The ACLU used to defend Americans’ civil liberties, even when the organization didn’t agree with the way people exercised them.
The organization’s defining case (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie in 1978), in fact, found it defending the right of neo-Nazis to demonstrate in the streets of a Chicago suburb. To shut them down, Executive Director Ira Glasser argued, would only make them stronger.
“The Holocaust survivor Jews of Skokie organized a counter-demonstration,” Glasser explained in a recent interview with Spiked. “They had like 60,000 people ready to come march against these 15 people. And in the end, after we won the right for [neo-Nazi leader Frank Collin] and his group to go to Skokie, they chose not to go, because they would have been completely humiliated.”
Glasser believes in the power of letting truth and falsehood grapple, as John Milton put it in his anti-censorship polemic Areopagitica. “Who ever knew Truth put to the [worse], in a free and open encounter,” Milton wrote almost 400 years ago.
The American Civil Liberties Union, however, no longer believes in the power of truth — or the value of free speech, unless that freedom benefits the right political cause. The executive director of the ACLU from 1978 to 2001, Glasser lamented the “demagogic” shift of the ACLU in recent years, as it has pivoted from protecting free speech to determining which speech is worth protecting.
The organization is no longer interested in defending the First Amendment for its own sake.
Fast forward almost 40 years from Skokie, and the ACLU of Virginia agreed to defend the free speech rights of a reprehensible crew: those at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. But after the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer, the ACLU’s response was to promise, in essence, not to defend bad people in the future.
It did not blame, as Glasser argues it should have, a poor police response. And this newfound fear of free speech is consistent with the direction of the ACLU.
“I believe that the national ACLU, if the Skokie case arose today, would not take it,” Glasser said. “They might take the same case for the Martin Luther King Jr. Association, but they wouldn’t take it for the Nazis.”
The ACLU’s shift is reflective of another trend: the way many young people see free speech. When students lobby to ban Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro, and even Milo Yiannopoulos from campus, they’re setting a dangerous precedent in the long run.
“Speech restrictions are like poison gas,” Glasser said. “They seem like they’re a great weapon when you’ve got your target in sight. But then the wind shifts.”
