Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

The line lands like a trapdoor under the post-9/11 consensus: if you question the security state, you become its next suspect. L. Neil Smith isn’t merely criticizing specific policies; he’s indicting a social script that converts dissent into evidence. The phrase "expected to believe" does quiet work here, implying a mass hypnosis engineered by repetition, fear, and the respectable voices that tell you what a "reasonable person" should accept.

Smith’s most surgical move is the moral inversion in "hand it over to the government for safekeeping". "Safekeeping" belongs to banks, babysitters, and storage units - services you hire because you can revoke them. Applied to liberty, it turns freedom into property temporarily checked at the door, to be reclaimed later. That "later" is the real target: emergency measures sell themselves as provisional, but bureaucracies are better at accumulating powers than surrendering them. The subtext is that the Patriot Act and DHS aren’t just tools; they’re institutional habits with incentives to expand surveillance, secrecy, and the definition of "threat."

Context matters: early 2000s America was saturated with the politics of unity, where skepticism could be framed as disloyalty to victims or soldiers. Smith captures the rhetorical coercion of that moment - the binary choice between safety and freedom, with no room for democratic friction. The line’s sting comes from exposing how the language of protection can function as a loyalty test, and how quickly a frightened public can be trained to confuse government power with collective security.