As the Thanksgiving travel season heats up (hopefully literally – I prefer not to have an icy drive to the Pacific Northwest tomorrow), there’s increasing public awareness and discussion of the sexual assaults being routinely performed on Californians as well as the risky and unsafe backscatter machines. More and more Americans are growing uncomfortable with these intrusive procedures, which appear to be an obvious violation of the 4th Amendment.

However, we’re starting to see a backlash to the backlash, as liberals line up to defend the security state. By doing so, they not only defend what are truly indefensible practices by the TSA – they also are reinforcing decades of similar practices routinely conducted by local law enforcement against people of color.

The progressive response to the TSA crisis should be a strong reassertion of the 4th Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Unfortunately, people like Kevin Drum see nothing wrong at all with the massive violation of our Constitutional rights by the TSA:

But what about our civil liberties? Maybe you think that even if TSA’s procedures are slightly useful, they aren’t useful enough to justify all the intrusion. Instead, we should just accept the risk of an occasional plane falling out of the sky. Think again: if a plane comes down, you can just kiss your civil liberties goodbye. Today’s TSA procedures will seem positively genial compared to what takes their place with the full and eager support of the American public. Given that reality, if you’re really worried about civil liberties you should welcome nearly anything legal that protects air travel from explosives, even the things that are really annoying and only modestly useful.

In other words, Kevin Drum is saying that because a terrorist attack might be successful, and because that success might eliminate ALL our civil liberties, we should give up most of our civil liberties, and allow children to be sexually molested by TSA agents or for cancer survivors to risk their lives by going through the pornoscanners.

Kevin Drum has written some pretty ridiculous stuff over the years, but this takes the cake. Drum basically argues the American people have no ability to stand up for their rights, and that in fact we should just give up our rights in order to be safe. Because of the possibility that a terrorist attack might be successful, our rights to be safe and secure from unreasonable searches should be tossed out the window.

This is exactly the same argument used by the TSA itself to justify these procedures. Importantly, it is also the exact same argument that was used by police and “law and order” politicians to defend the constant erosion of 4th Amendment rights during the war on drugs over the last 30 years.

People of color are routinely stopped without justification and subject to intrusive patdowns. When they went to court to assert their 4th Amendment rights, the courts eroded those rights and upheld the unfair treatment. White Americans never complained about this, because they believed their privilege would save them.

It didn’t. Well before the pornoscanners and sexual assaults at airports began, whites were discovering that by throwing the rights of people of color to the wolves, they just set themselves up to be victimized. I learned this the hard way in 2002, when police destroyed my apartment in the mistaken belief that a bank robber had taken refuge inside. The apartment was empty the entire time, and the cops never acknowledged their mistake, even after the FBI agent on scene said he agreed the cops had no justification to storm the apartment.

But because most whites still believed their privilege immunized them from the abuses of law enforcement, they continued to support the erosion of their rights. Finally, the TSA has gone too far, but it’s difficult to walk back, especially when people like Kevin Drum take to the blogs to defend the TSA’s practices.

Other progressives have taken issue with the “we need this to be safe” argument, such as Digby:

That’s why this is security theater. We are chasing phantoms by pretending that if we stop people from carrying a bottle of shampoo on an airplane that we are safe. If you are so scared of terrorism that you’re willing to throw logic out the window and subject yourself to ever more irrational safety procedures for no good reason, you’d better think twice about ever leaving your house. That, of course, is exactly the point of terrorism. And authoritarian police states.

Others such as Melissa McEwan took issue with the blithe dismissal of concerns about sexual assault at the hands of the TSA:

there are practical and valid objections being made by people with disabilities, parents of children with disabilities, and survivors of sexual violence….Those millions of people are not just potentially “inconvenienced.” Being triggered does not mean feeling hassled or being annoyed or having your feelings hurt or getting upset. It means experiencing a physical and/or emotional response to a survived trauma, having a significantly mood-altering bout of anxiety. Someone who is triggered may experience anything from a brief moment of dizziness, to a shortness of breath and a racing pulse, to a full-blown panic attack.

This seems to have convinced Drum that the “enhanced” patdowns are a problem:

I very much doubt that the “enhanced” versions are justifiable. So unless I hear a pretty good argument from TSA about this, I’d be in favor of returning to the old patdown standards and trying to eliminate some of the pain Melissa is talking about.

That’s good, but Drum does realize that the sexual assaults are happening to deter people from opting out of the unsafe pornoscanners, right? And that those scanners are no less a violation of the 4th Amendment than having a TSA agent fondle your junk?

I’m not sure he does. Drum’s basic argument is the same as those that have been used to defend the erosion of the rights of many Americans – often of color – who see a depressing familiarity in just how easily some white liberals will defend the erosion of rights and personal security.

The solution here should NOT be to just stop the TSA searches. White America has finally learned that their government believes it has the power and the justification to do unspeakable things to them in the name of security. Our job as progressives is to use their newfound consciousness to mobilize them to support restoration of the 4th Amendment for all Americans, not just for whites at an airport but also for an African American in Oakland, or a Latino in southern Orange County.