Have we lost our freedom of speech in America? Numerous attempts have recently been made by the left to demonize and marginalize the right. For example, two days ago we were informed that Al “Tawana Brawley” Sharpton had called upon the NFL to turn down a bid by a group attempting to buy the St. Louis Rams because Rush Limbaugh was a minority partner of said group. Statements were issued by some NFL owners and by the NFL Player’s Association that Limbaugh was not wanted in the NFL. Yesterday, Limbaugh was disinvited by the leader of the potential buyers, Dave Checketts, and today Fox News informs us that the Executive Director for the NFL Player’s Association, DeMaurice Smith, was part of Obama’s election campaign team. Several days ago, the White House interim communications director, Anita Dunn, blasted Fox News for being a “research arm of the Republican Party.” And MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN are not the propaganda wing of the Obama administration, we might ask? Obama, meanwhile is in full campaign mode still, giving speeches in San Fran (Moscow by the Bay) Cisco about how he’s not done fighting all those nasty opponents who don’t just roll over and accept his “change” (read: socialism). And of course, the town hall protesters were demonized for being an “angry mob” (of irate senior citizens?) and the Tea Party denizens for being right wing nuts (who actually believe in the Constitution). We must not forget, however, that all this comes after years of attacks by the left on the free speech rights of conservatives, in particular, on college campuses, where the free exchange of ideas should be de rigueur. Many of our leftist educated kiddies are now full grown adults in the work force, employed in a media industrial complex that is 95% leftist. (I admittedly drew the number out of a hat but according to polls that I’ve seen tracking how members of the MSM vote in Presidential elections, I shouldn’t be too far off the mark.) Should we be surprised or have our chickies just come home to roost? This past Presidential Election, the MSM threw all pretence aside to objectivity and impartiality as Chris Mathews “felt this thrill going up his leg” as Obama spoke and most members of the Obama pander-ocracy felt no restraint in demonstrating what Bernard Goldberg christened “A Slobbering Love Affair” with Obama. Is it any wonder that this narcissistic light weight of a community organizer should think he’s the Chosen One? The arrogance, pomposity and grandiosity displayed in his speechifying should be grating on the nervous system of any remotely sane American, not mystified by this mass delusion. Didn’t Washington, for whom we no longer even have the respect and gratitude to celebrate his individual birthday, decline to be King? Today I note also that Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen, was disinvited to speak at a Harvard University panel on immigration. Apparently, this behavior is nothing new as Peggy Noonan reported in the Wall Street Journal (“The Sounds of Silencing”) on October 13, 2006 :
At Columbia University, members of the Minutemen, the group that patrols the U.S. border with Mexico and reports illegal crossings, were asked to address a forum on immigration policy. As Jim Gilchrist, the founder, spoke, angry students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables. “Having wreaked havoc,” said the New York Sun, they unfurled a banner in Arabic and English that said, “No one is ever illegal.” The auditorium was cleared, the Minutemen silenced. Afterward a student protester told the Columbia Spectator, “I don’t feel we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. . . . The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration.”
“The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration”? How can you have a debate if only one side is allowed to be heard? And we call these kids educated! As Noonan concludes: “Free speech means hearing things you like and agree with, and it means allowing others to speak whose views you do not like or agree with. This–listening to the other person with respect and forbearance, and with an acceptance of human diversity–is the price we pay for living in a great democracy.” Unfortunately, free speech has long been dead on American university campuses.
But let’s get down to business and address the question, which I’ll rephrase: Why is the right in danger of losing its right to free speech and dissent? Or, in other words, why has the left become so intolerant of the right to free speech for their opponents on the right? I think that there are two reasons: First, the left has become so used to dominance in the American institutions of cultural transmission – schools, universities, and the media, that they believe that everyone with an iota of intelligence thinks the same way they do. They can’t imagine what Thomas Sowell has called “A Conflict of Visions,” and that there is actually an intelligible conservative philosophy in opposition to left wing hegemony. I’ll call this “the fish don’t know they’re wet” reason. (I’m not sure where the expression came from but I heard it from Hugh Hewitt on a Book-TV interview.) Pauline Kael’s memorable quote about Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory comes to mind: she is reputed to have said that she “couldn’t believe Nixon had won”, since no one she knew had voted for him (Wikipedia ).
But the fact that the left thinks that everyone should think the way they do because all their friends do, does not explain all the animosity in current political discourse or the desire on the part of the left to silence their political opponents. More specifically, this is a form of groupthink that can occur anytime or anywhere there is an orthodoxy that cannot be challenged. It’s quite typical of tribal societies and religious societies where conformity is highly valued, and it should be rather rare in modern liberal democracies that value free speech and debate, but as J. L. Talmon has pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), this sort of egalitarian intolerance has a long pedigree going back to the French Revolution when dissenters were sent off to the guillotine. .
Noonan asks partisans of the left to ask themselves the question: “Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies?” I think the answer to that question is that the left in America has changed over the years. As I’ve argued in previous articles (see What’s in a Word? ), there is a huge difference between classical liberalism and progressive liberalism. James Burnham noticed this difference in the 1960s when he wrote Suicide of the West (1964). Classical liberalism promotes individualism, individual freedom, limited government, and free speech, whereas progressive liberalism, much influenced by European socialism, advocates egalitarian social justice, the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy. The former is primarily in favor of freedom while the latter prefers equality, and the two are not always compatible, as Tocqueville, among others, was want to point out. By the time the campus rebellions of the 1960s rolled along, our university system was already rife with refugee leftist scholars from Europe and their American protégées, ready to indoctrinate American youth with the ideology of political correctness in its various forms. Political correctness is a form of cultural Marxism; it’s part of the hard left and has very little or nothing to do with the American political tradition. So it should be no surprise that the Obama administration is full of Marxists and communists; so are the colleges and universities that bred them. And it should be no surprise that such people do not tolerate dissent or free speech; it’s not part of the far left agenda. We should recall the leftist article of faith: “no enemies on the left.” As Bill Lind has observed about Herbert Marcuse, one of the founders of political correctness on American campuses: “Coming back to the situation people face on campus, Marcuse defines “liberating tolerance” as intolerance for anything coming from the Right and tolerance for anything coming from the Left” (“The Origins of Political Correctness,” An Accuracy in Academia Address at American University, 2000). Recall also the long list of more moderately inclined leftist apologists for Stalin, Mao, Che, Castro, Pol Pot, the list is endless, and this loyalty of democrats for totalitarians should become quite evident. Leftist political philosophy, unlike the right, is on a continuum, from anarchism to communism, with various forms of socialism and democratism in the middle. Egalitarianism is their core belief. (The right, on the other hand, must always struggle with the contradictions between conservatism and libertarianism.)
So when Ms Noonan observes about the left:
Students, stars, media movers, academics: They are always saying they want debate, but they don’t. They want their vision imposed. They want to win. And if the win doesn’t come quickly, they’ll rush the stage, curse you out, attempt to intimidate.
We know the answer: The left pushes, shouts, and ridicules the opposition because they do not want to debate. They want to impose their ideology on their opponents. Call them politically correct Marxists, Liberal Fascists, or whatever, but free speech is not part of their belief system when it comes to the free speech of their opponents. That my friends is the political reality that we live in. Keep your powder dry!
Posted by markamagi 