Pious fraud, or excellent point?

Judge Posner was guestblogging on Leiter Reports for the last week of December. He's had some interesting things to say.

From The Religion of Civil Liberties:

Noting that “the power which the [British] Home Secretary seeks to uphold is a power to detain people indefinitely without charge or trial,” he says that “nothing could be more antithetical to the instincts and traditions of the people of the United Kingdom.” This is a pious fraud, ignoring a long history of abuses of civil liberty by British police and security agencies, documented by the English legal historian A. W. Brian Simpson in his book In the Highest Degree Odious and by others.

Hold on, there, just because British police have failed on occasion to live up to the standards the people of the United Kingdom set for them and for themselves, means those ideals don't actually exist?

I beg to differ. Just because something is difficult to achieve, doesn't mean we should stop striving for it. To jump an ocean and return to the US, should we throw out all of our ideals because someone (or multiple someones) maltreated a prisoner? If one group failed to live up to an ideal, why does that mean all of us should stop trying to live up to it?

Terrorism that kills thousands of people (in time, it could be millions) is less menacing than laws that cut back on “traditional laws and politi­cal values,” even if the “traditions” are only a few years old. An ordinary sensible person would think that terrorism on the scale enabled by modern technology and inflamed by religio-political fanaticism can do more harm to a nation than a law authorizing the in­definite detention of nondeportable aliens suspected of being terrorists. To think otherwise is to be in the grip of a dogma that flaunts its defiance of common sense. Credo quia absudum est.

Terrorism that kills thousands of people, or in time, millions, is not, in my opinion, as bad as destroying the idea that is a nation. The US is a created nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights. You can kill a citizen, and incur our wrath. But kill the idea that makes us us, and you can kill a country. Which of these is worse? I esteem my life greatly, I really do, I place a very high value on it, but I esteem my principles, too.

Civil liberties have real benefits that are entitled to considerable weight whenever measures to increase public safety are proposed. But in Lord Hoffman's opinion, as in similar pronouncements by American civil libertarians, the effort is to place the existing level of civil liberties beyond pragmatic assessment by according them transcendent value compared to which considerations of physical survival are made to seem petty.

Reading the Declaration of Independence, I see a transcendent value, not just "real benefits", attached to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

(thanks to Medley, for pointing me in this direction)