I HAVE SAID in the past that I like Michael Sean Winters and respect his thinking so I wanted to take some time to respond to his October 27th article. I don't have time to go through every part of it so I'll go to what I think is the heart of his argument which he starts by saying:
At Politico Magazine, Evan Mandery penned an interesting profile of Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The organization is devoted to the promotion of civil libertarianism. Catholics cannot embrace libertarianism of any kind but we can, perhaps, extend good wishes to the civil libertarians in this moment of time.
Of course many will be surprised to find out that according to Catholic doctrine libertarianism is problematic, to say the least. My objection to it is not at all based on Catholic doctrine but is due to my conviction that equality is an absolute requirement, a just and legitimate foundation of any legitimate government. I think in practical terms equality is an nonnegotiable foundation of any legitimate government. Equality under the law, equality under rules and practices, equality for the absolutes of material and spiritual right to live a decent, safe, secure life. Libertarianism puts any number of "liberties" over that and has no problem with the use of liberties allowed to crush PEOPLE, their rights, their lives, putting those liberties over any morality that supports equality, democracy and a decent normal life for those either targeted by libertarians or those who benefit from their ideology, primarily those who are privileged, the wealthy, the white, the male, the straight, the glib and telegenic.
I HAD BETTER SPECIFY THAT THAT EQUALITY IS EQUALITY FOR PEOPLE, NOT FOR ABSTRACTIONS, NOT FOR IDEAS, NOT FOR WORDS. I will never entertain the idea that rights, including a right to equality inheres to anything but natural living beings. People are natural beings to whom rights can inhere, abstractions, ideas and words are not natural beings. It is quite possible to discern that those to not only be inferior to other ideas, while many ideas are good, many are innocuous and many absolutely true, others can be everything from suspected of to being known to be to be absolutely known to be dangerous to the rights of People and animals and other living beings. Those ideas can often be suppressed with not only no danger but with the results that dangers are prevented. No one in the world would have been harmed if Trumps lunatic advocacy of using horse wormer to treat Covid-19 had been absolutely suppressed. Many may have lived if that had happened, no one would have died because it was.
He continues:
The question remains: Are Lukianoff's principles right? The answer remains "no" and the reasons are in the profile. Civil libertarianism is a good thing, until it becomes an ideology, an absolute. In Lukianoff's hands, it fits the definition of heresy attributed to Lord Acton: a truth run amok.
How is it good? Free speech is a necessary lifeblood of democracy.
I can think of any number of "lifebloods" of democracy that come before this inspecific, abstracted even disembodied notion of "free speech." One of those is certainly relevant to the claim, the freedom to tell the truth, which is the actual lifeblood of democracy. There is a right to tell the truth, which is a good, there is no right to lie, lies being everything from innocuously wrong to fatally wrong and perhaps most often told for creating harm. I can also note that many things like eating, drinking, breathing, shelter, safety, are more necessary to democracy than any word or idea. Yet none of those are guaranteed by "civil liberties" or the United States Constitution, for that matter.
Without the truth being the crucial aspect of "free speech" free speech becomes the opposite of a lifeblood of democracy, it becomes a sure and fatal poison to democracy. That is true of the only form of democracy with complete legitimacy, egalitarian democracy. The vote of those who have been successfully lied to is certainly not any kind of a guarantee to that, those who voted for Trump, those who voted in dictators and despots who have then ended any elections and immediately abridged the rights of those who oppose them, most of all the right of anyone to tell truths that they want to suppress. Those who toe the party line of the worst dictators are entirely free to speak or write or publish that, true or false makes no difference. Such are the uses of "free speech" when the libertarian definition of that bears its full crop of fruit.
I do thank Michael Sean Winters for so tidily putting it, though, "Civil libertarianism is a good thing, until it becomes an ideology, an absolute," which is a useful point of departure. More useful than anything I've ever heard from any "civil libertarian."
I have yet to read or hear libertarianism which is not an ideology, an absolute, including civil libertarianism. The "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU, various free lance "civil liberties" lawyers - such as Ephraim London who, pro-bono, went after Mary McCarthy when she told the inconvenient truth about that icon of civil libertarian "free speech" Lillian Hellman, that she was a flagrant liar and fabulist. That London's client spent decades idolizing Stalin and the Soviet Union as they not only abolished truth telling and even quite innocuous speech and artistic expression but murdered countless truth tellers and writers and artists doesn't seem to have much bothered the civil liberties lawyer. Considering that and the fact she was filthy rich, unlike McCarthy, you'd have thought he'd have charged her. That is typical of "civil liberties" lawyers, as I've recently pointed out. They seldom if ever intend to be the ones who pay the cost of their clients privilege to target other People. They are generally like the named men in Winter's articles, affluent, straight, white men who have white collar professions, mostly the product of elite educations supported by others fitting those descriptions and whatever dupes - such as me, who stupidly and dutifully sent my annual donation to the ACLU once was - who fall for their PR.
I have come to truly despise those who make "civil liberties" their professional identity as either a lawyer or a member of the scribbling class or media babbeler. I have never looked far into the actual life or professional activities and associations of one which doesn't mark them as an accomplished hypocrite. Almost always members of the privileged class who are seldom going to be targeted for destruction by their clients or those on whose behalf they write amicus briefs.
I'll list those in the article:
Evan Mandery- Harvard College, Law School
Greg Lukianoff - American University, Stanford Law Scholl
Jonathan Haidt - Pennsylvania University, Yale
Nicholas Christakis - Pennsylvania University, Harvard, Harvard Medical
Ron DeSantis - Yale, Harvard Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr - Harvard University
Certainly I'm not the only one noticing a pattern, here. The one out, according to Winters would be DeSantis, only I'd note that his policy as governor and would be president oddly ends up somewhere not that far from where the reality of what the "civil liberties" industry gets us, in the end. If lies and false witness, the promotion of racism and bigotry were not allowed to flourish on the airwaves, on the cabloids, on hate-talk radio and the internet, Ron DeSantis would probably have a legal career such as the on Alina Habba did before Trump hired her. It is certainly the same as that which so many in the "civil liberties" industry represent in court, as I mentioned the ACLU proudly announcing their amicus brief in favor of Trump practicing witness intimidation, intimidation of prosecutors and trial judges. The Nazis, the white supremacists, etc. Who are politically ascendant in no small part to their "free press" advocacy.
Anyone who calls themselves a liberal should think fondly on the memory of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.. who did so much to shape our understanding of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.
I've gone into detail at how bizarre it is for any traditional American style liberal to hold Holmes jr. in that regard because he was a bitter, cynical opponent of much of what liberalism must champion for it to be liberalism. He believed in survival of the fittest and it showed in his work, like his father before him he . He was a convinced Darwinist, what most polite college credentialed People would call a "social-Darwinist" though, unlike them, Holmes had read Darwin and his followers and knew that "social Darwinism" is, in fact, identical to the ideological scientific theory of natural selection. He was bitterly cynical about democracy and only late in his life modified his thinking in reaction to the Great Depression and the rise of European fascism and Nazism. Unfortunately it came after he wrote the decision legalizing forced eugenics sterilization which he privately expressed deepest satisfaction in having done. And he never really much did atone for that. I'll point out, again, that the Nazis, among others, were deeply impressed with and influenced by the eugenics that Holmes decision legalized in the United States.
Since it figures so much in the article and the whiny advocacy of "civil liberties" by these guys, I think the reason that college campuses have become the locus of so much reaction against professor or student expressions of racism, bigotry, sexism, etc. is that those who go there often worked very hard to get there, those who are not affluent, straight, white men often having to work far harder than those who are. They pay or borrow a lot of money to go there to get an education or, actually, the credentials that colleges and universities hold a monopoly on giving them, often their best hopes for something like a leg up, only knowing that those with privilege already have more than two legs up.*
Landing at a college or university with all of that being the case, they then find themselves and those like them and those who they know they're in the same boat with being targeted in ways that make their lives on campus and during their college years far harder, their living conditions sometimes more frightening or upsetting than what they knew before. The university or college they are paying and going into debt for not helping them is certainly more than just a "civil liberties" thing. It is a danger to their future. I wonder if they had more legal and political clout, you can read that "money," if they could not get what happened to them there made into a breach of contract. Maybe they could find a lawyer who would take the case, though they'd certainly find the elite "civil liberties" lawyers filing a brief as to why they should be coerced into dropping out of college. Untold martyrs to "civil liberties." Unlike the lawyers and scribblers who support that result, in the end.
I think what these white men and their allies have a beef with is that Black People, other People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+ People are in the hallowed halls of the conferring of credentials with all the rights and privileges those afford being offered to them and the experience of those People, their lives lead to them knowing that the old slogans of libertarian ideology, the truncated language of "civil liberties" the facile interpretation of "free speech" aren't sufficient in the fight for equality and real democracy. I hear some of them and I distinctly sense that what they don't like is that those people are going to the same places they went.
The experience of the Trump era in which so many so often bemoaned the basis of Trumpian fascism, lies, the devaluation of the truth, the attack on the concept of truth, itself, forces the question of why, since we all know lies are such a danger to democracy, why lies are allowed to flourish under the slogans "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press". That's hardly news, the role of lies in the rise of dictators throughout history has long been noted. I doubt anyone could ever find the first expression of the experienced and noted danger of lies in world literature. It is certainly there in the Torah, it is expressed in Scriptures and other writings from around the world from the earliest times.
You have to be as pretend stupid as a civil liberties lawyer or a judge or "justice" to pretend to not know that lies are dangerous, in no small way dangerous to People and to equality and, yes, to democracy.**
That was hardly a novel concept to those who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, yet they stupidly neglected to make that clear in what they wrote and what got adopted. Of course, since most of them were slave holders they can hardly have been suspected of much minding if false witness was spread about those they never intended to allow free-speech or free-press or any of the other things they wrote into the Constitution. They certainly didn't intend the slaves to have "the right to bear arms." They certainly didn't allow them any of the other civil liberties they wrote into the Bill of Rights. That's a truth you'll get told to shut up if you say it.
We have reached the end of that, it's clear the fascists among us, the white supremacists, the billionaire and millionaire weaponizers of "civil liberties" and the judges and "justices" who have no liking for equal or democracy - the attacks on Voting rights and Bush v Gore prove they are a majority on the Renquist and Roberts Courts - this can't go on in such lofty, Ivy-League law school inspecificity.
We will either drastically change the current notions of "civil liberities," "free-speech" "free press" or we will lose them. At the very least the frequently heard "civil liberties" lawyer slogan that someone "has a right to lie" has to be definitively suppressed.
Winters completed the thought left off above with this statement.
Keeping government out of the regulation of ideas is as essential to the functioning of a democracy as counting the ballots fairly.
Which is nonsense because while a fair vote count is always an essential act in a democracy there are numerous ideas that could be absolutely suppressed or abolished with absolutely no harm to the functioning of a democracy, anti-democratic ideas, for a start.
The idea that the promotion of Stalinism, Nazism, Maoism, fascism, the indigenous American form of that white supremacy are not, actually, a danger to democracy instead of essential to it is sheer lunacy. Winters gets close to that with this observation:
One of the deeper problems with the civil libertarianism Lukianoff promotes is its abstractness. It may be well suited to producing resilient young people, capable of arguing in ways that develop their ideas. But how do the moral claims of the common good manifest themselves in all this? For example, most liberals applauded the ACLU when it defended the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. But what if they wanted to march in Stuttgart, Germany? Does the state there have the right to restrict speech given the uniquely horrific history of antisemitism in that country? .
Well, Native Americans, Black People, Women, LGBTQ+ People here have been murdered and oppressed, enslaved, etc. here. Women are murdered every day because they are Women, Trans Women of Color have one of the highest murder rates in the United States. Black People and Native Americans are murdered on account of their race, often with complete impunity, in our past, AND TODAY. White supremacists, Neo-Nazis, the incumbent Speaker of the House make no secret of their intentions to continue and relive worse times for all of use, my fellow LGBTQ+ People and our fellow People in all of those other targeted groups that the "civil libertarians" want to always wear a target so their clients can always have a chance to do it again. It is the open intention of the Republican-fascist party and a reality in many of the states in the country right now. I have absolutely no intention of targeting the lives of them in the same way that they have every intention of targeting me. Certainly my advocacy for equality of People, though not necessarily their words and ideas, is different from someone who wants to kill me. If civil libertarians can't tell the difference they're too stupid take seriously on any of this.
None of this is a surprise to those who have been successfully targeted by one or more of those, the history of Black People in the United States is untellable without noting their lives living under white supremacy, the same for Native Americans. As we have found in the long backlash against the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, etc. that form of fascism, targeting those without white skin is not in some past but is a reality today. That People of Color on campus might see things differently from those white guys named in Winter's article is hardly to be wondered at, they know a reality that white people might know abstractly though it's clear that the "civil libertarians" don't really mind it, THAT THEY HAVE MORE CARE FOR THE "RIGHTS" OF WORDS THAN PEOPLE IS WHAT WOULD BE EXPECTED FROM THOSE SO PRIVILEGED.
The question such bleating civil libertarians always as is "But who is to decide?" the answer to that is certainly not those who benefit from the inequality of privilege, "civil liberties" has come to be a guarantee of every step forward being followed by some Supreme Court or lower court sending those targeted by such "speech" back to where they started from, if not somewhere worse. Like the Taney Court in Dred Scott, like Joseph Story in Prigg v Pennsylvania, the tender regards for "rights" of those with privilege generally comes with a devastating loss of rights of the most basic kind. The answer to that is we have to make those decisions and choices because to not make them is to allow the worst the liberty to make the worst happen, which is what they want to do.
* I hate to break it to anyone but getting a degree from even an elite university is not a sign of being educated, if you want an education that's a life-long job and, sorry, it's up to you to get it for yourself. Given the vile characters that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. are turning out and into our media and government, I've developed a very strong skepticism for those who have a degree from those preservers and bestowers of privilege, a law degree from their law schools more so than a BA or BS from their undergraduate sides. "Civil liberties" lawyers from them as much or even more so as much as those who tried to overturn the 2020 election for Trump. The stink from them should never get off of those institutions. They should be leveled by taxing their obscene endowments, the money collected given to educational institutions and scholarship programs that lift those targeted by the product of the elite diploma mills.
** In the first version of this, before I cooled down a bit, I noted that Judge Judy is more honest about knowing bullshit for bullshit than any "civil liberties" lawyer or so many judges and many "justices" are. Their professional poise of stupidly not seeing plain truth and even fact is disgusting. I have an absolute conviction that stuff started as a way for them letting off those they wanted to let off, the privileged, the rich, those they knew or were related to. From there that practice was made precedent and it is ubiquitous in the fact that the law is often not only an ass, it is an asshole.
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