Arthur Chrenkoff discusses the recent uproar among progressives over an open letter calling for respect for free speech … when the “wrong kind of people” started signing on:
Godfrey Elfwick’s disturbingly accurate summary of free speech support among the woke.
So how did it come to this on a meta-level – how did the left, which for a long time championed ideas like freedom of speech, come to be the new censors and book burners?
The answer is short and simple: power.
Thanks to its Marxist heritage, the left is all about power. Who has it, who doesn’t (Lenin’s famous ur-question “who whom?”), how to get it. Power and power relationship is the ultimate touchstone and lodestar, the prism through everything else is seen and judged. Everything, including morality – what’s right, what’s wrong – flows from the position in this binary system (and with power it is a zero-sum game: you either have it all or you have none).
Turkish Islamist president Recep Erdogan has once famously said “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” The stop – the end – is power; democracy is the mean to the end.
So it is with the left and freedom. The left was pro-freedom when it was on the way up. Being pro-freedom helped them achieve their objectives. Freedom of speech, for example, was important because it guaranteed them the ability to spread their ideas.
Now the left has the power, if not in all respects and in equal measure, certainly as far as culture is concerned, where it enjoys near hegemony. Being on top it doesn’t need freedom of speech anymore. Quite the contrary: freedom of speech now enables its critics to challenge their ideas and their position. Debate is a waste of time and effort, much better and more efficient is to silence any dissenting voices.
It’s never about principle – it’s about the side (yours) and power (yours to gain and keep).
