Former President of ACLU Discusses Free Speech

The notion that classical liberalism, which champions both the free market and the free exchange of ideas as principles central to the survival and flourishing of an open society, is now more at home on the right side of the political spectrum than it is on the left has gained increasing credibility as the left grows ever more insular and self-immolating in response to ideas which challenge its hegemonic dogma. As the Democratic party and the leftist movement in general have become increasingly hostile to any speech which counters its bizarre, inconsistent and often disturbing (see: whenever a female celebrity discusses their own abortion, a procedure which, depending on your political persuasion, terminates what is already alive or what will at the very least become alive, with the same callous indifference with which I might describe a routine tooth pulling) ideas, the American Civil Liberties Union, long a favorite punching bag of many conservative op-ed writers, has found itself in a precarious position. Since the election of Trump, which is in hindsight beginning to look like the beginning of some new and wholly terrifying chapter in our political discourse, the ACLU has been both embraced and shunned by the left at various points, all for defending the liberties of Americans and non-Americans regardless of their political affiliation. In the winter of 2017, the ACLU became the non-profit du jour for many on the left thanks to its numerous legal challenges to the Trump Administration’s travel ban, with many Hollywood stars choosing to attend that year’s Oscars with a blue ACLU ribbon pinned to their outfit; by August of that year, many liberals abandoned the organization in droves after it defended the right of white nationalists to march in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, even after a demented and despicable member of the far-right mowed down counter-protesters in his car, killing a young woman and injuring several others. For the ACLU to defend the rights of people with views that most Americans, most likely including all of its attorneys, find contemptuous and even evil is nothing new. In the National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie case of 1977, the ACLU successfully argued that the right of neo-Nazis to march through a suburb of Chicago with a high Jewish population-including many Holocaust survivors-was protected by the First Amendment. Although it managed to convince five of the nine justices of the Supreme Court, the ACLU suffered a huge dent in support, losing around fifteen percent of its membership in the years which followed the Skokie decision. That the ACLU has largely defended left-wing causes, such as opposition to the Vietnam War and the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation policies among many others, should not obscure the fact that it has also defended right-wingers when called upon to do so, even if it has cost them financial and political support.

In an alternate universe, Nadine Strossen might have become a leftist icon on par with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and might have even perhaps inspired the same sort of cult-like following which the honorable Justice Ginsburg has achieved. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Ms. Strossen graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School before joining Ginsburg at the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU in the mid-1970s. In 1991, she became the youngest director in the ACLU’s history, holding the post until 2008. As she explained to an audience of around four-dozen at the Rockefeller Center on May 2, however, in the decade-plus since she left the ACLU, Ms. Strossen has found herself often at odds with a left-wing that might have otherwise embraced her as the fierce defender of the Constitution which she has been throughout the course of her career. Though she was ostensibly at Rocky to promote her latest book, Hate: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship(Oxford University Press, 2018), Ms. Strossen’s remarks touched upon a number of other topics, including the news that Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones and several other alt-right figures had been banned from Facebook, which had broken earlier that day. Over the course of her remarks, Ms. Strossen vigorously and coherently laid out her arguments in favor of free speech, while being careful to not endorse all speech as Constitutionally protected, as speech which in context presents an imminent harm to an individual or group of individuals has been repeatedly determined to not be protected by the Bill of Rights. In keeping with the left’s love of claiming to be oppressed in spite of a lack of any oppression to speak of (why do dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different and poorly-explicated gender/sexual identities exist if not to allow one to invent oppression where none otherwise exists?), her remarks also frequently touched upon the fact that limits on free speech have a tendency to disenfranchise minority groups within society, be they Civil Rights protestors in the 1950s and ‘60s or Black Lives Matter or NoDapl protestors today. The left may celebrate when members of the alt-right get banned from social media or from protesting on public property, but, as Ms. Strossen noted, if left-wing groups were treated in a similar fashion, there would be an uproar. A true defender of free speech, she asserted, must defend it regardless of the views expressed or the speaker presenting them. In Ms. Strossen’s view, by consistently attempting to silence those holding contrarian beliefs, the left has essentially locked itself into a self-defeating cycle of outrage, which those holding positions which leftists find objectionable can use to further their own interests. Even if the basics of American constitutional law can’t convince the left to allow opposing viewpoints to be respectfully presented, perhaps the fact that it is not conducive to, and in fact undermines,  the spreading of progressive dogma can serve as a means of convincing them that it is unwise to seek to censor contrarian speech.

Perhaps the most cogent and efficacious remarks made by Ms. Strossen over the course of the afternoon had to do with the Skokie case, and the reaction to it within the ACLU itself. Referencing the book Defending my Enemy, she described an argument between the then-director of the ACLU, himself a Holocaust survivor, and a subordinate regarding whether the organization should defend the National Socialist Party of America or not. Reflecting upon his childhood in Weimar and Nazi Germany, the director pointed out that the Nazis came to power despite the attempts of authorities to censor them. Indeed, such attempts on the part of Weimar Republic authorities merely served to garner the Nazi party press coverage, sympathy, and support. While the majority of alt-right and far-right figures are admittedly not Nazis-though they may share disturbingly similar views regarding Jews, homosexuals, the disabled, and other groups targeted by the Hitler regime-the passage which Ms. Strossen highlighted raised an important point, and one which I have mentioned earlier in this article. By attempting to restrict the speech of those they disagree with, left-wing activists, as well as social media companies pressured into removing iconoclastic or controversial figures from their sites, individuals on the left are effectively working to ensure that such figures receive greater attention, and perhaps even win more converts to their side, than would ever be possible if they remained active on conventional social media apps. While companies like Facebook and Twitter are well within their rights to remove any user from their site for what they determine to be a violation of their terms and conditions, by doing so they essentially give high-profile users which they remove a degree of mainstream media coverage which they might not have ever obtained under normal conditions. Despite the near-monopoly which sites like Facebook and Twitter have achieved over their specific corners of the social media market, the growing popularity of Gab, a social network officially intended for populist, conservative, libertarian, and nationalist users (according to its own financial filings), but which seems to traffic primarily in neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and alt-right rhetoric, is demonstrative of the fact that removing individuals who engage in hate speech from more mainstream social media sites does little to prevent them from disseminating their messages online. While sites like Gab may have a smaller and less politically diverse user base than Facebook, Twitter, or any other larger social networking service does, the fact that fewer internet users are exposed to the ramblings of Mike Cernovich, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and its other popular users is undercut by the fact that alt-right, neo-Nazi, and white supremacist beliefs are presented without being challenged, as they often are on more mainstream sites. While it is certainly not pleasant to imagine the reinstatement of alt-right figures back on Facebook or Twitter, I would put it to any reader that, broadly speaking, it is preferable for our political and cultural discourse that alt-right ideas, no matter how abhorrent one might find them, are presented in as wide an arena as possible, so that they can be refuted and debated rather than accepted wholesale as universal truth, as they so often are in the bowels of 4Chan, 8Chan, Gab, and elsewhere on the extremist internet. As Oliver Wendell Holmes so eloquently put it, “the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas [and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

Perhaps the most unforgivable sin committed by the global left in the social media era is the manner in which they have managed, intentionally or not, to frame free speech, perhaps the most fundamental of rights guaranteed to the American people in the Bill of Rights, as a political issue rather than a Constitutional one. Though liberals and conservatives have historically interpreted elements of Constitutional law differently throughout history, for perhaps the first time in the annals of the United States-as Ms. Strossen pointed out, the first country to even aspire for liberty and justice for all of its citizens, even if the definition of citizen has expanded as our society has grown more enlightened-those on the left have sought to disregard the Constitution entirely. The principles of classical liberalism have not become more aligned with the Republican party or the conservative movement in general because the GOP has moved to the left; in fact, the party has very clearly moved to the right in recent years, particularly in the wake of Obama’s election and the Trump takeover of 2015-16. Instead, classical liberals have been pushed out of the Democratic party by a small but highly vocal cohort of professional activists, committed to reshaping the American left in their image, even if it all but destroys the Democrats among the white working class voters who have formed the backbone of the party since the New Deal Coalition helped Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman cruise to victory in five successive presidential elections between 1932 and ’48. Look no further than attempts on the part of the activist class to discredit Joe Biden, who has by far the best shot at winning over the voters who abandoned Hilary Clinton for Donald Trump in 2016, as being too moderate, too handsy, and for having supported a variety of controversial political causes over the course of his nearly fifty years in national politics. A party which loves to engage in hand-wringing about how Trump has caused significant, perhaps even irreparable damage to the republic over the two-and-a-half years should be attempting to unify rather than engaging in immature squabbling over which candidate is the most “woke,” the most privileged, or the most problematic, among a host of other labels too numerous and pointless to list. While I am not a great admirer of President Trump, his ability to unify the GOP behind a set of policies, many of which are at least consistent with Republican principles, sets him and the Republican party drastically apart from the Democrats, who seem unsure of exactly what kind of party they want to be heading into 2020. As compelling and persuasive as I found Ms. Strossen to be over the course of her remarks, I couldn’t help feeling that the leftist movement which she considered herself to be a part of had been supplanted by a group of radicals uncommitted to any of the rights which she and the ACLU have ardently fought to defend.