We Must Defend Free Thought

I believe this article makes a valid and important point.

I feel there is a gap between left goals and left means. It’s particularly distressing to me because I always viewed “our team” as the side that was cooler headed, would wrestle with uncomfortable ideas, and would keep trying to find the merit in people that we disagree with.

But I find myself feeling that a portion of the left has retained the banner issues of the left, while adopting a shockingly tribal worldview and conservative tactics of the right.

It feels like when I was younger, and you'd say something critical about some aspect of the US, and the retort was, “if you hate our country so much, why don’t you just leave.” Critique was rounded to anti-American sentiment and you thus became a valid target of unlimited scorn.

I see the same thing on the left, where if you don’t agree to a reductive expression of certain wedge issues, people are rounded to nazi, misogynist, X-phobic, etc. and then are irredeemably subject to unlimited scorn.

I expect this kind of stuff from the right, but it’s painful to see it from the left.

The First Amendment didn’t prevent our genocide of native peoples. Democracy didn’t prevent 100 years of slavery. ‘The marketplace of ideas’ didn’t keep us from torturing people to death or killing a million people in a pointless war.

The problem with liberals is they mistake the means for the end. Because their lives are insulated from consequence, they prefer the “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”. They have a fairytale understanding of the world, where Nazism can be stopped with debate instead of carpet bombings.

What matters is that the hungry are fed, the sick are treated, and the vulnerable protected, and that everyone can live free of the threat of violence or deprivation. Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not matter.

>I expect this kind of stuff from the Moral Majority, but it’s painful to see it from the Former Underdog Turned Moral Majority.

This is the nature of power, and an example of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Once a particular version of an ideology becomes the preferred political weapon of the majority, displacing the previous one, it can be considered to have become the Moral Majority.

When this happens, the rational people (those who cared about the ideology as a means to an end rather than an end in itself, to summarize the Iron Law) begin to look for greener pastures. The people that are attracted to the ideology simply because it has political capital begin to pervert it, twisting it further and further from the truth the ideology was originally designed to address. These people care little for logical consistency, and tend to create contradictions until another ideology (pushed to prominence because it was forced to be liberal to accept the good people seeking refuge from the first one's oppressiveness, and relatively parasite-free because of its lack of political status) comes along. And at that point they jump ship, the new one becomes the Moral Majority, and the cycle starts again.

Liberals have already left Leftism, because Rightism is a better fit for liberal thought at the moment. Authoritarians are the only ones left on the Left, simply because they like the power of what the idea still represents (the general population has a lot of lag time and takes a while to catch up; it's faster if they can outright defy the authoritarians and not need to worry about finding another job or house if they lose theirs for political reasons- the 50s through the late 70s gave that power to a lot of people which is why so much change was able to happen; whereas today due to economic slowdown this process is a lot slower).

This tension between liberals and non-liberals is the real Culture War. And so it rages.

I think you missed my point: all those things can be tools for accomplishing a just society, but they are not sufficient or an end in themselves.

Slavery was ended by war. Labor rights were achieved by fatal street battles. The civil rights movement was legitimized by a growing threat of a domestic insurrection. Marriage equality was established by an unelected Supreme Court. Basically every time significant positive change has happened in this country has been the result of extrademocratic leverage being found and exercised, not going hat in hand to ask an uncaring majority for what you are due as a human being.

Finally, as a moral being with obligations to others I absolutely get to decide who is a bigot, just as you do.