Nineteenth Century abolitionist Frederick Douglas railed against the tyranny of his era’s version of political correctness, stating: “Liberty is meaningless when the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
Yet it is those on the Left, those who purport to be the champions of the “oppressed,” that ironically seem to fit Douglas’ definition of a tyrant, be it the Liberals here in Canada obsessed with silencing all who disagree with them, or the simpletons at Facebook, Twitter, etc., who simply cancel opinions of which they do not approve.
This impulse to stifle the free speech of others is rooted in the arrogant assumption by some that the bulk of the species is either too stupid or vile to distinguish truth from nonsense, good from evil. It is an assumption clearly not shared by the Enlightenment designers of America’s founding documents for whom vigorous debate and Majority Rule were obviously goals worth achieving. Yes, the species is prone to error and imperfection but the vast majority of history’s many debacles have been instigated not by “ordinary” people but the tyrants who led them. Yet today “populism” is a dirty word, England’s decision to leave the European Union denounced throughout the political Left as an explosion of populist intolerance. While I shan’t go into them here, there were some very cogent issues pertaining both to the safety of the British people and the preservation of their wonderful culture which made the Brexit vote far more complicated than the hate-fest typically vilified throughout the “progressive” media. While Douglas is no doubt an icon of that media, its prioritization of its political bias over an honest respect for the truth ironically makes it an aspect of the very tyrannical impulse he found so repulsive 150 years ago.
George Orwell famously said: “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” A proponent of Democratic Socialism, he loathed the fascism that infected so much of Europe in the first half of the last century. Yet it is the very socialist ideology he championed that has ironically become the source of the fascist disdain for freedom of speech that has come to infect contemporary Western culture.
Democratic Socialism is to me an oxymoron, a preoccupation with the good of the Whole by definition requiring some form of oppression of the Individual. Orwell would seem to have been hoisted, as Mr. Shakespeare so memorably declared, upon his own petard, his political ideology entailing the very sort of stupidity he had mockingly ascribed to other intellectuals.
Such ironies are to be found everywhere on the political Left, the ludicrously misnamed fascist organization Antifa immediately coming to mind. Fortunately for their mental well-being, the demagogues of CNN, MSNBC, the CBC, The N.Y. Times, The Toronto Star, etc., etc., seem utterly unaware of the concept of Irony.