Liberals often assert an asymmetry in U.S. political ideology. While the Right can be seen as demanding less government, no matter what, the Left — they say — doesn’t push for more government, no matter what. The Left wants sensible, reasonable regulations, and wants the government to intervene when it can bring about good.
These days, there’s plenty of evidence against that liberal argument — evidence that the Left sees any erosion of federal authority, any any crack in the New Deal, any expansion of economic liberty, and even some expansions of free speech, as the camel’s nose under the tent.
The simplest explanation is that they see government as good in itself.
The expansion of free speech rights is the latest phenomenon to spark concern on the Left. The New York Times recently ran a feature about the recent Supreme Court decision that the Town of Gilbert, Arizona, could not outlaw a yard sign informing passersby about church services while simultaneously allowing politicians’ yard signs.
“Effectively,” one Yale law professor told the Times about the Gilbert decision, “this would roll consumer protection back to the 19th century.”
The liberals’ concern is that instead of issuing a narrower ruling, the Court laid down the idea that before government can regulate speech based on its subject matter — discriminating between speech about church, speech about elections, speech about investments — it must show that such regulation is “narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.”
This broad ruling has been used to strike down a ban on panhandling (speech requesting money), and a ban on selfies in the voting booth (speech about how one voted). Clearly, the Court has expanded a right that Americans hold dear, curbing onerous government restrictions. The Times frets about what speech might be deregulated next.
If it seems odd to worry about the expansion of free speech, recall the liberal anger about Citizens United. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a nonprofit whom the federal government had attacked for the crime of distributing a brief film criticizing the front-runner for President of the United States.
It would seem like liberals would defend the poor man on the street asking for his daily bread, or the dissident group criticizing a powerful legacy politician. But that would require favoring restrictions on government’s power.
The other recent dangerous expansion of liberty by SCOTUS involved raisins. The New Deal created a federally protected cartel that forced raisin farmers to sell raisins to the federal government. Forcing someone to sell you something is the same as taking something from someone, and then tossing him some cash.
The Supreme Court ruled this summer that the government could not take the raisins grown by farmers Laura and Marvin Horne. Sun Maid, the largest single marketer of raisins in the world, sided with the government and lost. Again: Big Business supported a price-fixing cartel that hurt small businesses.
This was “worrisome,” according to liberal writer Ryan Cooper at The Week. It “rolled back a key element of the New Deal.”
Deregulated eyebrow-threading is another frontier of dangerous economic liberty. “Texas Could Become an Even More Dangerous Place,” the Slate headline warned this summer. The article freaked out over a “startling decision” by Texas’s Supreme Court. The decision in question struck down an occupational licensing law governing eyebrow-threading. That law, of course, was transparently an effort of established beauty businesses to protect themselves from small-business competition.
Go back to 2005, and you see the New York Times editorial page praising the liberal majority in the Supreme Court’s Kelo v. New London ruling, which upheld a local government’s decision to bulldoze a working-class neighborhood so that Pfizer’s subsidized new factory (which was never built) would have a nicer view.
In all of these cases, government power advanced the interests of the well-connected. In all of these cases, the poorer, the less powerful, the smaller, sought basic economic and personal liberty. And in all of these cases, you could find liberals lamenting the expansion of liberty and resisting any diminuition of government power whatsoever.
When Bernie Sanders, President Obama, or the New York Times editorial page advocate big government, it’s usually on the premise that big government is needed to protect the powerless. But look carefully, and the pattern becomes clearer. When big government oppresses the powerless, the Left is equally likely to defend big government.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
