E-Pluribus | Mar. 30, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Chris Stirewalt: The First Amendment: Rarely Popular, Always Necessary
At The Dispatch, Chris Stirewalt manages to work “rainbow jamboree with the Care Bears” into a rousing defense of the First Amendment. Read it all to find out the context, but rest assured that the Founding Fathers, free speech-related warts and all, make far more numerous and significant appearance in Stirewalt’s piece than the bears. And while “caring is what counts” may suffice for Care-a-lot, America’s need for a strong commitment to the First Amendment is as important as ever.
Though Thomas Jefferson is most assuredly out of favor with the modern progressives who are his heirs, in 1787 he identified the same problem with American politics many in today’s Democratic Party now decry. Jefferson blamed what today is called “fake news” for the Constitution’s version of the presidency that he believed was inclined toward monarchy.
“The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them,” Jefferson wrote to John Adams’ son-in-law from Paris. “The English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves.”
He was calling Adams and the other Federalists a bunch of dupes who created an undemocratic presidency because of the “impudent and persevering lying” of pro-British journalists. We could say the same thing today about American outlets and politicians who echo Chinese talking points about the prevalence of racism in our country or Russian propaganda about the legitimacy of the 2020 elections.
Unlike many in his party today, though, Jefferson didn’t suggest controlling the information Americans could receive. In fact, he said misinformation was an inevitable consequence of life in a free society. “The people can not be all, and always, well informed,” he wrote. “The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.”
As we said, read it all at The Dispatch.
Jonathan Rauch: Fighting Back, At Last
From Care Bears to Monty Python. Persuasion’s Jonathan Rauch invokes the Spanish inquisitors (didn’t see that coming, did you?) in a recounting of the rise of numerous groups dedicated to restoring classical liberalism to stifled college campuses, and at least in some cases, to broader society. If politics is downstream from culture, then surely even further upstream is education, so the trend noted by Rauch should be a welcome one to anyone, right or left, who is concerned about the future of freedom in our nation.
Today’s flowering of activism is sudden but was long in the making. The postmodern strands of illiberalism — like Monty Python’s Spanish inquisitors bursting into the parlors of unsuspecting residents — had the advantage of surprise. They flourished in academia, but most people assumed that they could not take root in the harder soil of the outside world.
For liberal pluralists, the past decade has been a shock. Activists, bureaucrats and theorists seemed to come out of nowhere to police speech on social media and in schools, corporate HR, foundations and nonprofits. Last July, a poll by the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans agreed that the political climate prevented them from expressing beliefs because others might find them offensive; one-third worried about missing out on career opportunities or losing their jobs if their political opinions became known. Only those on the far-left felt safe expressing their opinions, and even among them, the share who did not feel safe rose from 30% in 2017 to 42% in 2020.
The initial response from pluralists was shock, disorientation and self-doubt. No reasonable liberal, after all, denied the reality of persistent social injustices, and no one wanted to imply otherwise. But gradually, and then not so gradually, it dawned on pluralists that these new activists were not friends of liberalism, and posed serious dangers.
Read the whole thing at Persuasion.
Josh Holdenried: Big Tech Censors Religion, Too
Rounding out today’s roundup and writing on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, Josh Holdenried of the Napa Legal Institute says non-conforming political opinions are not the only target of Big Tech censorship. As Holdenried sees it, religious views that conflict with modern cultural trends are increasingly under fire as well.
Consider LifeSiteNews, a popular religious news website. In February its YouTube channel was permanently banned by Google, which deleted all its videos. Google claimed its action was a response to Covid-19 misinformation but wouldn’t tell LSN which video had offended its standards. The tech giant had flagged LSN for a video of an American Catholic bishop criticizing vaccines developed with fetal cells. The website’s editor in chief said “our best guess is that the channel was taken down for our frank and factual discussion of the controversy around abortion-tainted medicines and vaccines.”
In January, Bishop Kevin Doran, an Irish Catholic, tweeted: “There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practiced, is not an expression of freedom or dignity.” Twitter removed this message and banned Bishop Doran from posting further. While the company reversed its decision after public opposition, others haven’t been so lucky.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter
Zaid Jilani on the availability of legal representation for the accused:
Thread from Claire Lehmann on the woke left and center left:
The possibility of vaccine passports is beginning to create some chatter over privacy and other concerns:
