Last summer, it was liberals' reflexive grasping for the nearest "Terrorist watch list" and "No Fly List" -- institutions they'd hardly be likely to defend otherwise -- as the only form of gun control that seemed politically viable (and that was --tellingly -- the only kind endorsed by Trump). This time it is the foreseeable muddying on the Left of the concept of free speech, and the depressing antagonism that many have already displayed toward the ACLU for its legitimate defense of the constitutional rights of extreme-right groups, including those who gathered in Charlottesville. There is also the immense heaping of scorn on a handful of marginal figures, and the seemingly bottomless desire to add heightened penalties and sentences to the lone perpetrators of violence, regardless of whether they acted out of mental derangement (and without, as Glenn Greenwald points out, waiting to know the first thing about the state of their mental health one way or the other) -- which one hears from people who are otherwise sworn opponents of capital punishment. The targets of all of this outrage are nearly always the relatively weak, because they are the ones who can be reached. Meanwhile, the big sharks -- including the biggest one of all, currently circling in his tank in the Oval Office (if that is in fact where Trump ever spends his time) -- keep on swimming.
The fact that the Right wishes to respond to violence by tightening the iron fist of the state is so familiar as hardly to inspire commentary -- even though it is still very much worth condemning. When the Left mouths the same tired and impoverished arguments in favor of the same end, however, it hurts quite a bit more, and in a different way. One feels that one can occasionally let the sins of one's political adversaries go unremarked; it is taken for granted, if one has been at this for long enough, that one is aware of them and disapproves. The sins of one's friends are quite a different matter. One feels that one's own moral dignity is implicated in them. The sting is harder to extract. "When you're young and healthy," writes Anna Seghers in Transit, "you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different -- it paralyses you." (Dembo trans.)
One feels dragged out of retirement by such moments. One has to start writing against one's will, simply because something preposterous and damaging has been uttered that is both easy to refute and desperately needs refuting. There is a passage at the very beginning of Hazlitt's Table-Talk in which he is speaking of the pleasures of painting. What he particularly likes about it is that one can engage in it at one's leisure, and without this quality of dread compulsion. "[Y]ou have no absurd opinions to combat, no point to strain, no adversary to crush, no fool to annoy," he writes longingly. Unlike such moments as these -- Hazlitt is implying -- when one becomes the wielder of the pen once more and --utterly without joy -- readies for battle.
An instance of the absurd opinion in question here. On the local radio today, in the immediate aftermath of the rally in Boston Common, I hear a guest on the program -- a liberal minister -- declare, "Of course we believe in free speech, but not when it comes at the expense of people's lives!" It is hard to say what that even means. Still harder to answer the question of who ought to have the power to determine what kind of speech is life-threatening, and what isn't (as Greenwald observes, in our present country the authority that would be making that determination would seem to be the Trump executive branch. Is that what our liberal minister wants?) And finally, it is easy to see that this is the same argument that is made for every encroachment on civil liberties. Every time European governments invoke a recent terrorist attack, say, to expand the definition of what counts as "glorifying terrorism," it is done in the name of this same posturing defense of the vulnerable. Every despotism in the world believes in freedom for that speech which it deems not to be "dangerous." The question is who gets to decide what is dangerous, and to whom.
The morally consistent view on all of this is not terribly hard to grasp, even if people seem to keep on misplacing it. Neo-Nazis and other white supremacist groups have constitutional rights to free assembly and free speech. The rest of us also have those rights -- and we have the moral duty to use these rights to, among other things, protest those groups and all that they stand for. It would be the most natural thing in the world for a member or supporter of the ACLU to show up in court one day to defend the right of the Charlottesville ralliers to their permit, and then to join the counter-protest the next day to condemn every one of their views -- as many did.
This is the highest victory liberalism can achieve over the far-right forces that oppose it -- to stand up for the rights of those who would not do the same in return. And to do it even when one doesn't have to, when no outside actor is forcing one's hand -- indeed, when all practical and prudential wisdom urges against it. To do it because it is right -- even when it means bringing odium on oneself, as the ACLU is now experiencing. That is the greatest moral achievement of which liberalism is capable. I've quoted these lines of Ortega y Gasset's many times now, but they continually need repeating: "Liberalism [...] is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak."
Beyond this, I have little more to add to Greenwald's already airtight rebuttal of the pseudo-Leftist condemnation of the ACLU in the wake of Charlottesville. Of course Greenwald's manner of going about his rebuttal is, predictably, a bit grating. We have the usual lack of self-criticism, and the usual excess of self-congratulation for Greenwald's own greater clarity of moral vision-- one piece of his earlier writing on the "free speech" question is described, humorlessly, as "my comprehensive 2013 defense of free speech," for example. But so what? The slightly obnoxious -- and even exceedingly obnoxious -- will always make the best and most consistent defenders of our rights to free expression. Those who less effortfully blend into the mainstream -- those who don't particularly believe that the majority of people around them ever really get it wrong anyways -- are far less likely to feel the need of them. This is but one of the many ways in which we all benefit by the presence of the maladjusted. Long live the weeds, as Roethke says, quoting a line from Hopkins.
This is also Greenwald's own point, to a large extent. It is the old argument that it is precisely the rights of the people we most dislike -- even loathe -- that most need defending. If we don't stand up for the "hard cases," there will be no principle left to appeal to when the "easy cases" start to be subjected to censorship or intimidation as well. I was listening to Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists on audiobook today while doing laundry and chores (which is, may I add, the best way to imbibe one's Ronson, lest you miss the sound of his mellifluous Welsh voice), and he calls attention to an episode of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect that aired shortly after the "Ruby Ridge" travesty. Maher indicates that he is indifferent to the fate of Randy Weaver and his family, citing the latter's (not entirely direct) connection to Aryan Nations. Maher's guest from the ACLU says that it is not a crime to associate with such groups, and that to do so does not deprive him of civil and constitution rights. It's clear the point is lost on the rest of the room. But, the implied response is, it's so immensely unsympathetic!
This is not of course the only time Maher would oppose civil liberties, despite being an occasional darling of the Left. I recall a bit from one of his monologues back in the Bush years, when he put an image up on the screen of a man in Islamic dress and asked the audience something to the effect of: "Seriously, would you not profile this guy if he showed up in a TSA line?" A line worthy of Trump at his worst. Showing the inner logic of all misguided opinions, the fundamental consistency of inconsistency, Maher appears to believe that his own detestation of certain ideologies or religions or worldviews is enough to justify scrapping the fundamental rights of their adherents. I bet many of the pseudo-liberals who laughed along with Maher's "TSA line" remark are now decrying our current President's views on Islam and Muslims.
Along similar lines, I wonder if liberals have really understood how much the forms of gun control that they often reach for in the aftermath of violence abet the forces of over-policing, racial profiling, and Islamophobia that they claim to stand against. Terrorism watch lists, "No-fly" lists, gang databases and the like are not only notoriously unreliable and biased against certain ethnic and religious groups -- particularly Muslims and Central Americans -- they are also flawed in principle. They seek to deprive people of rights and freedoms that others enjoy without due process of law. They are an intrinsic violation of constitutional principles.
Moreover, the actual attempt to clear guns off the streets, as prescribed by gun legislation, will nearly always lead to still more over-policing of already heavily targeted Black neighborhoods. An outstanding PBS Frontline documentary from June 2016, "Policing the Police," focuses on the use of "stop and frisk" tactics in the Newark P.D. Reporter Jelani Cobb takes us on a series of police stops of the sort that have been found by federal courts to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of suspects, and to encourage racial profiling and the still greater dangers that arise from it, including extrajudicial killings. Liberals should note with deep concern that the contraband the cops are evidently frisking people for, at least in this jurisdiction, is not drugs. Mostly, it's hand-guns.
None of which is to say that gun control is inherently a misguided endeavor, or that it can't be done well. The need to end the proliferation of dangerous weaponry is a real and pressing one. My point is just that it is a no more urgent need than all the other legitimate aims of public safety and well-being that are invoked to justify over-policing, mass incarceration, and the violation of the civil rights of terrorism suspects. If the Left is not persuaded by any of those arguments -- and it shouldn't be -- then why is it by this?
In the end, we are obliged to say that either constitutional rights are inviolable, regardless of expediency, or they are not really rights at all. Gun control, if it is to be done, must be done in a way that does not sacrifice anyone's fundamental rights. It should, in my view, focus on the supply side of the gun industry -- make it harder for weapons manufacturers to profit from their trade via regulation -- rather than on the ordinary citizens on our streets who might or might not be carrying illicit items -- an approach which can probably only lead to still more "broken windows" and "stop-and-frisk"-style policing.
Oh, the political Left. You ever more fruitful source of disappointment and fury than those with whom I have far less in common. In spite of what I said above, there is a passion, an exasperation, and yes, even a morbid delight, I suppose, that is aroused by seeing you stray from your own path, and by recognizing the duty to call you back. Perhaps it is nothing more than the fact that these are the moments that remind one that one is still an individual. That one does not still quite think with the herd (though one is getting more herd-like, it sometimes seems, by the day, in this world where the punishments for departing from the group can come so much more swiftly), even with the herd one has selected for one's own.
These are the few moments of political thought that are truly ours. This is why we cherish them. In George Eliot's Felix Holt, it is revealed that the minister, Mr. Lyon, despite being generally a reformer, takes a surprisingly hostile view of the institution of the secret ballot. Eliot -- in that quite flawed book that is nevertheless one of the greatest compendia of nugatory political wisdom ever penned -- draws the following, profoundly true and endlessly re-quotable observation from that fact: "Our pet opinions are usually those which place us in a minority of a minority amongst our own party:--very happily, else those poor opinions, born with no silver spoon in their mouths--how would they get nourished and fed?"
No comments:
Post a Comment