When Trinculo, the jester in The Tempest, finds himself forced to share the cloak of a deformed native in order to escape the ravages of the storm that shipwrecked him, he notes that “misery acquaints man with strange bedfellows.” Anyone who has flown after 9/11 can attest that the security line at the airport was already a fairly miserable experience before the introduction of groping and nudity. But does the misery of the airport create strange bedfellows? As the news media continues to fixate on the TSA this week, I've noticed this particular Shakespearean idiom crop up again and again to help explain Americans' growing outrage. From James Fallows to NPR’s On The Media, bloggers and journalists continually analyze the situation with language mirroring that of The American Prospect: “Hatred of the TSA makes for strange bedfellows, with some conservatives now sounding like card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union.”

Except that they don’t. Not at all.

This notion implies that critics on both sides of the political spectrum are largely uniform in their criticism of the TSA and their concerns revolve around government trampling upon civil liberties. But this seems patently false to me. As I noted in a previous post, upwards of 80% of Americans agree that scanners and enhanced pat-downs are a perfectly legitimate or necessary addition to airport security. If this that’s the case, why any outrage at all? Answering this question, I think, allows us to realize that there are two distinct criticisms of TSA polcies, and they overlap a lot less than the media might generally suggest.

In the same American Prospect article, Adam Serwer suggests that many middle-class Americans’ outrage is rooted in the notion that the price of security shouldn’t be shunted onto them or people like them. It’s perfectly fine to torture, to defy habeas corpus, or to approach the rest of the world like a playground for our unmanned drones insofar as the victims are foreign, brown, and/or Muslim. The now nearly complete breakdown of the most basic democratic principles? Nothing to get too upset over insofar as  “it’s just Muslims being tortured and foreigners being detained indefinitely.” Sure, hook electrodes up to the testicles of some poor Afghan boy picked up off the streets, why not? But if you so much as brush up against John Tyner’s junk, he will have you arrested. Those are rich white balls.

 

This helps explain the seeming contradiction of overwhelming outrage against, and simultaneous support for, TSA policies. For probably the majority of Americans, this isn’t about "civil liberties" as much as it is about their civil liberties. And for such people, the solution is some system of profiling based on race, religion, and/or nationality.

Between 39 and 70 percent of Americans (depending on how you phrase the question) support such a system. Columnist Charles Krauthammer suggests in the WaPo that "The only reason we continue to do this is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling - when the profile of the airline attacker is narrow, concrete, uniquely definable and universally known. So instead of seeking out terrorists, we seek out tubes of gel in stroller pouches." And googly-eyed cuckoo bird Michelle Bachmann argues that current policies could be used to fixate on "pro-life, gun-owning veterans who like smaller government and who believe America should secure our borders against invasion by illegal immigrants" while "Osama bin Laden and his friends skate by." (Seriously, what the hell is she even talking about? How could you people re-elect her? I don't understand).

Nevermind that racial profiling is institutionalized racism (pop quiz hot shot: how many more crimes have law-abiding Muslims, African Americans, or Latinos committed than law-abiding whites? The answer is zero. So why should they be subjected to increased scrutiny?), security expert Bruce Schneier explains that profiling would actually make airplanes more susceptible to attack:

"Schneier has suggested that any 'enhanced' screening of passengers be 'truly random.' That means that while the majority of passengers wouldn't face the invasive security checks they face now, every passenger would face the risk of a thorough search. Terrorists can't avoid or plan for truly random enhanced searches, like they can with protocol-, background-, and profiling-based searches. You don't want terrorists to be able to plan their way around your security. You want them to have to get lucky."

We don't actually want to be more secure; we just want to feel more secure. The actual costs of complete security are, really truly, just too high.