Pew polls reveal that switching from a Republican to a Democratic president causes Republican enthusiasm for NSA surveillance programs to fall by 23 percentage points – and likewise causes Democratic enthusiasm for NSA surveillance programs to rise by 27 percentage points.

My Rawlsian comrades sometimes accuse me of being too quick to see statist opinions as culpable rather than as being the result of reasonable pluralism. I think these results show that we shouldn’t be too quick to exaggerate the extent of the realm of political innocence.