Politics & Power Quote by Richard Perle

Perle’s sentence is doing boundary work: drawing a hard, almost tribal line around who counts as “us,” then using that line to reprice rights as a private club benefit rather than a constraint on state power. The phrase “American national community” sounds sociological, even benign, but it functions like a legal solvent. If rights are merely what “Americans accord one another,” then they aren’t principles that bind the government; they’re favors exchanged within an in-group. That’s the rhetorical trick: relocate rights from the Constitution’s reach into the mood of the collective.

The second clause tightens the vise. “No proper claim” isn’t just descriptive; it’s a moral veto. It implies that any demand for due process is category error, not controversy. And “non-citizen terrorist suspects” is an intentionally elastic label: “suspects” lowers the evidentiary bar, while “terrorist” raises the emotional temperature. The pairing invites an audience to treat uncertainty as danger and danger as permission.

The context is the post-9/11 security state argument in its cleanest form: exceptional threats require exceptional governance, and exceptional governance requires exceptional people who can be placed outside normal rules. Perle, a hawkish policy entrepreneur of that era, is translating national trauma into administrative discretion. The subtext isn’t only about foreigners; it’s about insulating executive action from scrutiny by redefining rights as membership perks. Once you accept that framing, the circle can always be redrawn.