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?
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.
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.