Why Left has turned against the masses

ONE of the worst things about being a leftie in the 21st century is that everyone assumes you are anti-free speech.

I get it all the time. As soon as I drop into polite conversation the fact that I was a commie in my youth, used to work on a magazine called Living Marxism and still consider myself pretty red, someone will say “Ahh” and start making various assumptions.

It will be assumed that I’m a fan of section 18C. That I think shock jocks warp the little people’s brains with hateful nonsense and therefore may have to have their knuckles rapped by a media watchdog. That I believe misogynistic lingo is the scourge of Twitter and we need more streamlined ways to censor it. That I fret over how raucous the modern press is and long to allow judges or lords or some aloof eejit with a PhD to regulate it.

In a nutshell, it will be assumed that I think freedom of speech is a scary, potentially destabilising thing, invading minds and warping souls, and therefore the state must sometimes step in to cover mouths and block ears.

When I say I don’t believe any of this, that I think shock jocks should say whatever the hell they like and there should be no restrictions whatsoever on what the press can publish, looks of bemusement descend on faces.

But it isn’t surprising people make these assumptions. Because the bulk of the Left has abandoned freedom of speech.

It’s one of the most curious developments of the modern era: the Left’s ceding of the terrain of freedom of speech to the Right.

There has been an eye-swivelling switcheroo in recent years. The Right, much of which was very censorious in the Cold War era, now considers itself the champion of freedom of speech. And the Left, which yesteryear would have fought for the right of radical parties to hawk their rabble-rousing rags or of artists to display all sorts of obscene material, has become deeply suspicious of freedom of speech, viewing it with fear and alarm.

Just look at the section 18C debate. It is the newspapers that lean more to the Right that have loudly demanded reform of this legal restriction on what people can say, while papers that lean Left insist section 18C must stay.

Guardian Australia says reforming section 18C would be “morally repugnant” because it would “give Australia’s racists free rein”. In short, we need censorship to keep the peace, to maintain social order, to prevent the mob from running riot.

Is it just me or is that the kind of thing stiff right-wingers used to say, while the Left would have fiercely challenged it? Wasn’t it once stuffy traditionalists who wanted to curb certain ideas to pacify the public, while lefties would have argued for more openness, more permissiveness? Now it’s completely the other way round. What’s going on here?

The surreal transformation of the Left into clamourers for censorship was brought home to me when I was being interviewed by BBC Radio last year. When I corrected the interviewer’s description of me as right-wing, his response was: “But you’re really into freedom ...”

There you go — I support freedom, therefore I must be right-wing. Lefties, how have we let this happen? It’s worth reminding ourselves how new the Western Left’s turn against freedom of speech is.

For centuries, those who considered themselves left-wing, left field, agitated by authority and tradition, were the greatest defenders of freedom of speech.

Indeed, all the historical movements that today’s Left believes it is descended from fought tooth-and-catapult for the freedoms of thought, speech and the press. If they time-travelled to the 21st century they would be bamboozled by their political descendants’ urge to censor all that offends them.

Consider the Levellers, the most radical political movement of the English Civil War, whose demands for greater suffrage and tolerance of dissent marked them as the first modern lefties.

They were committed to freedom of speech. They argued that only full press freedom, the right of everyone to publish their ideas without needing state approval, would allow people to protect themselves from “tyrannie”.

Press freedom is “so essential unto freedom, as that without it, it’s impossible to preserve any nation from being liable to the worst of bondage”, they said.

Or consider Thomas Paine, the 18th-century radical pamphleteer whose ideas stoked revolutions in America and France. The modern divide between Left and Right was pretty much born from Paine’s heated debates with Edmund Burke, through which Paine outlined what would become key leftish ideas while Burke set the modern conservative outlook.

Paine was passionate about free speech. He said state meddling in the realms of ideas and publishing was always more a “sentence on the public (than) the author”, because it effectively told the public “they shall not think, they shall not read”.

He said: “When opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.”

What a stirring expression of trust in the public and its ability to decipher truth from falsehood. Paine was basically saying that the public forum — that is, us lot — should be free to debate and decide on the worth of various ideas: the precise opposite of the moaning of modern leftists, who think that if “opinions are free” then racism and other horrors will ensue.

Fast-forward to the 19th century and you will find a young radical journalist by the name of Karl Marx writing some of the most beautiful defences of the freedom of speech and the press.

Marx said: “The free press is the ubiquitous vigilant eye of a people’s soul, the embodiment of a people’s faith in itself, the eloquent link that connects the individual with the state and the world … It is a people’s frank confession to itself, and the redeeming power of confession is well known. It is the ideal world which always wells up out of the real world and flows back into it with ever greater spiritual riches and renews its soul.”

In the 20th century, too, left intellectuals articulately defended the freedoms to think, speak and press one’s ideas. George Orwell decried the fact “anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness”, and said freedom of speech was essential if one was to “criticise and oppose”.

Today, in a tragic turnaround, it is usually the Left who “silence with surprising effectiveness” anyone who “challenges the prevailing orthodoxy”.

What went wrong? How did the Left go from championing to fearing free speech, from opposing censorship to cheering it?

In essence, it lost its faith in everyday people, in the man and woman in the street whose rights it would once have defended.

The main driver behind earlier leftists’ agitation for free speech was a powerful belief that people didn’t need politicians or pointy-hatted religious men or self-styled experts to tell them what to think or what was true; they could work it out for themselves by reading stuff, thinking about it and making a judgment call. If “opinions are free”, all is well, as Paine put it.

In recent years, the Left has become more and more cut off from ordinary people, and now views the state, not the masses, as the best guarantor of truth and fairness. And so its old belief that people could be trusted to think and speak freely, and to reach ­rational conclusions, has been replaced by a poisonous, pat­ernalistic conviction that if we hear the wrong thing we might instantly turn into psychotic racists or morons.

The Left no longer believes people should be protected from “tyrannies”, but rather than we must be protected from ourselves and our base instincts.

Behind the Left’s love of section 18C lies a far larger historical story about its abandonment of its old liberal ideals, and its vicious turning against the masses it once might have fought for.