‘Liberals would be chumps’ to let speech interfere with ‘progress’
It’s safe to say that the predominant strain of academic thinking on American campuses abhors the suppression of alleged and professed communist sympathizers and party members on the eve of the Cold War.
Skidmore College historian Jennifer Delton, whose academic specialty is “rethinking the 1950s,” takes the opposite view: Let’s replay the anticommunist playbook with the alt-right.
She writes in The Washington Post that American liberals need to ditch their “First Amendment absolutism” (a few still embrace it) because alt-right personalities such as Richard Spencer “seek to bait liberal institutions by weaponizing the concept of free speech, which is an issue that divides the liberal left.”
Progressivism is endangered if liberals let Spencer and his ilk enjoy the legal protections they are guaranteed on public university campuses, Delton says, hearkening back to how President Truman and establishment liberals handled communists:
To deny communists freedom of speech and assembly — to run them out of politics on the basis of their ideas and political connections — seemed like the height of hypocrisy. Communists constantly pointed this out, as did those liberals who rejected the anticommunist agenda.
So anticommunist liberals made a series of arguments that justified denying communists these rights on account of their disingenuous intentions and totalitarian ideology. Most famously, liberal activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued that communists hid behind the First Amendment to attack liberal democracy, using it as a shield as they sought to destroy the democratic system that upheld those rights.
Schlesinger understood there weren’t enough communists in the United States to actually foment revolution. But there were enough to divide progressive forces and thus create an opportunity for conservative Republicans to take power and repeal the New Deal … Liberals would be chumps to let a principled commitment to “freedom of speech” undercut the pragmatic goal of political survival, which was the only way to ensure progress in civil rights and social welfare.
This sounds an awful lot like today’s arguments by professors and their students that some speech is inherently violent and it must be suppressed – the First Amendment and college promises to protect “freedom of expression” be damned – to protect the very identities of people who disagree with it.
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Indeed, Delton says it’s time to revisit the academy’s historical aversion to McCarthyism, and embrace the analysis by Schlesinger and philosopher Sidney Hooks:
Both worried that liberals’ commitment to the absoluteness of rights made them unable to confront an enemy that didn’t share that commitment. Both understood that the [Communist Party USA], like the alt-right, was engaged in a struggle to destroy the cultural and political legitimacy of western democratic liberalism. And both understood that First Amendment absolutism was a luxury that only a stable, peaceable society could afford. I can’t help but think that even William F. Buckley would have agreed with this.
But she also urges institutions of higher education to not censor or censure “liberal critics of, say, diversity policies or Title IX excesses,” who rightly point out “campuses have become places where the free exchange of ideas has been curbed by peer pressure, self-policing and a self-righteous call-out culture”:
Until university presidents offer real leadership in reconciling the liberal critique of “identity politics” with a new generation of diverse students, faculty and staff for whom such politics represent progress, they will be unable to protect their institutions from conservative attacks.
Delton is not a constitutional scholar, so she doesn’t attempt to reconcile her advocacy to actual American jurisprudence, much of which arose from suppression of communist and other dissident activity.
By asking liberals to rethink McCarthyism, simply to take on a weak white-nationalist movement whose main weapon is Twitter, the historian paves for the way for the continued centralization of college life under risk-averse bureaucrats at the expense of faculty like herself.
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