American liberalism is increasingly comfortable with authoritarianism. That’s my only conclusion from last Friday’s free speech discussion on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
During that episode, one liberal panelist defended attacking non-violent Nazis, and the other liberal called for shredding the first amendment.
The sad saga began when host Bill Maher referenced a Seattleite who was recently assaulted for wearing a Nazi symbol in public. Maher explained that the incident was totally unacceptable, “… we have to go by principles and not feelings, that’s what the other side does. You can’t just punch Nazis …”
“That’s what the other side does” was a short-lived sentiment.
Disgusted by Maher’s defense of free assembly, “activist” musician, Tom Morello, interjected.
“I grew up in a home with an anti-fascist,” Morello explained, “he was my uncle who was a World War II veteran who fought against fascism, and if he … saw a Nazi symbol of someone who wanted to throw all Jews into ovens and ethnically cleanse all colored people from the planet, my 90-year-old uncle … would have punched that son of a bitch in the face, and I would have had his back.”
Having endorsed terrorism (that’s what political violence against innocents is), Morello sat back and awaited the audience’s applause. Sure enough, the applause followed.
At this point, were I on the panel, I would have turned to Morello and said, “Your words dishonor the 408,000 Americans who died to defeat the Third Reich.”
Fortunately, Maher pushed back with a defense of the Constitution. “This is what the First Amendment says; even if something is odious, this is America, you are allowed to express it. If you throw the principle out the window, and just say, it’s how I feel, then you’re just as bad as them.”
Maher is right. As I’ve outlined, American exceptionalism rests on the recognition that more freely exercised viewpoints serve social dialogue and empower individual freedom. The founders also recognized that attacking repellant speech does not extinguish repellant viewpoints, it feeds those views in a toxic cauldron of personal anger and absent introspection.
Still, perhaps we shouldn’t be too shocked that Morello does not understand this reality. After all, his website recommends authors including Che Guevara, Lenin, Marx, and that favored of liberal cop-
Next, it was White House reporter April Ryan’s turn to attack free speech.
“Some of these old laws need to be revisited, because they just don’t fit what’s going on,” Ryan asserted, “and the bottom line; he has freedom of speech but yes, he has intimidating, inciting, and that’s not right.”
Ryan continued a minute later, “There needs to be some kind of galvanizing and coming together because it should not be that people walk down the street, about whether it’s about Nazism or whether it’s about the Confederate statues. This has got to stop because there is a bubbling up in this nation right now.”
It’s hard to articulate the stupidity of Ryan’s words, but let me try.
First off, Ryan totally ignores the U.S. legal definition of illegal incitement. Such incitement requires more than Nazi paraphernalia or statements, it requires speech or action designed to encourage others to commit immediate, unlawful violence in circumstances where that violence is likely.
Yet Ryan’s broad subjectivity also belies the danger of her argument. When Ryan says, “whether it’s about Nazism or whether it’s about the Confederate statues,” she defends the left’s Inner Party fetish for undone history and purged oldspeak. Put simply, Ryan’s argument isn’t just a slippery slope to authoritarianism; it’s a rocket ship towards 1984-style dystopia.
Regardless, it says much about the state of modern liberalism that two of its prominent supporters are so willing to dedicate themselves to opposing freedom. Ryan, for example, isn’t just some random liberal, she’s the National Association of Black Journalists 2017 journalist of the year!
Ultimately, the left faces two choices here. It can embrace the maximal-speech approach offered by left-wingers like Maher and Christopher Hitchens, or it can double down on the Leninist-idealism of Morello and Ryan. But it can’t do both.
Watch the full exchange here.
As I say, it’s sad.
