I Remember the ACLU

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, July 28, 2022

 

Headline from The Nation:

 

The Arizona Prison System Is Censoring The Nation. We’re Doing Something About It.

 

Arizona prison authorities are stopping incarcerated people from reading The Nation. We’re working with the ACLU’s National Prison Project to assert their First Amendment rights.

 

At times like this, it would be a very fine thing to have an ACLU that was a civil-liberties-and-free-speech organization rather than an ACLU that is a free-speech-sometimes–except-if-we-don’t-like-it-in-which-case-you’re-on-your-own organization. Having real principles makes coalition-building easier. The ACLU may still make the occasional political stretch, but the organization seems to have lost its way.

 

We’ve seen this kind of thing before: When Amnesty International stuck to its mission — prisoners of conscience — William F. Buckley Jr. was on the board, and it had cross-ideological support for its core program. When it became just another left-wing advocacy organization, it lost its vitality. Roughly the same thing happened to the NAACP. On the right, the NRA lost its way when it took its eye off the Second Amendment ball and became in effect a subsidiary of the Republican Party and an unfocused right-wing culture-war committee.

 

We could use an organization that does what the ACLU used to do. But I fear that Americans, particularly American liberals, have long ago stopped believing their own dogma.