Speech, hatred, means, ends, and punching Nazis

This article is a decent high-level look at the ACLU, civil rights absolutism, and its conflict with a variety of progressive ideals.

And I admit, this is one of those areas that, as each person speaks up with their on spin on the debate, I find myself nodding in agreement — which not only makes my neck sore, but leads to a confusion in viewpoint, which is what I’m suffering from at the moment (as a number of partial, abandoned blog posts on the subject demonstrate, at least to me).

The conflict is, as we look at the ACLU’s stance to date on protecting the civil liberties of Nazis (figuratively and literally) is, I think, fundamentally about ends and means.

The ends, from my perspective, is seeing anyone espousing the racist, demonizing, hate-filled rhetoric — rhetoric that is apparently utterly sincere in its desire to render a variety of minority groups as second-class citizens (at best), or to rid our society of them by whatever means necessary (at worst) — to see that rhetoric ended and the threat that goes with it.

So, yeah, the whole “punching Nazis” or keeping them from getting permits for gatherings or not defending them if they’re carrying around weapons, that makes complete sense to me. These are dangerous people, as the majority of the violence in Charlottesville demonstrates. And, heck, we’ve seen what happens in a country that adopts Nazi race supremacy as public policy, and we’ve seen what happens when white supremacists and the Klan hold sway in our own country. Seeing these folk marching about, espousing dangerous ideas and plans for future action, seems inconceivable to tolerate.

A day when no African-American, no Jew, no gay person, no person of color, no woman, no anyone has to hear that kind of hatred, that marginalization, that existential threatening — that sounds like a fine day to me.

But then there’s the question of means. Because there is one unalterable truth, and that is that those in power will use and abuse any legal abridgment of rights — any power to act against “dangerous ideas” or “threatening behavior” or “hate speech” or “risk to the public order” or “threat against the social contract and the ability of people to live their lives as they see fit” — that they will use those legalities against any idea or behavior or people by whom they are threatened.

Laws and court cases that stifle Nazis and their despicable ideology and their appalling protest marches will be used against socialists, against Black Lives Matter, against LGBT organizations, against women’s marches for reproductive freedom, against environmentalists, against strikes and organized labor, against people trying to block pipelines, to #Occupy groups and #Resist groups.

Indeed, to a degree they already have. And, historically, that’s been the “natural” way of things.

“But there’s a huge difference, qualitatively, in their cause, between Black Lives Matter and the Nazis,” you might say. “Nobody could possibly confuse the two.” And, yes, I agree — but that not a difference one can codify easily into law, not in a way that people in power who find your cause to be a threat, or distasteful, or just politically or economically inconvenient cannot take advantage of.

“BLM is a violent organization.” “BLM is a racist organization.” “BLM protests have turned bad.” “People who identify with BLM have done bad things.” “BLM is anti-police and anti-white.” Those are largely incorrect statements, but someone in power — a judge, a governor, a major — who asserted that they are correct could (and would, and have) then treat BLM (et al.) the same way many folk are understandably arguing that the Nazis, the KKK, the shouting, chanting, swastika-waving, hating, gun-toting, threatening-violence yahoos ought to be treated.

And that’s bitter to face. The righteousness of one’s ends tends to drive what seem like reasonable means. It tends to make it easy for the moment to see the bad guys, the black hats, the enemies, to consider them so clearly identifiable that anyone should recognize their particular evil and suitability for targeting.

But government is awful at taking official steps against “the bad guys,” because not only is governmental power a clumsy club, it’s too easily subverted by those in power.

It’s bitter, and it’s deeply frustrating, and I know that if I were a target of these groups (a direct, obvious target, at least), I’d feel that anger and frustration more clearly, to the point where “To hell with the means, we’ll worry about that after these yahoos are dealt with” as an attempt toward a short-term solution would seem to make sense.

But the short-term solution here is fraught with long-term peril. Heck, with the current Administration, perhaps only mid-term peril. A President willing to claim “many sides” were responsible for the violence in Charlottesville would clearly love to crack down on the “sides” he sees fit to.

How do you let the righteous crack down on the evil, and prevent the evil from returning the favor?

I don’t have any easy solutions, but arguing that there is a group so invidious, so threatening to the social order that the power of the state should silence them, seems fraught, to say the least. I do think that, given precedent, the state (local municipalities in particular) can take a much more careful view of future such rallies and gatherings, and can (and must) be much more prepared in their police activities to step in sooner and more forcefully when things start going wrong.

+Yonatan Zunger has argued, elegantly and persuasively, that tolerance is not a moral absolute, but a social peace treaty [https://goo.gl/NVvAwq], to be reconsidered regarding those who make it clear that they are not willing to reciprocate. I’m not arguing that Nazis should be socially tolerated — people who say that slices of our population are subhumans who ought to be shipped out, ghettoized, or treated as lessers have no moral or social standing to demand to be liked and treated as social equals when someone calls them on it.

But legal “tolerance” is another matter, because the law is myopic about the virtue of any particular given opinion or belief or cause, and the clumsy tools it provides are easily used against even the pure of heart and righteous. It is, writ large, similar to the conflict in giving criminals — even obvious and unrepentant and self-confessed criminals who were caught in the act, on camera, committing heinous crimes — the right to self-defense and due process. We recognize that as critical, because who is the “obvious” criminal is too open to interpretation, or willful misapplication, and deciding that only some people are allowed a court defense endangers everyone.

The ACLU’s efforts (among the many other things it does) to defend the civil liberties of even Nazis and haters can certainly be challenged in any given instance, but the angry (even justifiably angry) assertion that the ends sometimes do justify the means, that treating Nazis as unworthy of and therefore not eligible for those civil liberties, not only violates most practical and moral standards, but ignores how others will use those means to ends that I, for one, have no desire to see.

How else do we stop these brutes — who I clearly agree need to be stopped from their end goals, and the damage they’ll do in trying to reach them? I’m more than open to figuring that out.

Why the ACLU is adjusting its approach to “free speech” after Charlottesville
The ACLU positioned itself to lead the resistance. Now its deepest traditions could be at stake.

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