Liberalism Removes its Mask

Upper-class America pretended to care about rights, until the rabble moved too close to home

In the Washington Post today, under the headline, “Musk and Durov are facing the revenge of the regulators”:

While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy… Banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did… Now, for better or worse, it is.

Columnist Will Oremus noted that although the Durov and Musk cases differ, both “involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls” who “thumbed their noses at authorities.” He highlighted a “vibe shift,” noting that “high-flying tech leaders will have to think a bit more carefully” about “whose soil they’re on when they step off a plane.”

American liberalism railed against Bush conservatives who said those who didn’t break the law had nothing to hide. Now, once-liberal voices are tripping over each other to make more extreme versions of the same argument. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich published a guide to how to “rein in” Elon Musk in The Guardian that includes a recommendation that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest,” adding cheerfully that “global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov.” Following up its July article about how “The First Amendment is Out of Control,” the New York Times also has a piece titled, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is it Also Dangerous?”

My old employers at Rolling Stone described defenders of Durov as “far-right extremists” and Musk as a “grandstanding” charlatan seeking to evade “consequences.” All this is in line with views of Kamala Harris, who’s argued that “there has to be a responsibility that is placed” on social media sites to prevent misuse of speech “privileges.” The Harris take previewed the complaint this year by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that the First Amendment was “hamstringing the government,” despite this being its purpose.

There’s no “vibe shift.” Having written bestselling books on criminal justice for blue-leaning audiences, I can attest: American liberalism’s trumpeting of “rights” always stopped at the border of whatever tony suburb or upscale city neighborhood it inhabited. While public defenders fought rights violations at peasant wages, wealthy Democrats in the privacy of voting booths always voted in the truncheon, lapping even law-and-order Republicans in aristocratic disgust of the rabble. As podcast partner Walter Kirn put it, the mask is off: