FREE SPEECH FOR ME

Posted at 7:24 p.m. ET

Free speech for me, but not for thee.  It's a familiar refrain of civil libertarians, warning of the attitudes of some Americans.

But those attitudes seem to be spreading into dangerous corners.  In a short but important piece, Rich Lowry cautions about some disturbing trends in the Obama campaign, and the Obama movement.  This is a matter of great concern to me as well, and I'll be writing about it in the future.  Let's start with Lowry:

Barack Obama has already brought change. He's ended the "chilling effect."

Any restrictions on speech -- real or imagined -- were once inevitably deemed to have a "chilling effect" on people who would otherwise exercise their First Amendment rights if they weren't so frightened by the possibility of running afoul of the law. Claims of a "chilling effect" were the most reliable weapon in the American Civil Liberties Union's absolutist campaign against, say, even the most common-sensical laws against obscenity.

But the politics of free speech has been subtly shifting. Opponents of the ACLU on the Right are increasingly worried about overreaching rules against "hate speech" defining legitimate opinions as out of bounds. Meanwhile, the same people who forever decry the country's imminent descent into the dark night of fascism are now comfortable regulating political speech in federal law and banning speech on college campuses. The Left has learned to like some chill with its free speech.

Wonderfully stated.  And more:

Enter the Obama campaign, which reflects the new ethos. It twice issued "Obama Action Wire" alerts for activists to call a Chicago radio station and try to shut down appearances by two Obama critics, writers Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso. No "chilling effect" here.

And...

Enter the Obama campaign, which reflects the new ethos. It twice issued "Obama Action Wire" alerts for activists to call a Chicago radio station and try to shut down appearances by two Obama critics, writers Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso. No "chilling effect" here.

And...

The Obama campaign's effort dovetails with the work of an outfit called Accountable America, run by a former MoveOn.org operative. It is devoted to threatening conservative donors with legal action and exposure of any embarrassing details of their private lives if they give money to groups running ads against Obama.

And...

Liberal editorial boards have apparently lost their former zest for the First Amendment. Consider this approving sentence from a New York Times editorial: "The wholesale descent into Swift Boat campaigning has been blocked -- for now -- by a federal judge in Virginia."

Those hero judges.

It's all just a taste of what's to come if Obama wins and Democrats have even bigger majorities in Congress, emboldening them to try to crush their antagonists once and for all. "Hate is not a family value" was a popular bumper sticker on the left during the 1990s. Now, the left has embraced hate as, if not a family value, the organizing spirit of its long assault on George W. Bush, and anyone else in the way, from Joe Lieberman to Sarah Palin.

Finally...

America's partisan politics has always featured its share of rancorous abuse, but there's something rancid at the heart of the new, blog-driven left that believes its bullying childishness has led the way out of the wilderness. This spirit will inevitably seep into an Obama administration. Whatever Obama's professions of his commitment to cross-partisan understanding, he's never confronted the left of his own party and has always been willing to engage in hardball when it suits his purposes.

And where is the ACLU?  Are we serious?

Several years ago, one of the last of the great ACLU lawyers, a man truly devoted to the First Amendment, told me how worried he was about the anti-freedom trends in this country.  He worried first about speech codes on college campuses, which teach young kids that such restrictions are permissible and desirable.  Those kids will be in positions of power in 20 years, he cautioned, and will carry that logic with them.  He worried about his own ACLU, and revealed that some members of the national ACLU board don't even believe in traditional free speech any longer.

The left is very good with words, far better than the right.  It is also ruthless about power.  It won't say it's restricting free speech when it tries to get talk radio off the air.  It will say it's expanding opportunities for others, and improving the atmosphere in our nation.  It will lie because it feels it has a right to lie, because it possesses "a higher truth."  Among the worst offenders in the drive to limit speech will be journalists. 

Remember that all totalitarian systems begin with words, not actions.  If we slip into a kind of dictatorship, it won't be because the Army gets out of control or there are riots in the streets.  It will be a soft ride, with assurances along the way that these "new standards" will elevate us.  All dictatorial systems promise a kind of paradise to those who go along.

How many Americans will go along?  Given the nature of our educational system, and the collapse of journalism's once-spirited defense of the First Amendment, I fear the answer to that question.

October 4, 2008.