E-Pluribus | Mar. 18, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Ian Dunt: Anti-protest bill: Freedom dies in silence
The U.S. is not the only country struggling with issues of illiberalism. British journalist and author Ian Dunt writes at politics.co.uk that a bill that comfortably passed a second reading in parliament would give police the power to restricts public protests with as weak a justification as causing “serious unease, alarm or distress” to others in the vicinity. While Dunt is disturbed by the substance of the proposed law, he found even more appalling the lack of willingness on the part of supporters of the legislation to even attempt a defense.
These are the most draconian restrictions we have seen on protests for decades, but those defending them on the government benches would not even mention them. They simply pretended they did not exist. And then they passed them for second reading, by 359 votes to 263.
The bill gives police the power to impose severe restrictions on protests if they suspect they “may result in serious disruption to the activities of an organisation” or could cause “serious unease, alarm or distress” to a passer-by. This applies to every single protest outside parliament and indeed to any protest anywhere. There has never been a protest which you could prove would not alarm someone. They make noise. That is what they do. The bill puts the power as to whether a protest can be held entirely in the hands of the police.
And yet even this benchmark was considered too high. So the bill also gave the home secretary the power to change the legal meaning of the term “serious disruption” by statutory instrument — effectively sidestepping parliament. In future, if Priti Patel or one of her successors decides that a protest was legal but they still wanted rid of it, they could simply unilaterally change the law.
[ . . . ]
And now, here, the silencing had finally begun. Protestors were being told that they could not raise their voices. It was as clear cut an attack on free speech as you could possibly imagine. But to that, they had nothing to say. The great champions of liberty did not even offer a murmur of criticism. Philip Davies, David Davies, Steve Baker: not a whisper of dissent. In fact, Baker stood up at the end to say that Labour was “refusing to engage” with “legitimate limits on freedoms”.
We’ve been here before, of course. During the New Labour period, some truly disturbing attacks were made on civil liberties and free speech. But back then, ministers at least had the decency to argue for them. Some of those arguments were terrible. But they at least had the basic decency to offer them.
Today, the government did not even try to justify what it was doing. Tory MPs barely pretended to have read the bill, let alone understand its contents, let alone challenge them. The great champions of English liberties didn’t say a word.
Read the whole thing here.
Rafia Zakaria: India’s illiberal ‘democracy’
Continuing the overseas theme, the world’s largest democracy India was recently demoted to “partly free” by Freedom House in its annual report on the state of democracy around the world. Rafia Zakaria at Dawn.com chronicles India’s decline, demonstrated by its treatment of minorities and journalists.
The report went to some lengths to explain why India had been demoted to a partially free country. They include the widespread crackdown on dissent and discrimination against Muslims that has been a hallmark of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration. The report noted that things had gotten progressively worse since the re-election of the Modi government in 2019. Since then, the state had been involved in a crackdown on journalists reporting on the farmers’ protests, using the colonial-era sedition laws.
The journalists included major media personalities such as Rajdeep Sardesai, a well-known anchor, Vinod Jose, executive editor of the Indian political and literary magazine Caravan, and also noted legislator and historian Shashi Tharoor. The Modi government has alleged that the journalists provoked the crowd for their own personal or political gain by spreading false and misleading information on the internet. Anand Sahay, the president of the Press Club of India, noted it was no coincidence that the charges against the journalists had only been registered in states that are ruled by Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
[ . . . ]
Then there is the demonisation of minorities. The Freedom House report notes that the government has been spreading false information during the Covid-19 pandemic by saying that Muslims were somehow responsible for transmitting the disease. The report takes particular notice of the ‘love jihad’ laws that have been designed to victimise Muslim men under trumped-up charges of forcibly converting Hindu women. In Uttar Pradesh, where the laws are in effect, several Muslim men have been arrested on dubious charges.
In essence, the laws exist as a tool to further demonise Indian Muslims on the whim of BJP operatives wielding state power. Even bigger problems have been created by the new citizenship laws, which use clever documentary requirements to prevent poor Muslim minorities in border states from retaining Indian citizenship.
So successfully has the Modi administration demonised Muslims in India that it has adopted the same sort of tactics against the Sikh population. Even though the farmers’ protests have been directed at three different laws related to how farmers sell their products, the government line has been that the Sikh farmers are really separatists demanding secession. The government has even alleged that Ravi, the climate activist booked on sedition charges, had connections to these secessionist groups among the protesting farmers.
The shocking thing is that all these authoritarian power grabs in India have gone unchallenged. One reason for this is that the Modi administration has worked systematically to erode the very constitutional checks and institutions that would have helped prevent such abuse of power. The Modi government’s support for Hindu supremacy has relied on the fact that 80 per cent of Indians are Hindu and that attaching privileges to that religion would be popular with them. This might explain the enduring support for Modi and his party among a large segment, even though the administration has not been able to deliver on promises of economic prosperity and global ascendancy.
Read it all here.
Max Boot: Why we should cancel the phrase ‘cancel culture’
Max Boot at The Washington Post takes a contrarian view (as he has been wont to do as of late regarding various ideas that skew right) of “cancel culture.” Boot disdainfully suggest the concept was “always overblown” and primarily a “trope” of the right, only utilized by the left apparently in response to its being used against their side. To Boot, cancel culture is an unfortunately but understandable evil in America’s move towards a more tolerant and pluralistic society.
At the risk of feeding the hysteria on Fox News, I propose that we cancel the cant phrase “cancel culture” because it has long since become divorced from reality. It’s a trope used by the right — and now cynically appropriated by some on the left — to resist accountability for wrongdoing. Specifically, it is a way to deflect the demands of Black Lives Matters and the #MeToo movement for a redress of wrongs such as those committed by producer Harvey Weinstein and the Minneapolis cop who killed George Floyd. By talking about “cancel culture,” the right can pretend that the real victims in America are White men — and that there is nothing wrong with hurtful comments, and even hurtful behavior, against women or people of color.
Even the right implicitly recognizes that some words go too far. The Conservative Political Action Conference, for example, canceled the invitation of a hip-hop artist after his long history of antisemitic statements came to light. The question is where to draw the line. Is anti-Zionism acceptable even if antisemitism isn’t? Is crude language — “locker room talk” — okay in some settings but not in others? Can people earn a second chance with an apology or are there some words so heinous they can never be taken back?
That is the difficult national conversation we should be having. Instead, we are all spectators in the political theater of the absurd as Republicans gleefully pounce on every instance of leftists acting a bit bonkers. Unfortunately, some progressive activists seem intent on providing Fox News with fodder.
Read the whole column here.
