Is Today’s Left More Opposed to Free Speech Than Yesterday’s?
28th March 2014
Historically, the left has had an ambivalent relationship to what used to be derisively called “bourgeois freedoms.” From Marx’s On the Jewish Question to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of repressive tolerance, some of the most interesting thinking on the left has been devoted to examining the limits of what for lack of a better word I’ll call the liberal defense of freedom and rights. And of course this tradition of thought has often—and disastrously—been operationalized, whether in the form of Soviet tyranny or the internal authoritarianism of the CPUSA.
But if we think about this issue from the vantage of the 1960s, my sense is that today’s left—whether on campus or in the streets—is far less willing to go down the road of a critique of pure tolerance, as a fascinating text by Marcuse, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Woolf once called it, than it used to be. (As Jeremy Kessler suggests, that absolutist position, which is usually associated with content neutrality, historically went hand in hand with the politics of anti-communism.) Once upon a time, those radical critiques of free speech were where the action was at. So much so that even liberal theorists like Owen Fiss, who ordinarily might have been more inclined to a Millian defense of free speech, were pushed by radical theorists like Catharine MacKinnon to take a more critical stance. But now that tradition seems to be all but dead.
March 29th, 2014 at 01:27
The answer to the question is “no.” The Left from the start when French revolutionaries smashed the printing presses of their opponents, has always been opposed to freedom. Any apparent advocacy of liberty by the Left is mask.