I do, in general, believe in the standard old arguments for civil liberties, and I am disturbed by the broad left-wing flirtations with abandoning them on those grounds.  Even beyond the fact that I think people should have the right to hold and express unpopular beliefs, even vile beliefs, simply as a matter of basic principle, I also think that many centuries of history teach us that attempts to curtail these rights result inevitably in unforeseen, ugly consequences,  against even the best of intentions. And for those of us on the left, that history should function as a potent warning indeed. Because power is not our friend.

It may be tempting to embrace the violent power of the state as the solution to ideas and expression you find hateful and ugly. But I promise you: the day that the United States bans hate speech, such a law will be invoked against a pro-Palestinian activist, to pick one example. I promise. That is inevitable. Whether the elites that so credulously embrace the notion of empowering the police state to squash harassment like it or not. And it may be tempting to embrace the coercive power of large corporations to limit speech online. But I promise you: that power will also be used against you by your antagonists, who are opportunistic and learn quickly. Lefty Twitter might be obsessed with policing language. But they won’t actually get to do the policing themselves. Instead, they will hand that work off to the same broken institutions and corrupt authorities that they themselves have diagnosed as broken and corrupt. And that is one of these fundamental, existential paradoxes within contemporary left-wing orthodoxy today: simultaneously recognizing that we live within structures of intrinsic, intentional inequality and injustice, and yet forever ready to abandon that skepticism towards those structures when it seems convenient to do so. Pure folly.

We on the left speak for those without power, money, or privilege. To assume that ceding rights of individuals and minority rights to establishment authority will help us in the long run is to abandon the most powerful, most important insight we have. We can, at times, grasp power, and we have used it in the past for good. But power is not your friend. Not if you are a feminist. Not if you oppose racism. Not if you speak for the poor and the dispossessed. And if you abandon your resistance to power because you think that’s in your short-term interest, you will find in the long run that when power comes to crush people, it will crush us, first and most brutally of all.