The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank is disappointed that today’s Democrats have turned into defenders of the very civil liberties violations they formerly decried. It’s not clear whether he’s also surprised, but he certainly shouldn’t be.
Democrats used to be fervent supporters of colorblind racial equality, but for a long time now they have supported the state distributing burdens and benefits based on race and denounce as racist anyone who still believes what they used to believe. Democrats used to be in the forefront of those defending free speech and an untrammeled First Amendment, but in most free speech controversies today Democrats are on the side of suppression — of speech that someone might think causes a workplace to be “hostile”; of speech they describe as “hate speech”; even of the political speech that former great liberal theorists of free expression such as Alexander Meiklejohn asserted was at the core of the First Amendment.
If Dana Milbank, if anyone, is still surprised when Democrats abandon values they used to hold, he’s been in Washington too long.
