Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smsm42 | Hacker News Reader

It's not ACLU's identity crisis, it's the Left's identity crisis. Civil rights are checks on government and institutional powers. When the left gained a massive institutional power and a lot of governmental power, it turned out it doesn't really like this power to be checked and challenged. It's one thing to fight for the free speech of people who are maybe abhorrent, but ultimately their speech won't change much, it's another thing when the speech is by your political rival, the fate of the power distribution in the nation depends on it, and you have all the tools to shut it down. It is hard to resist the temptation, and the Left didn't even try to resist it for long - in fact, they embraced it. Turns out, the hard question question wasn't "can you defend the Nazi's free speech", but "can you defend the Republican's free speech, if it could cost your favorite candidate the election?". Looks like the major part of the Left decided the right answer is "no", and winning is more important that preserving the liberties. After all, if the good guys are in power, who needs their powers to be checked? Only the bad guys.

no offense but since when was rights based discourse ever the focus of the left? The left's self-declared purpose is advancing material interests of ordinary and marginalized people, using collective institutions like the state to make that happen.

It seems like you're complaining about the fact that the left is not conservative at heart, which is odd. It's not exactly some sort of hidden agenda that the point of the left is to win elections and wield executive power rather than obstructing the government and focusing solely on individual rights.

> no offense but since when was rights based discourse ever the focus of the left

I am old enough to remember times where at least some individual rights - speech, association, honest elections, equality in the eyes of the law for all people regardless of their identity, due process - were the causes that most of the left would support. There were people on the left that genuinely supported Civil Rights movement because they believed all people should have equal rights. Now equality is offensive for them, and so are due process, free speech and other values their previous generation wrote on their banners.

and I don't think that's even been sidelined to the degree that people argue (as the article points out the ACLU did take up numerous free speech issues including the NRA or even Trump's social media ban), but one thing ought to be recognized I think.

There is a big difference however between the traditional old American left largely coming out of an academic, fairly elite milieu, and the much more diverse left today.

For people like Chomsky who used to defend the right to Holocaust denial say, it's a very abstract, intellectual debate. For a lot of Asian working class people, proliferation of hate-speech is a very real threat today. I don't think this tension is new either. Even during the civil rights era, there were marked differences between black activists (or even militant groups) and the public left-wing intellectuals.

Equality is not offensive and a left-wing value but today it is more obvious that there is a tension between formal equality in front of the law and genuine equality in the real world. And because there is now more voices in politics, the left is changing.And so is the right by the way, whose elite values are very, very far removed from the ordinary voter.

ACLU is just beginning its transformation. If I were asked 10 years ago "would ACLU take a free speech case?" I'd say "duh, it's ACLU, of course they would!". Now it's more like "depends on whose case it is and what Twitter thinks about it". What would happen in 10-15 years, when the old guard has retired? Who knows.

> For a lot of Asian working class people, proliferation of hate-speech is a very real threat today.

Anti-Asian hate speech has the history over a century long, at least, in America - sad, but true. It's not a new thing. And for all those years, Asian community managed to achieve huge success and become very prosperous, in fact so much that now the woke higher education institutions discriminate against this community (as they did against Jewish community years ago) - because they are too successful and make their formalistic "diversity" goals harder to achieve! Clearly, abandoning the ideals of the free speech is not necessary for the community to succeed, even in the presence of haters.

> there is a tension between formal equality in front of the law and genuine equality in the real world

No, there's no tension. Of course, the former does not guarantee the latter - it's only a necessary condition, but never a sufficient one. There's much more that a society needs to achieve equality of opportunity - if it's at all possible, and it will never achieve the equality of outcomes, of course. But the paradoxical conclusion the new left is making from this - completely common in human affairs - difference between the ideal and the worldly practice falling short of it - that the ideal has to be abandoned completely, since our inability to achieve it - even witnessing the huge progress that has been achieved - means it's a false ideal.

Even worse is that to replace this ideal, the old and tired ideas of racial division, segregation, racial hate and unequal treatment depending on skin color and ethnic identity, are unearthed, dusted off, and paraded as some kind of solution for inequality. Not only it could never work - forced inequality can't lead to equality - it is morally repugnant, and will cost us as a society a lot to drive those ghosts of the past back underground where they belong.

Some form of appeal to the rights of the individual is the cry of every political minority until it seizes power.

Some of the group's members might actually be pluralist civil libertarians at heart.

But this news demonstrates that the vast majority are not. They were authoritarians in libertarians' clothing, and today's political environment is woke enough for them to swap out their duds.

I don't think your conclusion that the majority of the left has adopted that position is founded, but I agree that this is a very interesting tension that you've perfectly described.

It's easy to be principled when it doesn't matter. To anyone who didn't live through it, the Nazis are an ancient demon that feels as relevant as Darth Vader or the Devil. What do I care if 4chan wants to name a soda "Hitler did nothing wrong" for the lols?

It's a lot harder when you perceive the speech that your principles would have you save to be a tangible threat to your safety. If some on the left (rightly or wrongly) see e.g. unmoderated alt-right social media activity as a risk factor for something bigger than 1/6, there would be an inherent tension between principles and pragmatism.

I'd be interested in seeing evidence as to whether the left has trended toward a particular side, but it's a shame that this has to become an issue in the first place.

We already had something massively - orders of magnitude - bigger than 1/6. In fact, it is happening right to this day - riots in Minneapolis and Portland continue right now, and have been happening all through 2020. The economic harm is in billions, the victim counts is raising steadily, and that before we account for the huge spike in crime - including murders - that happened in the last year in many major cities.

Yet somehow it's not a "tangible threat to safety" while a bunch of wackos fantasizing on the internet how Trump is about to be revealed as the Messiah is. Sorry, it's very hard to treat such "safety" concerns as genuine while keeping ignoring the real safety threats. It's more like a pampered $100K-per-year college student cries that she feels "unsafe" going to their college campus because somewhere there on campus there is a professor who once said something that puts him slightly on the right of AOC. It's not what people mean by "safety", it's weaponizing "safety" for political reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com