Why I Fear the Left in Power

Myrhaf came out of retirement yesterday to urge his fellow Objectivists to "Wear a Gasmask and Vote Republican", making him among the few who, like me, have publicly disagreed with Leonard Peikoff's election advice and advocated keeping the Republicans in power. His main reason is the same as mine: The Republicans are dangerous, but the Democrats pose the far greater immediate threat to America particularly due to their desire to quash freedom of speech.

Our campaign to spread Objectivism needs the right to free speech more than anything. The Democrats are the worst threat to this right. Political correctness, campus speech codes and thuggish attempts to shut up free speech are old news on the left.

Myrhaf does a pretty good job fleshing this point out with several recent examples of how hostile today's left is to the free expression of ideas it deems unacceptable. But if you need even more evidence, stop by Spiked and read this article by Brendan O'Neill on Wendy Kaminer. The article looks at threats to freedom of speech from across the political spectrum, but it quickly becomes clear that it is the left that has been working overtime to destroy freedom of speech.

Like a recent skewering I blogged of George Lakoff by a fellow leftist, this article describes the criticisms of the left by a leftist -- Kaminer was a former member of the National Board of the ACLU -- who is objective enough to see that the abuses of many of her fellow travellers could even be causing the left to get in its own way. O'Neill quotes her:

Looking at the history of the US, it is hard to imagine how any of our truly progressive movements could ever have advanced if people were not free to assemble and speak -- and in ways that other people often found offensive! One hundred and fifty years ago people thought that women shouldn't speak in public; that was a violation of God's law. It was only by violating God's law -- and in the process offending a lot of people -- that women's rights were put on the agenda. It is sometimes by being offensive that we push society forward.

I am no fan of the left, nor would I ground a defense of freedom of speech in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, but this is plainly true.

O'Neill paraphrases Mill in his attempt to explain why freedom of speech is important:

In modern English, truth, whether you are right or wrong, can only be established through full and rigorous public debate. And those who seek to stifle public debate -- because they presume that they're right and their opponents are wrong/corrupt/hateful -- denigrate truth by turning it into something that, by necessity, must exist separately from that messy marketplace of ideas.

This is an okay first stab, except that one need not necessarily consult with others to reach the truth: It merely becomes, when freedom of speech is protected by the government, far easier to do so -- and about many more things than one could alone due to division of intellectual labor . Those who stifle public debate make it far more difficult for large numbers of people to learn from each other factual information, including the merits of various ideas, progressive or not.

Since we need information to live and guide our lives by philosophical principles, those who seek to stifle public debate do not simply "denigrate the truth". They threaten our very lives. Thus freedom of speech is important to each of us, personally.

This weakness of the article aside, it has value in demonstrating to those who may not have been paying much attention lately to the out-of-power American left just what type of fire they play with in advocating its return to power. Here are some examples of what life is like when today's left is given free reign. They are taken from universities on each side of the Atlantic.

1. [A] "mob of students" at Brown University in Rhode Island ... stormed the offices of the student newspaper The Brown Daily Herald and seized its entire print run after it ran an advert paid for by a right-wing politician who denounced reparations for slavery....
2. [T]he Sussex University Students' Union [in Britain] has banned the right-leaning tabloid the Daily Mail for being "bigoted" ..., leading one Sussex student to complain that the union is "treating us like babies"....
3. At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London the union has banned Israeli Embassy representatives from speaking because part of its union policy states that Zionism is racism, and racists should "not be given a platform".
4. Other unions have banned the sale of Coca-Cola and Kit-Kats in protest at the working practises of their parent companies.
5. "Kids come to college, and for the first couple of weeks of freshman year they're in a sensitivity course, where they're told what they're allowed to say and what they're not allowed to say", says Kaminer. "They are subjected to thought-control programmes the minute they arrive. That is not a very good start." [Actually, that sounds like the beginning of the end. --ed]
   

I have no doubt that given half a chance, the left would be happy attempt to model our larger society on the universities it already controls.

I will close by quoting Kaminer:

One of the saddest trends among people who consider themselves liberal or progressive over the past 10 or 15 years has been this increased intolerance of free speech, and this notion that there is some right, some civil right, not to be offended, which trumps somebody else's right to speak in a way that you find offensive. It is like a disease, an infection, that has taken hold on the left. It is an incredibly regressive notion. [bold added]

Like I said, "This is not your father's Democratic Party."

-- CAV