Liberals who once preened as free speech absolutists sound
increasingly like censors. Their customary enthusiasm for diversity
of opinion has vanished as their gains in society erode under
conservative free speech.
Liberals want the drawbridges to public opinion pulled up before
conservatives dislodge them from power completely. Bill Clinton’s
lament last week about a “docile establishment press” was
essentially a call for the liberal media to stamp out the growing
number of conservative voices in it. A week earlier Al Gore had
spoken bitterly of the slowness of mainstream journalists to
recognize a “fifth column” in their midst. Gore might as well have
said: “Hey, liberal journalists, get your act together and make
sure conservatives don’t enter your profession.”
Clearly liberals are no longer in a Voltairean mood to defend to
the death anyone’s right to free speech. No, the disciples of
Voltaire now prefer the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Witness Tom
Daschle accusing Rush Limbaugh of yelling fire in a crowded radio
theater.
Liberals recognize that free speech absolutism is a poor
guardian of their power. So they will suspend it for now, but are
of course ready to revert to it should the recovery of power
require it again.
If liberalism seems more unprincipled and opportunistic than
ever, that’s because there are no real principles underlying it.
Nothing is consistent in modern liberalism save its willfulness.
The will remains constant while the intellect operates randomly.
The intellect is useful to it only in devising arguments that serve
ever-changing appetites. The liberal intellect selects arguments
not according to reasoning rooted in reality, but according to the
demands of the will. If, say, a cramped argument about the proper
limits of free speech happens to serve a desire of the moment —
such as “campaign finance reform” or stopping pro-life protests —
the liberal intellect will seize upon it, then discard it once a
new desire pops up. And if words such as free speech must be
willfully redefined, so be it.
The censorship of liberals appears under the guise of “civility”
and “standards.” When New York Times editor Howell Raines
got caught out using the paper for liberal agitprop against Augusta
National Golf Club, he couldn’t just say, “We want the club’s
single-sex policy to change, so we are not running anything that
defends the club.” He had to say instead that he spiked columns
deviating from the paper’s crusade because they had problems with
“tone and structure” and created an appearance of “intramural
squabbling” at the paper. A few days earlier one of Raines’s
deputies was put in the ludicrous position of having to say that
one of the columns was rejected because it contained a “logic” that
“did not meet our standards.” Curious since sloppy reasoning had
never bothered the Times before.
And apparently it doesn’t bother the editors now. Punctuating
the absurd arbitrariness of the episode, Raines has now run the
unacceptably illogical column. Under pressure from fellow liberals
embarrassed at his maniacal riding of his faux “civil rights”
hobby-horse, Raines relented. But he still denies the baldly
ideological reasons for rejecting them earlier. “There is not now,
nor will there ever be, any attempt to curb the opinions of our
writers,” he says implausibly. Censorship, he says, “is simply not
in our thinking, tradition, practices.”
Selective support for free speech is in fact an important
component of liberal culture, since it can only succeed if
conservative voices are restricted. Toward this end, liberals are
now overstating the conservative representation in the media,
hoping to cause a backlash against conservative free speech.
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. speaks of the
“rightward press,” which is “heavily biased toward conservative
politics and conservative politicians.” And he asks, “What will the
rest of us do about the new bias?”
From Clinton to Dionne, the liberal alarms are being sounded.
The “new bias” is producing in them a new censorship.
