The Rise and Fall of The ACLU -- Conservatives Start to Lament the Downfall of an Organization They Have Loved to Hate
David Bernstein has a great article on the abandonment by the ACLU of many of its traditional core principles.
Readers know I grew up a traditional Texas Conservative through high school, and then migrated to the libertarian-ish camp through college and beyond. One of my early disconnects with the Conservatives was their demonization of the ACLU. I didn't agree with everything the ACLU did (particularly related to economic regulation because then the group's quasi-Stalinist origins showed through), but I did think it did a lot of great work. It was defending the Bill of Rights in unpopular cases with unsympathetic victims (e.g. Nazis and obvious criminals) in situations no one else would touch. They were frequently a backstop against bad facts creating bad law.
Ironically, though, just as Conservatives really need the ACLU now they they are targets of things like speech and due process limitations, the ACLU is migrating away from defense of these things.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn't actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, "Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?"
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU's long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation "promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused." Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due proess protections "inappropriately favor the accuse."
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
