Back then, conservatives and liberals were equally proud of the system. They taught their children that Constitutional rights were good things and those rights made us different from other countries. In some other countries, we were told, the government could often jail people without proving they were guilty of anything. In some places, people were assumed to be guilty until they proved they were innocent. At that time, we were not taught the underlying assumption that our system was flawed and was failing, and rights needed to be disposed of. Rights were seen as being just, good things.

The attitude that rights are bad things was part of the Reagan revolution. It is my understanding kids are now taught about our Constitutional rights with some negative tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. The message they are given is that Constitutional rights were a sort of "mistake", and that individual rights are a sort of bad things which just allow criminals to go free. Not much emphasis is placed on how rights protect us all from the government, or why we need such protection (e.g. power corrupts, and governments will always tend to use power abusively unless the law prohibits it).

"Truth", at the time I was schooled, was viewed as being something which came out of a fair process of debate in a public setting, based on evidence. That is, it was something which was discovered by openly allowing all parties to present their arguments and evidence from their point of view. Truth is now considered to be something which is simply "known" by the police, and it is simply supposed to be accepted as such because the police are "good, reliable people", and because they have authority. Under conservative reasoning, whatever the police say is true is simply considered to be truth, and the value and validity of court procedures are judged in terms of whether or not the court agrees with the police. This is called authoritarianism. It is a very different way of reasoning from what I was taught as a child, and it is hard for me to get my mind around it. It also is completely at odds with the logic underlying the vast majority of our laws before Reagan.

The authoritarian attitude has become so widely accepted that it led to the Bush presidency, which suggests some large proportion of the people actually believe the Executive branch of the government is not bound by law, and the Executive is the final arbiter of truth. The Executive can do anything it wants, simply because it has the authority. At the local level, the Executive is best represented as the police, and the police are seen as the ultimate arbiters of truth in most communities. Due process is seen as a confusing and ineffective mistake -- a sort of old-fashioned tradition that nobody knows the reason for it or the purpose of it. Constitutional rights are seen as something that simply helps criminals, as if the founders liked criminals or supported crime. Courts are expected to defer to the police version of truth, and they are criticized and hated to the extent that their decisions deviate from the pronouncements and policies of the police.

As children, we were taught that the American system of justice was unique, and was designed to protect citizens from arbitrary and capricious attack by the government. This was all presented in the context of being a contrast to the justice system imposed on Americans by the British and the religion-dominated states before independence and the Constitution. In those systems, individuals had fewer rights, and the criminal justice system was used to silence political dissent and to attack people for religious reasons. We were taught that the fundamental ideas behind the American criminal justice process were these:

1. If the government arrested a person for a crime, the person had the right to ask the court to order the government to release them, because all Americans are free by default, and can't legally be held against their will.

2. If the government didn't want to release them, but wanted to punish them f