Liberals worldwide met Donald Trump’s recent border bans with principled opposition, practical help for the victims and the occasional lapse into nonsense. Consider the Bathtub Fallacy, a staple of educated opinion for too long.
Whenever the state imposes a counterterror measure, especially one as brute as the US president’s, statistics are dug out to show that fewer westerners perish in terror attacks than in everyday mishaps. Slipping in the bath is a tragicomic favourite. We chuckle, share the data and wait for voters and politicians to see sense.
For good reason, that epiphany never happens. Leaving aside the many curbs on freedom that governments enforce to prevent accidents — product regulations and tort laws, we call them — most people can intuit the difference between domestic misfortune and political violence. The latter is an assault on the system: the rules and institutions that distinguish society from the state of nature. Bathroom deaths could multiply by 50 without a threat to civil order. The incidence of terror could not.