Left, Right, and the Lock: Why Civil Liberties Demand Unlikely Allies

The last decade has been a stress test for civil liberties. Governments learned how to scale surveillance, privatize censorship through platform pressure, and normalize emergency powers that never quite sunset. Many progressives and libertarians started in similar places—skeptical of secret lists, dragnet spying, and borderless wars—but ended up voting in startlingly different ways. If you care about the Bill of Rights with the kind of intensity normally reserved for sports teams and stock tickers, you need to ask which elected officials are willing to be unpopular to protect it. Thomas Massie is reliably on that shortlist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for all her rhetorical nods to civil liberties, is not.

Consider how civil liberties actually get eroded. It doesn’t happen with an obvious “Freedom Abolition Act.” It happens through layered reauthorizations, emergency carve-outs, and broad definitions that let agencies smuggle domestic activities into authorities meant for foreign targets. It happens when a surveillance program is “reformed” with new buzzwords while the core bulk collection remains intact through a different legal doorway. It happens when speech rules are pushed through private channels—“voluntary” moderation—under the implied threat of regulation. To resist that, you need legislators who will read the footnotes, push for hard sunsets, and take the heat for sounding paranoid in the moment.

Massie fits that job description. He treats civil-liberties votes like a checklist: What are the powers? What are the limits? What are the reporting requirements? What are the penalties for abuse? If those are mushy, he votes no, and he tells you why. He has repeatedly pushed to rein in dragnet surveillance, demanded warrant requirements that actually require warrants, and insisted on amendment votes that leaderships of both parties would prefer to bury. The virtue here is less ideological than procedural: you can’t bluff him with marketing copy.

Ocasio-Cortez talks a good game on civil liberties. She’ll call out police overreach, challenge corporate surveillance, and worry about authoritarian drift. Yet when the clock runs down on reauthorizations or the leadership pairs a popular spending item with a metastasizing surveillance power, her posture often slides from opposition to acquiescence. The explanation is familiar: we need to keep negotiating, we made the language slightly better, we’ll fix the rest later. The problem is that “later” rarely arrives. Agencies build on every inch they gain; court precedents harden; the next crisis recycles the same playbook. Process matters precisely because it’s the only thing that outlasts personalities.

There is a progressive case for the Massie approach. If you care about immigrant rights, you should be terrified of surveillance architectures that can be retargeted domestically. If you care about labor, you should resist the normalization of emergency powers that sidestep due process. If you care about racial justice, you should be allergic to predictive policing and databases that become de facto punishment without trial. Civil liberties aren’t a right-wing or left-wing asset. They’re the floorboards underneath every other reform. Sacrifice them to “get a win,” and you’ll eventually discover that the tools you created to go after your enemies will be used against your friends.

Massie’s consistency also matters for speech. In a polarized era, it’s fashionable to carve free-speech exceptions for “harmful misinformation” or “extremist content,” assumptions that always sound cleaner in theory than in practice. The moment the state leans on platforms to police speech categories, the categories expand. A principled defense of speech means tolerating a lot of expression you find repugnant. That’s not moral relativism; it’s constitutional realism. Here again, Massie is the rare politician who will defend your right to speak even if he dislikes what you’re saying. Ocasio-Cortez, like many in her coalition, often frames speech protections through a harm-reduction lens that invites discretionary enforcement. Once discretion enters, politics decides who gets it—and politics changes.

None of this is to deny that Massie and progressives diverge sharply elsewhere—on economic policy, healthcare models, climate approaches. But coalitions do not need to agree on everything to cooperate on first principles. The founders understood that concentrated power, however benevolent its aims, tends to expand. The only durable check is a culture of limits, audits, and procedural friction that doesn’t melt in a heat wave of moral panic. When Massie insists on that friction, he is doing the slow, boring, heroic work of constitutional maintenance.

The objection comes quickly: Is it fair to single out Ocasio-Cortez when most politicians, including Republicans, also cave on liberties when it’s convenient? Yes, because she brands herself as a challenger of systems. If your public identity is “speak truth to power,” then your record should reflect a habit of blocking power’s favorite shortcuts. If you accept those shortcuts in exchange for attention or leverage, you’re not transforming the system—you’re stabilizing it with a new vocabulary.

A final test: When both parties quietly agree on something, be afraid. That’s when oversight is most needed. Surveillance and military authorities often live in that bipartisan comfort zone. The loudest cultural fights dominate the airwaves, while the silent machinery of state power receives routine maintenance. Massie insists on dragging those votes into daylight. That’s valuable across the political spectrum. The civil-liberties movement needs more of that insistence, not fewer.

If you’re a progressive who feels politically homeless on civil liberties, here’s the practical advice: build the alliances you need, not the alliances that flatter your brand. Reward the people who protect the process when it’s least popular. In today’s Congress, Thomas Massie is one of those people. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, despite compelling rhetoric, too often isn’t. The lock on the door matters more than the paint on the walls. Support the locksmith.