“My successor, and the board of directors that have supported him, have basically tried to transform the organization from a politically neutral, nonpartisan civil liberties organization into a progressive liberal organization,” Glasser says about Anthony Romero, an ex-Ford Foundation executive who continues to serve as the ACLU’s executive director. According to former ACLU national board member Wendy Kaminer in her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU, Romero and his enablers routinely engaged in the sort of undemocratic and unaccountable behavior practiced by the individuals and institutions the ACLU usually took to court, like withholding information (concerning a breach of ACLU members’ privacy, no less), shredding documents in violation of its own record-preservation and transparency procedures, and attempting to muzzle board members from criticizing the organization publicly. (“You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” remarked the late, great former Village Voice columnist and ACLU board member Nat Hentoff of this last gambit). Eerily prescient, Worst Instincts foreshadowed the hypocrisy and fecklessness that has since come to characterize the leadership of so many other, previously liberal institutions confronted by the forces of illiberalism within their own ranks.
Read it and weep.
@Arnold’s readers: I would like to respectfully request that you leave a comment to this post with a brief statement of an explanation from your perspective for why this happened to the ACLU. I think that would be a good way to learn the variety of viewpoints and “models for how the world works” of folks around here.
***
Asked why his organization was willing to further violate its tradition of political neutrality, Faiz Shakir, a Democratic Party operative then serving as the ACLU’s national political director, was brutally honest. “People have funded us and I think they expect a return,” he said.
A Marxist (Groucho, that is) said if you don’t like my principles, don’t worry, I have others.
They do polls of their contributor’s views. In my model of how the world works the policy choices of any non-profit are unlikely to stray very far from what their contributors want.
That said, their recent poll questions are more in the nature of a push poll than a genuine inquiry into these issues. It is also the case that all corporations, whether profit or non-profit, tend to be more heavily controlled by their top executives in reality than they are supposed to be in principle.
The “follow the money” / “money talks” thesis seems plausible. But it also raises the question of the direction of causation.
One the one hand, maybe progressive illiberal donors took the initiative wanted to change a comparably more stubborn and inertial ACLU. The donors didn’t believe hate speech should be protected, so they wanted to both neutralize the preeminent American legal institution standing in the way of that change, and at the same time to capture the cachet and prestige of that institution, to leverage it in pursuit of their different agenda.
On the other hand, it could have been a financially distressed ACLU taking more initiative, and changing *itself* per Sutton’s Law, “Because that’s where the money is.
It could always be similar amounts of both, but the latter mechanism fits in well with Conquest’s Second Law. You got with the zeitgeist, because money goes with the zeitgeist, and you need money.
Good question, Handle. I hope the answer isn’t obnoxious in length…
I think the root of the corruption is power. Power is inherently at odds with principle, because principles represent an internal self limiter on one’s exercise of power and choices. Assuming that politics is about power, whether national or office politics, the more politics is involved in a group the less principle matters.
In the ACLU’s case, as the organization became more prestigious it moved from being a principles based group to one where members could advance their careers and power through rising within the organization. The ends of members changed from advancing their principles to advancing themselves. I believe Yuval Levin gropes somewhat blindly on this elephant in his “A Time to Build”. How this change twists organizations happens across many margins, however.
1: Funding: Early stage, principle focused (ESPF?) organizations tend to accept donations incidentally to their process, while later stage power focused (LSPF) organizations make fund raising central to their process. Early ACLU accepted donations and solicited based on convincing others their principles were worth supporting, whereas later stage ACLU changed their behavior based on what people were willing to fund now, specifically big donors. ESPF orgs are more indifferent to fluctuations in funding so long as the bills are paid, while LSPF see any decline or even slowing in growth of donations as deeply problematic.
2: ESPF orgs are a means to an end of their creators and members, LSPF orgs are the end in and of themselves. I can’t remember who said it, but others have observed first that eventually every organization’s leadership becomes filled with people who see the survival of the organization as the top priority. I believe this comes largely from 1 above, as you lose a lot of power if your division/organization disappears. However, even if one does not agree with 1 this seems to hold true, and achieves the same shift in outcomes between ESPF and LSPF orgs.
3: ACLU and other non-profit specific in the US, or “Why do all non-specifically right wing organizations swing left wing over time?”: The left wing tends to disdain commerce and industry as a path to power and instead favor things that look charitable. (That in practice non-profits pay as much more more than industry jobs is irrelevant; very few people remain poor or turn down raises on principle, it seems.) This helps ease the cognitive dissonance of wanting wealth and power while disapproving of those who seek wealth or power openly. “I only want the power to help people and make the world a better place!” is a pretty common refrain of the powerful.
Even for profit organizations show this tendency, albeit more slowly perhaps. Our innate sense of fairness and general bleeding heart nature (not saying it is bad) tends to make humans sensitive and prone to supporting deviating from principle in that direction overtime, ignoring triumphs of power over principle if it is for the “right reasons”. I suspect that most right wing organizations drift that way too, but since their names are attached to certain ideas they simply lose donors and members and fail instead of sliding to a left steady state.
4: Just in general, principle is hard to identify and formulate, and worse to maintain. I doubt many people could give you a systemic breakdown of right and wrong that would lead to consistent behavior across a range of tricky circumstances. That’s fine for most of life, but politics organizational and national is almost entirely made up of those sorts of circumstances. I think there are key principles in particular that are deeply unpopular, such as tolerance and self control/responsibility that are perennial sources of failure.
So yea, I think that is why the ACLU is now indifferent to civil liberties: there is more power to be had fighting against the liberties of all than to be had fighting against the liberties of the enemies of the powerful.
Most consistently it’s Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
@Eric phrased it well: eventually every organization’s leadership becomes filled with people who see the survival of the organization as the top priority.
The issue of money is doubly crucial – both because it’s so necessary to the org survival, as well as for the STATUS, as well as comfort, of the high salary top execs at the important ACLU / ngo looking for donor cash.
As mentioned, most top ngo folk are against profit-oriented businesses, and money grubbing.
The Stranglers sing: “I was always taught in school, everyone should get the same.” Christians believe all humans are created in God’s image, and are of equal value in God’s eyes. The Acts of the Apostles includes them selling their possessions and living in equal communion, where all receive enough to live [not sure when that ended]. There is a strong “Christian Socialism” that accepts private property but as lesser, morally inferior, to charity for the poor.
Unidentified in most discussion is that Unfairness is NOT Injustice. The confusion between human decision caused injustice, and reality based unfairness, is seen linguistically by these different ideas being mostly considered synonyms. But there’s not much that can be done about unfairness: in Beauty, Health, IQ, place of Birth, parents. True injustices, like prior discrimination, can be stopped. (Post-injustice reparations or compensation, if any, are a different issue.)
Good people want Black people to have better results. There is big disagreement on why today, 56 years after the ’64 Civil Rights Act, Blacks remain so often in relative poverty.
It’s either the system or it’s the people. The only way to avoid blaming the poor Blacks themselves, the victims, is to claim they remain victims of an anti-Black system. Can’t go around blaming the victim.
There’s now a huge “white guilt” industry that includes guilty, racist donors who want to claim anti-racist “moral superiority” based on their donations, while supporting policies that help the rich and hurt the poor.
Reality is that if anybody makes enough bad decisions, they will be in bad economic shape. We all know the socially “optimal” decisions every American should be making:
1) Avoid having children outside of marriage,
2) Finish high school (able to read, write, and do basic math),
3) Get and keep a job for at least a year,
4) Avoid getting arrested for crimes.
Those who do NOT choose to make these decisions will, inevitably, become victims of their own bad decisions.
Reality:
“Have you ever had sex with somebody you’re not married to?” << YOU are part of the problem, if so*.
Too many people, White and Black and divorced and even currently married, do not like this truth. Easier to claim some other reason is the cause of the problem.
*I was part of the problem, but no longer am. Too many people get too much pleasure out of supporting the lie for me to expect that Truth will Triumph.
Here’s what Moldbug wrote about it the other day:
One who accepts this interpretation of events would say that the changes at ACLU are merely an internal autogolpe with a more progressive faction displacing the last remnants of the superannuated less progressive faction that executed the “Skokie strategy”.
Handle: At root, I think declining living standards, stratification and globalist-left propaganda is the cause of rising illiberalism and hypocrisy.
Obviously, we need new institutions. A new ACLU devoted to original mission.
I hear people talk about declining living standards, and there are always people struggling, but is this really the case in the general sense?
With some setbacks around recessions, household incomes generally have been growing even as household sizes have been declining.
https://navellier.com/9-22-20-rapid-income-growth-before-covidus-interruptus/
With respect to supposed declining living standards in the U.S., Don Boudreau’s posts about shopping in old Sears catalogs remain eye-opening.
“That is explained by O’Sullivan’s First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over—and the rest follows.”
See the explication of the confusion relating to Robert Conquest here: http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009604.html
What is a further, more interesting and difficult question is WHY does this drift from right to left occur such that there is a law codifying it?
That link you gave refers to another law by Conquest that may be relevant to the decline of the ACLU: “The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”
Classic ‘march through the institutions,’ with multiple likely causes, including:
1. Classic mission-creep of an NGO. People like to exercise power, don’t like restraints. NGO executives see narrow scope as a constraint on them.
2. Polarization. NGO execs have incentive to be non-partisan between groups they view as meaningful potential coalition partners. In elite world, non-left increasingly not seen in this way. Coalitions are *within* the left, not left-center or (heaven forfend) left-right.
3. Last, procedural liberalism has always been an acquired taste. Very irksome to give opponents the same rights you claim for yourself. Good Guys Win! is just more compelling to most as rallying cry than Fair Play!
Thank you for content that is not explicitly about FIT. I look forward to more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union#CLB_era
“In the 1920s, government censorship was commonplace.”
Then it was the 1950s, and government censorship was commonplace.
Now it’s the 2020s, and government censorship is commonplace, but they have Twitter or Facebook take the blame.
“Magazines were routinely confiscated under the anti-obscenity Comstock laws”
Now, if you can’t be sued for a hostile work environment or disparate impact, you get your visa & paypal accounts revoked.
“permits for labor rallies were often denied”
Now left-wing rallies have riot permits and right-wing rallies won’t be forgiven for littering. Luckily, possible right-wing rallies are rarely foolish enough to waste time attempting to seek a permit in the first place.
“activists that promoted unionization, socialism, or government reform were often denounced as un-American or unpatriotic”
Now activists promoting private property or personal responsibility are denounced as racist and fascist.
What about the 1820s?
De Tocqueville:
“In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is
closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak,
like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth.”
“If great writers have not at present existed in America, the reason is very simply given in these facts; there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America. The Inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circulating in Spain. The empire of the majority succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes the wish of publishing them.”
“Americans are so enamoured of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
Or: cancel culture is not new. There is nothing more American than cancel culture. If it was so firmly true in 1835, it was true in 1776 too. It’s traditional.
Even when Americans do speak, it’s a bit…
“There is often scarcely any connection between what [the English] say and what they do.”
“A quarter of what is said in England at a public meeting, or even round a dinner-table, without anything being done or intended to be done, would in France announce violence, which would almost always be more furious than the language had been.”
—
I find free speech in America to be essentially mythological. America would unquestionably benefit from banning speech entirely, especially journalism. The pretense is significantly worse than none at all. Lies are bad mmmkay.
I think Sailer could feel De Tocqueville was writing about him.
From the ACLU’s wikipedia page:
“During the 1920s, the ACLU’s primary focus was on freedom of speech in general, and speech within the labor movement particularly.”
The term ‘labour movement’ is one of the euphemisms for communism. ACLU started as a communist front. Now, it is a cultural Marxist front. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why has no organization sprung up to replace it? Are its long-time supporters unaware? Is there no appetite for supporting true civil liberties any more?
I am surprised there is no “canonical” Anti-Woke activist organization in the sense that the ACLU used to be “canonical” for free speech.
The Institute for Justice (ij.org) will take on First Amendment cases, although it would not be accurate to characterize it as a “replacement” for the ACLU. Rather, IJ is more (economic and civil) libertarian.
There is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which does amazing work, also the Institute for Justice, and more recently, Speech First, the Academic Freedom Alliance, and a number of Religious Liberty groups that overlap with free expression issues sometimes, First Liberty, RLC, Becket, and others. Don’t forget CATO, which does a lot of appellate-level stuff in those cases, such as amici curiae briefs.
Note, however, that none of these are considered leftist, liberal, or progressive groups. Woke progressivism is not compatible with old liberalism, and displaces it everywhere it goes.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
No leftist takeover has ever come with such a powerful consensus of the global cultural and financial elite before. The New Cultural Revolution will make Mao weep with envy in Hell.
I am a few years older than Dr. Kling (b Dec 1951). As a youth I idolized the ACLU until they proclaimed that the war in Vietnam was fundamentally a civil rights issue because of the draft and of inequality as to being subject to it – the rich white kids got deferments and convenient maladies, etc. I was pretty sure, still am, that US participation in that war was fundamentally moral or immoral for reasons entirely separate from that American “civil rights” side show. I took the ACLU’s stand as unprincipled pandering to its base, which was overwhelmingly “anti-war” and not going to let a few technicalities get in the way of taking a righteous stand. So today’s subject is not new to me.
Ken