I don't know if I'm just weird -- but there has been more than one period over the years when I've spent a considerable amount of time asking myself how I would react if this country ever went full-on totalitarian and the price for simply speaking out included the possibility of arrest, torture, even death. Would I continue to speak up and take that risk? Or would I duck and hide?

It's one of those questions I pull out every decade or so, chew over for a while, and then tuck away again -- because I've never come up with a definitive answer. I guess nobody really knows how they'd act in that sort of situation unless it actually happens.

But the one thing I have concluded for sure is that the very existence of torture is incompatible with a free and open society. Whether it's 17th century freethinkers expressing their most heretical insights only in code for fear of the Inquisition, or 19th century Italian patriots cheering operas that were thinly veiled allegories of their oppression by the Austrian Empire, torture forces authentic thought and feeling underground at best -- or makes them unutterable at worst.

That is why torture becomes the defining issue. In its absence, all other issues are on the table and can be freely debated and resolved. In its presence, all other issues become taboo.

But for the Peggy Noonans and George Wills of this world, that isn't the case. In their privileged enclaves they -- or their historical equivalents -- have always been able to speak freely among their fellows without fear of reprisal. In effect, the greatest perk of the kind of stratified society which tends to be created and sustained by torture is the right to act and speak as though torture does not exist.

And that, quite simply, is why Will and Noonan have no clue as to what is at stake here -- and no right to speak in the name of the people of this country.