The Left’s Abandonment of Leftism

All the world now knows that Elon Musk has completed his purchase of Twitter and that he did so because he regarded the platform as overly restrictive of speech, particularly of content that questioned leftist narratives or that was considered detrimental to Democratic candidates. The platform’s suspension of former president Trump’s account and its censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story shortly before Election Day 2020 are two especially egregious examples of the genre.

Musk has promised to free up the platform for a much wider range of speech although the precise breadth of what he’ll permit is still unknown, possibly even to him.  I, for one, favor the idea that major social media companies should adopt - or be legally required to adopt - policies that track the restrictions on censorship imposed by the Constitution on governmental entities.  Doing so would mean they’d have a huge body of existing law to guide their decisions, allow them to scrub patently illegal messages like libel, defamation, false advertising, etc., while leaving their platforms open to the free expression of viewpoints.

But whatever Musk does with Twitter, leftist commentary on the matter has been nothing short of hysterical, and predictably so.  It’s not as if the Left has made any secret of its disdain for the very concept of free speech in the era of the Internet.  For many years they’ve clearly articulated a vision of both governmental and private control of speech based frankly on its content.  What began on college campuses as the cancellation of virtually all speech inimical to leftist perspectives has become the policy of many major corporations.  Wrongspeak now risks being tagged by the federal government as terrorism. 

That’s plainly a power play.  Prior to Election Day, Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” and anyone who claimed otherwise merited censorship as a tool of Vladimir Putin.  After the election, it was openly admitted that there was no Russian disinformation and never had been.  The point was to elect Joe Biden.  Mission accomplished.

So, in the most whiplash-inducing turnabout in decades, promotion of free speech comes mostly from the Right while the Left demands ever-greater censorship.  Of course, it wasn’t so very long ago that the converse was true; the Left encouraged free speech, funded the ACLU for that very reason and valued the notion of speaking truth to power.  Nowadays, one of the most progressive presidencies in history announced that its Department of Homeland Security would be scouring public discourse for “disinformation, misinformation and mal-information,” and working with Big Tech to quash same.  Leftists cheered, but their cheers turned to howls of protest when conservatives and a few unreconstructed old-guard liberals spoke out against the “Disinformation Governance Board” and the plan was scrapped.

Which raises the question “what happened?”  When did the Left abandon liberalism and embrace censorship?

The answer, I believe is the simplest one of all: when they took power.

For decades, the Left either was out of power or at least firmly believed itself to be so.  In academia, government and the news media, the essentially-invariable refrain was that power elites were fundamentally conservative, acting in their own interests and those of the state they controlled.  Sociologist C. Wright Mills articulated the idea fully as early as 1956 in his book The Power Elite.  Big business, big banks, big war industries and their mouthpieces in the press, so the argument went, have a natural tendency to protect their own power, i.e., the status quo, and are therefore conservative.  Needless to say, those were arguable points, particularly after the implementation of the Great Society, but whatever your stance on them, they were taken as articles of faith by the Left generally.  Further, the U.S. was considered a belligerent world power that would do pretty much anything to maintain and expand its influence including stepping on the individual rights and free voices the Left then espoused.  Power, it was assumed was a fundamentally conservative phenomenon exercised in fundamentally conservative ways.

But much has changed since then.  Now the Left is ascendant; its ideas hold almost total sway on college campuses and have been embraced by federal and state governments, the military and the corporate world.  Conservative voices are routinely silenced on campus, in the MSM and online.  Draconian measures are deployed to keep them afraid and quiet.  Employees, even highly-paid and influential ones, can find themselves looking for a job solely because they expressed a thought disapproved of by the Left.  Now, views critical of the Left survive, if at all, on Fox news, and on sites like Substack and Rumble.

The lesson here is one of the oldest: he who holds power asserts the authority to control public discourse; he who’s out of power asserts the right to free speech.  The Bill of Rights exists because of the need to limit governmental power.  That the Left has come to opposes the First Amendment’s right to free speech can only mean it’s taken power.

The flip-side of that coin shows the same thing.  One of the apparent and often-mentioned hypocrisies of the Left is its simultaneous embrace of both the right to an abortion free from governmental interference and governmental infringement on the right to speech.  How can they do both?  Once again, the explanation resides in the Left’s defense of its own power.  Under Roe, women had close-to-unchecked power to abort a fetus at any stage of its development.  The Dobbs decision limits that power and therefore is virulently opposed by the Left.  The assertion of the right to free speech limits the power of the Left to impose its views on the rest of us.  So the two – free speech and Dobbs – have something in common that must be anathematized – the limitation on the power of the Left, leftist presuppositions and discourse.

Much the same could be said about, for example, the Left’s cherished desire to erode due process of law.

As long as leftist ideas and precepts dominate public discourse, expect the Left to champion censorship.  Principles, it seems, are all very well, but must take a backseat to power.