Happy Monday everyone! As always, Monday’s post comes to us from Stephen Hall. Thank you, Stephen! Stephen couldn’t choose a picture for this article and asked if perhaps I could. Seems Stephen has far more confidence in my 5am-ish abilities than reality dictates. :-D
Everyone have a great Monday and a super week!!!
A few years back when Robert Byrd was running for his 50th term as Senator, or 50th year, something like that, I forget; I amusingly watched and talked with those who opposed his perpetual election as they tried repeatedly to mis-characterize him as a leftist ideologue for numerous votes along those lines during his centuries or millennia as Senator. I think he was the one who was proposing to nominate Caligula’s horse to the Senate, but I may be remembering that incorrectly too.
The point being that their criticisms failed, and were doomed to fail from the start, and that it was rather obvious to me at the time, and not merely because he was popular for delivering excessive amounts of government pork projects to the state.
Rather, the criticism failed to stick because it was untrue. That is not to say that he had not voted for very many left leaning legislative acts, but rather the fact that they were left leaning was never his motivation.
@TheRogue_Elf sent me a link to a 60 Minutes article discussing the concern of many on the left that the ACLU has become no longer merely an extremist left wing organization but rather increasingly a heavily partisan organization openly endorsing leftist political candidates while disingenuously denying that they endorsed political candidates.
The point of both the article and the observations about Robert Byrd is just how important it is to distinguish between that which is partisan and that which is ideological because an improper critique will be ineffective in swaying the independent observer recognizing that even a proper critique will never dissuade those at whom the critique is aimed.
Criticizing Robert Byrd as a hard leftist ideologue fails because he was always a hyper-partisan Democrat. I watched him publicly criticize a Republican president from the floor of the Senate for that exact same policy for which he had just years before staunchly defended a Democrat president on that same floor.
Many would merely brush this off as simple hypocrisy and opportunism, but it was much more than that, partisanship was an essential and longstanding part of his character. He had been a Dixiecrat and led the filibuster to oppose the passage of the Civil Rights Act, yet after it was passed with Republican support and signed by the then Democrat president, and subsequently his party did a 180 degree turn to claim the were the champions of minorities, he fell in lock step, renounced his past affiliation with the KKK and pushed the party’s new agenda of welfare and dependency to replace segregation.
Whatever the party stood for, he was for, whatever the party opposed, he opposed, he was the very epitome of a partisan, which is how he stayed in the Senate as the longest serving Senator in history, mostly because he outlived Strom Thurmond. Partisanship keeps one’s incumbency, that and by gaining influence over appropriations through a very inappropriate seniority system.
The story of the ACLU is just the opposite, they are, and always have been, a consistently ideologically driven extreme leftist organization. Every issue, opinion, and amicus curiae advocates for increased limitations of traditional American institutions and increasing interference and control by the left.
I know, I can hear certain readers protesting that certain cases in the past under the spurious labels of “civil rights” and “civil liberties” did not actually increase government power, but we have been foolishly sold on the idea that it increased or at least “protected” the citizens’ liberties, e.g. the requirement of Miranda warnings of police departments.
In reality, the case involving Miranda is more of a tug-of-war between executive officers of the state (the police) and the judicial officers of the state (the lawyers) on essentially a procedural issue of best practices; any protection of the accused criminal is mostly incidental.
But, what about the socialists marching in Skokie, as a case of free speech, you ask? Aside from the fact that it was originally supposed to be in Chicago but relocated to Skokie solely for the shock factor, and then was moved back to Chicago after the legal case; does anyone really want to argue that marches and protests are not a nearly ubiquitous tool of the left?
The argument in that case was more to keep open the avenues of leftist advocacy, but what can you say, as a stopped clock is correct even twice a day, a leftist organization can argue the correct legal position even if some of us suspect that their motives for doing so were rather self-serving. Evidence for this position is that this same organization which was defending what now that same organization having internal conflict over this traditional stance.
In the long run, this is likely to be the one area where they are actually on the correct side not because of ideological purity but because this is the side on which their bread it buttered; the ACLU would lose all credible claim to be a “civil liberties” organization if they reversed position on their most famous success. Got to keep those donations coming.
And it is those donations which appear to be threatening the traditional concept of the ACLU as a leftist ideologue with a new partisan fervor, because, as the 60 Minutes article points out they have received a vast increase in not only donations but membership and erstwhile activists resulting directly from their opposition to President Trump.
“Orange man bad” is a great selling point to drive money into the coffers of such an established extreme leftist organization.
Why is this important? For the same reason that the advocacy of the legalization of drugs by the Libertarian party attracted throngs of support from the members of Norml numerically overwhelming the traditional intellectually ideological membership of the Libertarian party by single issue voters who were often pro-statist in many of their political views in other areas.
Unlike Robert Byrd, being an individual, an organization is subject to change and influence not through reason but through numerical superiority. The shift from ideology to partisanship is both an easy and a dangerous transition for organizations, because it fundamentally changes the character of that organization.
The Founding Fathers warned us to beware of the “spirit of faction”, what in modern language we oft refer to as “partisanship”, but often rears its head as “identity politics”. It is the force which can divide a nation irrevocably and irreparably, as we have seen in the Civil War.
Recent politics has been rife with divisions people into identity groups of whites, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Islamists, Catholics, feminists, men, socialists, capitalists, and this is where I typically say that the list goes on and on, but in this case there are an infinite number of divisions because there are as many ways to divide people as the human mind can conceive traits to divide them along. That is the very spirit of partisanship.
However, when the spirit of partisanship corresponds with the division of ideology, the differences can become so blurred that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between them. What is an argument against the ideology without being an argument against that faction of the populace?
Where Democrats have increasingly aligned themselves with socialist economic policies and appear to be united under the socialist banner, they have experienced increasing divisions along ethnic and demographic lines; however the Republicans have appeared after the election of the current president on essentially a platform of opposition to Washington politics, they appear more divided than ever between the conservative ideologues and the partisans who, like Byrd, support the party even when the party appears to be changing their position on issues.
Can Democrats continue to support a party which generally agrees with their leftist ideology when it appears to oppose their ethnic or religious or cultural identity? Or as the Democrats adopt different ideological stances to appeal to certain groups, do they lose partisans who have adhered to them before? The internal conflicts are very numerous, but the Democrat voters appear quite pliable.
Can Republicans support a party which increasingly overlooks moral stances for which it has traditionally championed in order to gain converts from the sinking ship of the other party? Conservatives are notoriously inflexible ideologically, and less likely to place party above ideology.
Does the ACLU continue its current path of hyper-partisan candidate endorsements as its new supporters demand, or can in save its ideological leftist purism from being overwhelmed with new cash and new memberships? It was always a thin veil of pretense that they were above politics, but that veil is ripping apart, as it has with other leftist organizations which have become openly partisan, e.g. the media corporations, the SPLC, the NAACP, NOW, the ABA, Twitter, Google, Facebook, et cetera.
