ACLU has been subverted by political correctness, mob mentality of internet, and the do-gooder activists. ACLU is a perfect example on how we ended up in the through the looking glass world.
Here's an interesting bit:
> The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown. With too few police officers who reacted too passively, the demonstration turned ugly and violent; in addition to fistfights, the far right loosed anti-Semitic and racist chants and a right-wing demonstrator plowed his car into counterprotesters, killing a woman. Dozens were injured in the tumult.
> Revulsion swelled within the A.C.L.U., and many assailed its executive director, Anthony Romero, and legal director, Mr. Cole, as privileged and clueless. The A.C.L.U. unfurled new guidelines that suggested lawyers should balance taking a free speech case representing right-wing groups whose “values are contrary to our values” against the potential such a case might give “offense to marginalized groups.”
That's not political correctness, that's ideals colliding head-on with the grim reality. The real world isn't a Disney movie, and doing the "right thing" doesn't magically make everything work out positively.
So the Virginia ACLU defended the freedom of speech of Nazis, and the Nazis did what Nazis do and ran over people they didn't like, killing a woman. At that point a lot of people started asking themselves "Are we really being a positive influence?". And a conflict began.
I see this as a conflict between deontology and consequentialism. Deontology says "free speech was defended, the outcome doesn't matter. Let's keep going". But it turns out that deontology isn't that great of a fit for the real world, because people do care about consequences very intensely. Few have the iron-clad nerve needed to say "an innocent died as the consequence of my/my group's actions, and nevertheless I wouldn't change a thing".
I think the major difference now vs the 70s is that news spread far wider, and consequences are communicated far better and more viscerally.
I can see why this discussion's turned ugly, but it can't NOT be ugly. None of this is hypothetical. It's blown up because the aforementioned Nazis worked out that they could compel the ACLU to effectively become a Nazi ally and devote their forces to the cause of terrorism. Under the ground rules of what the ACLU is, if properly managed, the organization can be used to clear the way for violence and actions that are not on brand for the ACLU, and not what it thinks of as 'civil liberty'.
This is a clever sort of meta-gaming thing, but it's also an obvious existential crisis for the ACLU to the extent that the ACLU cares at all about terrorism. I think there's an assumption that we can define some things with a bright line never to be infringed upon, and that there will never be exploits to undermine our assumptions.
And I mean, that's not even true for mathematical proof, much less free-speech liberalism.
Nope. It becomes a side-taking issue when sides are taken in a self-directed manner, rather than indiscriminate support. eg When the UN medics treat warlord soldiers after they have been left behind, the UN has not "taken sides".
I see this all the time in the so-called "paradox of tolerance", which is of course only a paradox if you assume a consequentialist framework as unstated background assumption.
Personally, I feel asking people to make personal consequentialist decisions gives them far too much leeway to bring personal bias in, so I'm in favor of deontological freedom of speech - on consequentialist grounds.
Everyone is consequentialist in some measure. It's in human nature.
In the end, we all want to be happy and to enjoy life, and to be proud of our work, and as a result we care when things get in the way of that.
You can see plenty evidence of this in modern times. Eg, to pick something a bit less dramatic, Brexit didn't work out so well for a lot of fishermen that supported it, and it's not hard to find news of them being very upset by this and demanding change. It turns out having sovereignty doesn't make one all that happy when it threatens one's own livelihood.
Those people were clearly in the wrong though. After all, why join a civil liberties union if your support for said liberties is conditional on your whims?
Pre-Brexit, there were a lot of people that really wanted sovereignty.
Post-Brexit, it turns out that sovereignty didn't make a lot of those people happy, because it got in the way of their employment or business, and it turns out you can't eat sovereignty.
Same thing happened here. It's a lot easier to defend a despicable person's right to hold a protest when they're powerless. But when people start dying that gets a lot harder to justify.
Only for those who were unprincipled in the first place. Those who approach civil liberties from a point of subjective right vs wrong are doomed to failure - the moment a case comes up that clashes with their own viewpoints, they will abandon the liberties they claimed to defend. On the other hand, those who approach civil liberties as a matter of principle face no such dilemma.
It's kind of a fairy tale of the kind Disney sells you: if you do the right thing, everything works out for the best. We like that idea because simplicity is appealing, but the real world is complicated and conflicts with such nice notions.
In Disney movies when you do the right thing, it saves the world in the end.
In the real world when you do the right thing, sometimes all you achieve is nazis running over a crowd, and you end up with a crisis of conscience and not much to show for it.
If WE are stopping the BAD GUYS from marching on OUR turf, then what precedent does that set for permitting a civil rights march in Selma?
Most of us aren't pure-logic Kantian robots. We have a goal in mind that's beyond simply being logically consistent. When we form an organization that sometimes defends the Nazis, we're not doing it because our only motivation is that some rights are absolutely inviolable no matter what. We do it for mostly pragmatic reasons, such as the one you've outlined. If the Nazis get a fair trial, then that helps ensure that we also do. If we make too bad of a law to use against the Nazis, we could end up as victims of it some day. Defending the Nazis is ultimately a means to the end of achieving a good society for us to live in.
That's why whenever the true end of doing such things starts being endangered, principles start faltering.
And it's valuable. Barely a year after getting people fired for takes was popularized during BLM, we see the cannon turned on journalists who wrote a pro-palestine essay in college. Nobody could have predicted it.
I agree completely. This is exactly the reason why I believe most ACLU staff are thoroughly unqualified for the job. Defending civil liberties as a matter of principle is not something most people can do. That's perfectly fine. What annoys me is the hypocrisy of it. Don't believe in civil liberties for all? Fine, just don't pretend you do.
...until they remember that there are that there is more than one civil liberty, and more than one person who has civil liberties, and that sometimes one person exercising a particular civil liberty can prevent or conflict with another person exercising a different civil liberty.
Once you are dealing with a society bigger and more complicated than Gilligan's Island, you cannot escape these dilemmas.
Nothing the ACLU ever did blew up in their face. People haven't "started dying" because of the rights they defended. Instead they just got taken over by people who are immersed in your worldview and willing to parasitize and destroy any organization they can get their hands on in a belief that people should be ruled by hard-left "experts", who will make them "happy", even if they don't seem to realize it or agree.
Unwavering, unconditional support for an idea - any idea - seems like it could result in a bad time.
Personally, I'm not sure where I sit on this one, and I think there's a valuable, good-faith discussion to be had on whether free speech as we see it today, is actually a net good or not. It's an inherently complex question worthy of debate.