How the ACLU ceased defending the Bill of Rights and, concerned with winning popularity contests, became an antiliberal progressive organization owing more to Marx than the Magna Carta. “Let the government abrogate the free speech rights of one group, however odious, [as in no-platforming] and it will do it again, possibly in the case of someone you like.”
James Kirchick: Adopting a scrupulously content-neutral approach to the defense of free speech is guaranteed to upset people across the political spectrum, but it was a price [ACLU head Ira] Glasser and his colleagues were willing to pay. Religious conservatives like Buckley fumed at the ACLU for arguing on behalf of flag-burners and blasphemous artists, while [progressives] were confounded by its insistence that neo-Nazis had the right to goose-step past the homes of Holocaust survivors. But the defense of the First Amendment was far too important to leave to those concerned with winning popularity contests. …
[Their] commitment to civil liberties [is now] primarily if not exclusively a function of partisan politics. …
Then as now, Glasser was at pains to remind the ACLU’s critics that it was not “defending Nazis” in the Skokie affair. It was defending the First Amendment, which remains valid independent of whomever exercises it. Let the government abrogate the free speech rights of one group, however odious, and it will do it again, possibly in the case of someone you like.
Almost immediately following Glasser’s July 2001 retirement, however, the organization started to slip. … Unlike the 1970s, when the ACLU was run by stubbornly principled people who refused to buckle under the weight of fashionable opinion or donor pressure, the new generation of leaders prioritized conformism over intellectual consistency.
“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive … organization,” Glasser says about Anthony Romero,(1) an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly. (“You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” remarked the late, great former Village Voice columnist and ACLU board member Nat Hentoff of this last gambit).
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Meghan Daum, in The Problem with Everything:
The American Civil Liberties Union, apparently confused about its purported mission of protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens, unleashed a tweet thread denouncing the rollback because “it promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused . . . We will continue to support survivors.”
Nonetheless, to hear the ACLU talking about “inappropriately favoring the accused,” even on a platform like Twitter, was nothing short of remarkable. To me, the nagging question was … why so many people and organizations were willing to override fundamental democratic principles in order to show that they were on the “right side” of an issue …
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(1) Apparently Leader for Life, as the autocratic Romero’s rule commenced twenty years ago.
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