That’s the classic liberal faith, which supposedly forms the base of the Democratic Party. In the RealClear poll, however, that respect is down, way down. Fully one-third of Democrats agree that Americans have “too much freedom.” Also, three-fourths of Democrats believe that the government is authorized to limit “hateful speech” on social media. Only 31 percent agreed with the old saw, “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
To those of us who heard liberals in the past hailing civil rights sit-ins, decrying the House Un-American Activities Committee, mistrusting the FBI and CIA, and savoring the in-your-face antics of Lenny Bruce et al., this is an astonishing turnabout. The ones who loved to stick it to The Man now line up behind Big Brother. Suppression is OK as long as the right people are suppressed. In the past, they recognized well how a term such as “hateful speech” could be defined so as to include righteous and peaceful criticism in order to target people who protest a repressive system. Now, they encourage the expansion, along with the prosecution of those who fall afoul of it.
It’s hard to comprehend—not only the duplicity and hypocrisy but also the blithe and bare-faced expression of this course reversal. Liberals have changed their minds, it seems, with no hesitation, no concern. The high principles of civil disobedience and reasoned dissent no longer hold, and liberals don’t much care. How can they do this when, up until recently, they professed to support diversity and inclusion, the marketplace of ideas and John Stuart Mill, due process, and free speech?
The answer is simple, although hard to stomach. Any liberal who shrugs at the shout-downs of conservative speakers is no such thing and never has been. If he ever believed in the ideals of pluralistic democracy, he did so lightly and “situationally”; when situations changed, so did his beliefs, which is to say that he believed in nothing. The 1960s–90s liberalism of do-your-own-thing and honor-the-iconoclast that we thought was an actual social doctrine was, in fact, a momentary pose, provisional and canny, never deeply espoused. They spoke vehemently, but it was all an act.
Conservatives have a hard time with this. The flexibility—or cynicism—that liberals exercise flummoxes them. They have all the tools to deal with principled liberals—data from social science on family formation and welfare programs, arguments from Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman and so forth—but an unprincipled adversary brushes evidence and contrary ideas aside with ease. Conservatives do battle with words and facts, but that approach doesn’t work so well when liberals alter the meaning of words with abandon or reframe a conservative’s words as “code” for something else or attach “dog whistles” to them. Conservatives still play the game of debate; they believe in a contest of opinions that results in the truth. Liberals don’t.
Too many on the right are stumped and exasperated. They can’t understand an opponent who doesn’t play fair, who suffers no shame at being caught in an inconsistency. They haven’t adjusted. Twenty-first-century liberals live in the shadow of Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, who start from the standpoint of power, not truth. Conservatives reject that standpoint intellectually, but that doesn’t help them one bit when it comes to real-world affairs and institutions. We know that from how well those hearings and op-eds and strongly worded letters have curbed the contemporary Democratic Party’s illiberal animus.
Is it that conservatives and Republicans can’t admit the prospect that their liberal antagonists have no interest in debate? Have conservatives trained so well for the forensics of an open society that they don’t know how to function in a closed society? Do the dynamics of power divorced from truth so appall them that they refuse the challenge? Whatever the answer, it’s time for conservatives to stop being confused and confounded. They must see their foes clearly and distinctly and jettison strategies that belong to 1992.
