beating of the war drums -- we never go to war against people who are our moral equals after all, and thus we must first dehumanize our enemy by reducing him to the status of a morally deficient, diminished pawn of an evil state.

[DanielBMarkham]

In both cases our values go out the window the minute there is the smallest amount of pressure.

I've always had a problem with this line of reasoning. While I understand that flexibility is given to the executive during times of war, I haven't seen total tyranny by any means. The founders understood that one of the roles of the executive was to take temporary extraordinary powers in time of war. That's one of the reasons for the office. This internment camp example seems especially flawed.

I want to see if I understand it.

During wartime, the national government has the ability (and uses it) to forcefully conscript people and send them off to fight and die. In addition, warring powers have the ability to (and do) use explosives, fire, and all sorts of other means to kill civilians. Furthermore, the government has the ability (and the obligation) to move parts of the population around depending on national need.

Given this, you think going to live in an internment camp seems like tossing our values out the window? Like to tell that to some poor grunt storming the beach at Iwo Jima? The next war where the world loses 60 million people or more, can I go live in a camp without harm for a few years? Hell I won't even complain about it.

EDIT: I'd like to add that I consider Lincoln to be an American tyrant. Having said that, there is simply no comparison with the Chinese examples in this thread.

[grandalf]

Since we have had relatively few wars, war powers provisions are among the most naive and ill-tested of any part of the constitution. In fact the need for the recent supreme court cases on Habeas Corpus (one of the oldest concepts in our common law) shows just how untested they are... and even when there is fairly clear legal doctrine, technologies such as rendition to other jurisdictions often renders the courts powerless to check presidential whims.

I would also not agree that just because something is considered (or found after the fact) to be constitutional that it is necessarily right or just.

To respond to your actual point... consider the sanctity of an individual's private, productive life. If soldiers are going to come through the door and put you in prison, they had better have a pretty good reason. In law, those reasons are very clearly articulated. Most Americans would claim that they consider things like due process to be exceptionally important aspects of our legal system... yet we are shockingly capable of ignoring them when the subgroup being violated is a small minority, and we succumb to the weakest arguments in favor of excesses.

Your argument could easily be used to justify any excessive use of power on the grounds that it's better than being blown up. By that logic, short of blowing up the citizenry, the president should have no checks on wartime powers (and calling something like post-911 a "war" gives rise to the question of what exactly constitutes one).

To zoom back out briefly and conclude, I think the letter of the law and legal justification is largely secondary... we can judge ourselves morally by how we acted in various situations, regardless of whether or not it was currently legal.

War, war propaganda, etc., cloud human judgment. Nobody other than a casualty ever really understands war, and so we are all doomed to reason poorly about it always. I'd argue that the pre-war aspect of much of US behavior on China (from Obama's trade war salvos to Krugman's rants) is one reason why Americans are so willing to embrace propaganda again so soon after the Iraq fiasco.

[Perceval]

>we have had relatively few wars

I don't think that's an accurate representation. We've had a short history compared to European states, but we've packed a lot of fighting into that time: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/crs/rl30172.htm

[grandalf]

We've had very few wars compared to antitrust cases, free speech cases, procedural cases, etc.

[mkramlich]

I don't think Lincoln qualifies as a tyrant.

He was elected -- though yes a significant percentage went to a third candidate so it wasn't a strong mandate.

He did not end up doing Evil Things like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc -- though he did have the misfortune to become President when half the country tried to secede and therefore a civil war broke out over it, and had the misfortune of being in that situation when a rather imperfectly & ambiguously written document was the official rulebook on what he was and was not allowed to do. A document which, to this day, is still debated by thousands of so-called experts as to it's exact meaning.

Also, being a tyrant is not necessarily a bad thing. One could be a wise, benevolent tyrant. Though reality is shades of grey, I'd argue that Lincoln was _at worst_ a benevolent tyrant.

Anyway, the definition or common usage of tyrant has shifted many times. I don't think he qualifies for the one that equates to Evil Dictator.

[DanielBMarkham]

We agree. "Tyrant" and "Evil Dictator" are two different things. I'm using "tyrant" in the original sense -- a person who takes most of the power of the state on themselves.