Do we live in a free society? A society in which every political faction, offbeat philosophy or maverick idea is protected under law? In which there is a strong and growing marketplace of ideas? Is the "Spirit of Liberty," eloquently defended by the great jurist Learned Hand ("A spirit that’s not too sure its right."), alive and well in this republic?
After the latest civil liberties outrages in New York City, in which a few dozen Ku Klux Klan members and a handful of their supporters were virtually terrorized (much as the Klan used to terrorize its enemies when it once was powerful), there can be no doubt about the answer to these questions.
And what of the authorities’ obligation to protect free speech? Despite tons of police, a few people were able to infiltrate the Klan rally and started beating them up. A woman in lower Manhattan who tried to take the side of the Klan was set upon by dozens of hooligans who, apparently, felt the only legitimate way to register their opposition to the Klan was to go out and beat up a woman. That’s provided, of course, the odds were no less than 100-to-one.
The moral ammunition for this street violence was provided by many local pols who lined up in droves to get on the tube and inform one and all they were against the Klan. City Comptroller {correct} Alan Hevesi, who is thought to be running for mayor, told the howling anti-Klan crowd what it wanted to hear: "These are stupid people. They need to blame their targets for their own failure." Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) joined in the anti-Klan diatribe, although the New York Times reported that many of his comments were drowned out by the mob.
Some seven decades ago H.L. Mencken said of our pols: "The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kow-towing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc or convince it hypocritically that he has done so while cherishing reservations in petto."
Actually, I think Mencken’s comments give the average blockhead New York City pol much more credit than deserved. I’m not sure if, even in petto, these leaders realize that playing to the lowest common denominator is a bad thing.
The attempt to crush the First Amendment was provided with legal backing by a city government, which went to court to ensure that the Klan members were not able to wear their hoods. Why? The city trotted out a little heard of 19th century law prohibiting the wearing of hoods. This law had not been previously enforced. No one wearing hoods had been harassed at the city’s Halloween parades over the past few decades. No one wearing a hood for fun, who is not a member of the Klan, has been cited by the city. Suddenly, a pathetically small band of white supremacists was a threat to law and order. The city’s political governing class and "average citizen" decided to team up to save the city from the threat of the Klan and, I would presume, the perils of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade.
The local media – especially the airheads of the tube – couldn’t resist crowing about New York’s great accomplishment. It beat the Klan! On a local cable news show, the anchor said the Klan was "a loser." It had failed because so few people showed up for the rally. Given the quasi-endorsement by local pols of the violence against the Klan, it’s amazing any of these poor hooded hinds showed up. And yet many of these same pols, media elites and average citizens say that they are "progressive" liberals; that they stand for "diversity" and against everything the Klan represents. So, ostensibly, the way to prove it is to break Klan heads, or, if they’re not enough crackpot craniums to go around, find someone, anyone who isn’t willing to howl against the Klan and break his or her head.
One thinks of the wonderful mob scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In the play, a mob-fired up by one of pols who had helped destroyed the Roman Republic, Marc Anthony – mistakenly kills a man who has the same name as one of the conspirators who kill Anthony’s idol, Caesar. In the middle of the mayhem, someone realizes that the mob has the wrong person. But it enjoys the violence too much to stop. And it the goes on merrily pummeling an innocent man to death as the crowd in Lower Manhattan might have done if its collective IQ had not been in the double digits (Remember Nadler and Hevesi, as politicians, bring down their score). The bard certainly would have understood the scene in Manhattan recently as would the philosopher Schiller ("Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.")
Blockheads abound in America whenever a radical group wants to exercise its First Amendment rights. Most pols aren’t too particular about protecting the Bill of Rights when it might interfere with their poll numbers.
Are Americans in 1999 allowed to be Klan members? Or white supremacists? Or – God forbid! – Libertarians, Socialists or Communists or any American not willing to whoop it up for the American Empire’s bloody exploits? And, if not, maybe media and political elites – few of whom were concerned about the rights of an unfashionable minority – can put out a list of philosophies, misguided or enlightened as they may be depending on one’s point if view, that are no longer allowed.
If Libertarians speak out too loudly against the recent obscene bombing in the Balkans, do they risk mob violence from Star Spangled Goose Stepping Yankee Doodles? And will the authorities then go to court to penalize the Libertarians and unite with the goose steppers baying in the streets?
If someone in America today says that he abhors Nazism or Skinheads, etc, but would defend to death their right to be wrong, that courageous person is advised to stay out of New York City or at least be sure that he has a large, fully-paid up life insurance policy. Is it safe to believe, as J.S. Mill wrote in "On Liberty," that society has as much right to impose its will on one man as one man has to impose his will on all of society?
Many Americans love to preach to the rest of the world. Our interventionist foreign policy implies that this nation should have the exclusive right to settle disputes around the globe. The United States is the only super power left standing and we should use an iron fist to keep other warring people in line, Thomas Friedman, recently argued in a disgusting piece in the Sunday New York Times. Apparently, the Times believes that our government has so much wisdom that it can settle Balkan feuds that have been burning for centuries. We do this because we claim to be free; to accord freedom to every faction or group, provided they live under law.
As we insist on bringing freedom to other peoples, we should ask: Are we free? The streets of almost every town in America where the Klan – or some other unacceptable radical group wants to exercise its supposed first-amendment rights – tell a different story.
In fact, we live in a society in which we are only free to advocate accepted political ideas; the ideas "officially" approved by media and political elites. Does anyone actually think this repression stops with the Klan? Or Skinheads? Or Communists in the McCarthy period? Or anti-war objectors in the Vietnam era or the recent Gulf War?
Let others – who may preach anything from racial superiority to "isolationism" to limited government – advocate these unpopular ideas at the risk of injury, insult, agents provocateur (The FBI is notorious for infiltrating these organizations. One wonders, given what we know about the secret actions of our government decades ago, will we learn in a few years, that the FBI or so other government secret operations actually encouraged many of these hate groups?)
But what is the worst than the violence of mobs who will not allow people to be odd, wrong or bigoted is the sleazy pols who line up in announcing their opposition to the Klan. Why is it so many of them just happen to have elections coming up? The pols lust after votes and so what if it means the loss of a few civil liberties for strange groups? After all, if Joe Stalin could contemptuously ask how many divisions the pope has, our local George Washington Plunkitts can ask how many votes does the Klan have in New York City?
A courageous civil libertarian stand won’t get Alan Hevesi elected mayor of New York or to any other citywide office. New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who as a former prosecutor was famous for zealous indictments that were thrown out of court, isn’t going to be elected to the U.S. Senate if he insists that the First Amendment covers everyone.
Whenever I hear the silence of politicians for the violence of these mobs – whether it is the violence of union workers trying to stop privatizations by closing down construction sites, or the threats against various radical groups or the violence carried out against those who didn’t want to "honor" the picket lines of various newspaper strikes – I think of the phrase used by a historian of the Third Reich. He said Hitler’s victory meant, "the gutter had come to power."
The gutter was out in force recently in New York City. And pols know that the "gutter" has plenty of power in our liberal democratic society.
Gregory Bresiger is a business writer living in New York City. He recommends J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Learned Hand’s The Spirit of Liberty, H.L. Mencken’s, The American Scene, a Reader and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
