"Stone also identifies what makes the difference between restraint and excess: political leadership willing to maintain legal discipline even under pressure, courts willing to enforce constitutional limits even when the public is fearful, and robust democratic discourse that allows dissenting voices to be heard."
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0 for 3. The U.S. is headed for a real rough patch.
More to the point, what we're seeing in the U.S. isn't really a response to public fears at all. Haitians were not eating pets. Illegal immigrants actually commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens, which should not be surprising given that they can be deported as the fallout of a traffic stop.
The crisis currently playing out in Minnesota and other states was not an undisciplined response to public fears. It's the deliberate creation of public fear using what amounts to a private militia.
Doesn't it work the other way as well? When everything is terrorism then the term starts to become meaningless, a bit like the term "lying" is more or less meaningless now when every second YT video has a title like "they're lying to you about X". So perhaps the endless dilution of the term isn't a bad thing once we get past the initial pain period.
I think that the dilution of "terrorism" will not be very significant in the long term. I think of "terrorism" as describing certain actions that are almost "universally" bad, as with the more-easily-defined "murder". To whatever extent "terrorism" becomes diluted, people will want a less-diluted word (such as a new word) to describe most of the same actions or will continue using "terrorism" as they currently do toward a restricted target audience. If I strongly trust a certain speaker on issues that have been brought widespread attention by or have been highlighted by protests, violence, or terrorism, that particular speaker's usage of the word "terrorism" might not become very diluted if at all for me.
