Why the Left Is No Longer 'Liberal'
The definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” have undergone a radical transition in the last 40 years. I know because I’ve been alive and involved in politics for all that time and longer. The old verities that divided left and right have mostly disappeared and have been replaced by new truths that someone who lived in the 1960s would have a hard time accepting.
According to the “Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics,” “Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.” I don’t see today’s left-wingers almost anywhere in that statement.
Advocating for “Individual rights” is a sign of selfishness, there is the “consent of the governed” as long as the governed agree with the left, private property is racist, and there is no equality before the law because the law is racist, sexist, homophobic, and unfair to poor people.
On the right, support for Donald Trump has exposed fractures among conservatives. There is conservatism, and then there is “Trumpism.” Trump is not and never has been a conservative, and trying to pigeonhole the former president as a believer in conservative principles is an exercise in futility.
Strangely, where the left used to be the strongest advocates of the First Amendment, they have now become its most relentless foe, shredding the meaning and conducting a pogrom against those who want to continue promoting an expansive definition of freedom of speech.
Matt Taibbi wonders where the liberals have gone.
Is your argument that private companies can do what they want? Then why did you think otherwise in 1985, when Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center suggested record companies “voluntarily” label as dirty songs like “Darling Nikki,” and call them McCarthyites when they compiled a list of the “Filthy Fifteen” albums? Does that not sound suspiciously like the “Disinformation Dozen”? Why were you on Frank Zappa’s side then, but with blacklisters now?
One of the biggest flip-flops has happened with the left wing’s embrace of formerly hated and mistrusted government agencies. Since when did the left demand that the FBI engage in censorship? When the left discovered the state security apparatus could do its bidding.
Do you now think it’s not really censorship if the FBI merely makes its opinion known about content, and doesn’t order takedowns? Did you think the same when the FBI sent a letter to Priority Records complaining about NWA’s “F**k the Police”? Did you agree then with the ACLU, whose Southern California chairman responded to the FBI’s letter by saying, “It is completely inappropriate for any government agency to try to influence what artists do. It is completely against the American traditions of free speech”?
And here we are today with the FBI working hand in glove with the Ukrainian secret service to censor anti-Ukraine content and websites. What would those tireless advocates for speech freedom from the 1960s say about that? What would the Berkeley students who occupied the president’s office say to the FBI?
More damning comparisons from Taibbi.
Is your belief that new forms of speech constitute “harm” and “offense” to such a degree that censorship is warranted? If so, why did you once support Andres Serrano and his work Piss Christ, which Catholics insisted was an intolerable offense, and call it censorship when opponents like Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms tried to pull funding for Serrano from the National Endowment of the Arts? Wasn’t the Hustler magazine spread suggesting Jerry Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse offensive? Didn’t you go to The People Versus Larry Flynt anyway?
Today, the snowflakes burst into tears and claim hurt feelings if you micro-aggress against them while demanding whatever you said or did be classified as “hate speech.”
The gimlet-eyed revolutionaries from yesterday didn’t care much about “hate speech.” If you used the “N” word to describe a Black Panther, they wouldn’t go to the administration and file a grievance. They wouldn’t go to court and sue you for “pain and suffering.”
They’d be likely to answer your hate with hate of their own. So perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that there are no more “liberals” to worry about.
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