The sodomy lobby taking out the Mozilla guy has the right-wing cranks out wringing their hands about the Left’s alleged turn toward authoritarianism. It is a tiresome performance that never amounts to anything. The game played since anyone reading this has been alive is that the Left advances and the Right complains. There’s never substantive push-back from the Right, just complaining about the unfairness. There are two interesting things to consider about this incident.
One is the Left has done such a great job selling their alternative history of themselves, that hardly anyone knows it is nonsense. Conservative Inc. accepts that the Left is the home of free speech and tolerance. Of course, the one big idea that sprung from the Left was Marxism and that has a body count of 100 million. If your thing has spent the last century murdering anyone suspected of independent thought, you’re not the religion of free speech and tolerance. But, here we are anyway.
The other thing worth considering is if this is a change in past practice. The tattered remains of conservatism thinks this is some ghastly new development. The Left has been attacking people for unclean thoughts since anyone can remember. According to David Horowitz, the New Left was running off heretics every week back in the 1960’s. Going even further back, the Left tried to ruin Whitaker Chambers because he had the gall to point out that Alger Hiss was a commie. It is rather pobvious that intolerance is a feature of radical thinking, not some new bug in the code.
Anyway, a surprisingly thoughtful look at this last point comes from the very liberal Corey Robin.
In a sharp take on the Left, Freddie deBoer asks, “Is the social justice left really abandoning free speech?” Drawing on this report about an incident at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Freddie answers his own question thus:
It’s a question I’ve played around with before. Generally, the response [from the Left] is something like “of course not, stop slandering us,” or whatever. But more and more often, I find that the answer from lefties I know in academia or online writing are answering “yes.” And that is, frankly, terrifying and a total betrayal of the fundamental principles we associate with human progress.
Freddie goes on to offer a rousing defense of free speech. I don’t want to enter that debate. I have a different question: Is Freddie’s sense of a change on the Left — “more and more often” — accurate?
To be clear, I know exactly the phenomenon Freddie is talking about, so he’s not wrong to point it out. But from my admittedly impressionistic vantage as a middle-aged American academic, it seems far less common than it used to be.
Historically, the Left has had an ambivalent relationship to what used to be derisively called “bourgeois freedoms.” From Marx’s On the Jewish Question to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of repressive tolerance, some of the most interesting thinking on the Left has been devoted to examining the limits of what for lack of a better word I’ll call the liberal defense of freedom and rights. And of course this tradition of thought has often — and disastrously — been operationalized, whether in the form of Soviet tyranny or the internal authoritarianism of the CPUSA.
But if we think about this issue from the vantage of the 1960s, my sense is that today’s left — whether on campus or in the streets — is far less willing to go down the road of a critique of pure tolerance, as a fascinating text by Marcuse, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Woolf once called it, than it used to be. (As Jeremy Kessler suggests, that absolutist position, which is usually associated with content neutrality, historically went hand in hand with the politics of anti-communism.)
Once upon a time, those radical critiques of free speech were where the action was at. So much so that even liberal theorists like Owen Fiss, who ordinarily might have been more inclined to a Millian position on these matters, were pushed by radical theorists like Catharine MacKinnon to take a more critical stance toward freedom of speech. But now that tradition seems to be all but dead.
Something happened on the way to the censor. Whether it was the pitched battle among feminists over the MacKinnon/Dworkin critique of pornography — and their advocacy of anti-porn statutes in Indianapolis and elsewhere — or the collapse of the Berlin Wall, most leftists since the 1990s have been leery of deviations from the absolutist position on free speech. Not just in theory but in practice: just consider the almost fastidious aversion to shutting down any kind of discussion within the Occupy movement.
That’s not to say that leftists don’t go there; it’s just that the bar of justification is higher today. The burden is on the radical critic of free speech, not the other way around.
Yes, one can still read of incidents like the one that provoked Freddie’s post (though compared to the past, they seem fewer and farther between). And critical issues like the relationship between money and speech are still argued overon the Left. But, again, compared to the kinds of arguments we used to see, this seems like small beer.
My take, as I said, is impressionistic. Am curious to hear whether others have a different impression. And to be clear, I’m talking here about the Left, not liberals, who may or may not be, depending on a variety of factors and circumstances, more inclined to defend restrictions on freedom of speech.
The professor cannot be blamed for defending his side by claiming it has been anything but in favor of free speech. That’s just human nature. He seems to have a genuine interest in truth, even if he is a Progressive. His willingness to confront his fellow ideologues is unusual and will ultimately get him banished. He is right to point out that this is not a sudden up-tick in witch hunting. It has been worse in the past. They are not killing anyone this time.
An alternative view is that as the last waves of this liberal flood recede, the hard thumping fanatics are rampaging through the culture looking for a few trophies. After the New Left had run out of steam in the late 1960’s, groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army went berserk and started killing people. Maybe we are in a soy-vegan-latte version of that phase. On the other hand, maybe things will get much worse over the next decade. Worse is always an option.