The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union
Siegel, Fred
A victim of reform TIE POLITICS Or THE AMERICAN CIYIL LIBERTIES UNION William A. Donahue Transaction Books, $29.95, $14.95 paper, 390 pp. Fred Siegel THERE is little doubt that America is...
...But "the unremitting assault on norms of community — in the name of liberty" undercuts, says Donohue, this new ACLU concern...
...Fred Siegel THERE is little doubt that America is a fairer place than it was twenty-five years ago, and that the change is due in no small measure to the American Civil Liberties Union...
...Liberalism had traditionally balanced a majoritarian sense of the popular will — for FDR the New Deal government was the collective energies of the people mobilized for common ends — and a concern for minority rights (in the case of blacks not always honored...
...In like fashion one party, the Democrats, has revised its procedural rules through a series of fairness commissions, although the results have been mixed...
...The Politics of the ACLU is weighted down by a dated attempt to pin that left-liberalism on a neo-conservative "new class" analysis...
...William Donohue's Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union will no doubt be dismissed by doctrinaire liberals, but it deserves to be carefully read...
...The sixties analysis which described America as latently totalitarian took hold in the ACLU...
...To paraphrase George McGovem, in 1972 the Democrats changed the rules to open the doors of the Democratic Party and people jumped out the windows in droves...
...Customary norms, state enforced or not, were undifferentiatedly depicted as a bell jar descending over a smothered individual...
...The ironic triumph of the ACLU's activities has been to convince millions of people that civil liberties leave them helpless and naked against any and every sort of malefactor...
...From the early seventies on, in a reversal of its earlier stance, the ACLU has emphasized economic equality as a precondition for legal equality...
...No says the ACLU, students must be "permitted to act in ways which are predictably unwise...
...As a former ACLU national board member told me recently, "It's my job to worry about freedom, order is a matter for the police...
...Criminals, it says, almost no matter how violent, ought to be placed on probation and reintegrated into society...
...The rights of the press, of blacks, and of women have been secured in a manner that was once inconceivable...
...Private schools and private police now abound...
...It sees the law as a threat to freedom of speech...
...Does the state of New York, acting on majority sentiment, want a law to prohibit use of children in depictions of sexual activity...
...Being at odds with the realities of everyday life is both its shame and badge of pride...
...the schools and the police, for instance, have been procedurally cleansed by judicial reformers only to have the people who can afford it desert them en masse...
...Unfortunately, something similar has happened to our public institutions...
...The new hero of our national morality play is file figure from our pre-New Deal past, the private sector entrepreneur...
...The tragedy of its recent successes is that, as Nicholas von Hoffman has put it, "the ACLU has so stretched and distorted our definition of 'rights' that they are beginning to look to many people like wrongs...
...The ACLU saw the thin wedge of totalitarianism everywhere...
...Unable to distinguish between the merely bad and the apocalyptic, beginning in the late sixties the ACLU tended to resist all moral judgments against the individual with counter charges against "crypto-fascist" American society...
...The tension broke down in the late sixties in what can be best described as a revolt against the masses over civil rights and Vietnam...
...Is it plausible to promote an unfettered individualism on all social and cultural matters and then expect people to band together to honor economic equality...
...The ACLU objects...
...Does Pennsylvania want a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for felons convicted of violent crimes with a firearm...
...The ACLU objects...
...The reason, says William Donohue in The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union, is that the ACLU (and by extension American liberalism more generally) has been a victim of both the 1960s and its own successes...
...After all there is nothing specifically in the Bill of Rights about victims...
...Do schools want to discipline disruptive students...
...Donohue's book is marred by a labored effort to prove the obvious, Yes, ritual denials to the contrary, the ACLU is a left-liberal organization...
...The liberal reform of these institutions has served, in some perverse fashion, to both heighten inequalities and diminish popular faith in public life...
...The ACLU cannot expect to both delegitimate the state as the singular source of repression and then authorize it to promote social justice...
...And citizens fearful of crime, von Hoffman might have added, are clay waiting for the conservative potter...
...This Manichean division leaves no room for the informal sense of community and its concomitant emotion of shame, which can leave people both freer and safer than an ACLUized world in which individuals who are not explicitly protected by the law are therefore vulnerable...
...In its blinkered pursuit of a legal version of scriptural literalism the ACLU has had little to say in recent years about the victims of crime or school disruption...
...Basking in the afterglow of the tradition12 My 1985: 411 shattering civil rights movement, it exults in a Cartesian contempt for customary truths...
...The paradoxical effect of legal formalism is to heighten the importance of the very power the ACLU is sworn to defend against, that is police power...
...In writing about the self-deceptions of the ACLU he has illuminated the broader dilemmas of an American liberalism which needs to reconsider some of its most basic assumptions...
...Racial equality before the law is the most obvious improvement, but the nation has also benefited from restraints on police brutality, the extension of free speech, and the expansion of procedural rights through our public and sometimes even private institutions...
...Where the book succeeds, sometimes brilliantly, is as a critique not only of the ACLU but of the radical individualist tendencies that have defined American liberalism over the past fifteen years...
...The ACLU has pushed bourgeois civil liberties to their limits without simultaneously demanding bourgeois selfrestraint...
...Freedom from overwhelms freedom to...
...The Union's legal director Melvin Wulf warned of incipient fascism...
...In case Donohue hasn't noticed, the "new class" that so frightened neoconservatives has been redubbed the Yuppies and it's starting to vote Republican...
Vol. 112 • July 1985 • No. 13
