Are American leftists really plotting a communist dictatorship? Uh, no.
The American left wing is stronger and healthier than it has been in a century, and many liberals are not happy about it.
First among them is New York's Jonathan Chait. In response to Bernie Sanders' success as a self-avowed socialist, as well as a largely favorable Dylan Matthews profile of left-wing Jacobin magazine last week, Chait wrote another in his series of red-baiting posts reminding everyone that, actually, Soviet-style communism is bad. He also implied that the Jacobin staff and their comrades are communist subversives.
It's a rather antiquated style of Cold War anti-communism that could pass for something from the 1950s with a few alterations. However, Chait's view of rights does inadvertently illustrate why liberals have been so wrong-footed by the return of American socialism: It lays bare liberalism's own troubled history with democracy.
Chait's main worry, as usual, is political correctness. Analyzing a Jacobin post justifying anti-Trump protests, he writes:
Free speech is for people on the wrong end of "power disparities" — which is to say, the oppressed and their allies, or, put more bluntly, the left. Free speech is not for a candidate who "scapegoats the most vulnerable and oppressed." Importantly, this principle denies the right of free speech not only to Trump but also to the entire Republican Party (whose analysis of poverty, crime, terrorism, and so on constitutes scapegoating of the oppressed) but also large segments of the Democratic Party as well. It is highly unlikely that the illiberal left gets its hands on the machinery of the federal government within our lifetimes, but if it does, repression would be a foregone conclusion. [New York]
In short: Socialists support using (some) disruptive tactics at Trump rallies, therefore they believe in the right of free speech only for themselves, therefore they will institute a Secret Tumblr Police if they get a chance — as compared to the open liberal approach of free debate and democracy. It makes good sense because, as Chait pointed out on Twitter, Marxists all love dictatorship of the proletariat.
Two glaring problems are immediately apparent. First, he fails to note that Jacobin has never published anything arguing for a Lenin- or Castro-style revolution. By his own (rather unlettered) standards of Marxism, Jacobin is not Marxist. But more tellingly, he does not mention that peaceful protest is also an elementary political right, right there in the First Amendment.
This clumsy treatment of rights is par for the course in debates like these. Early American liberals tied voting rights to property, and have often supported violent state repression of strikes and unions. Despite rating property and democracy about equally in theory for most of the last century (for which they owe much to socialists and radicals), in practice American liberals have often abandoned the latter in favor of the former.
Even after liberals accommodated themselves to universal suffrage and some workers' rights, their commitment to civil liberties has always been fairly weak. When the Soviet Union was around, liberals willingly contributed to bouts of fevered anti-red paranoia to crush domestic dissent or to overthrow some troublesome left-wing regime overseas that was either not capitalist enough or was threatening American property. It was not always liberals at the point of the spear, but the mainstream generally supported an illiberal anti-communism. Chait's preposterous syllogism predicting a plot to institute a Secret Tumblr Police — which would obviously call for preemptive state repression, if true — follows this script almost to the letter.
Heck, even today a liberal Democratic president operates an offshore zero-due process prison, a dragnet surveillance apparatus, and an assassination program.
At any rate, the Soviet Union was a hellish dystopia and its official ideology of Marxism-Leninism is garbage. But the threat of international communism has also been dead for an entire generation. Even Cuba is finally moving towards openness and good relations with the United States.
A powerless handful of tankies aside, American socialists — like their comrades in socialist and social-democratic parties in Europe — are firm believers in civil liberties and democracy. Where they differ with liberals on rights is where they pertain to market capitalism. Those that are plainly poisonous to society — such as ownership rights in buried carbon reserves — will have to be extinguished.
So relax, liberals, unlike some people President Bernie Sanders wouldn't sic the FBI on high-profile columnists with lame opinions.