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I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.
Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.
The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter
The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).
Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
I think that anything Hanania writes ought to be taken with an entire sack of salt. When I first encountered him I thought he was a parody account along the same lines of Titania McGrath, but now I think he's something more along the Moldbug. IE an edgy left-wing activist type who started out as a tankie only to realize that there was nothing "edgy" about being a tankie in places like Berkley or the University of Chicago.
Censorship in the name of public health and safety has been a component of the progressive platform going back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR. The impression that this really only crystalized in 2016 is presumably a product of being too you to remember the 90s and Clinton's efforts to quash talk radio and the nascent internet coupled with revionionist histories by left leaning journalists. For the record it wasn't conservative republicans pushing the Comics Code in the 50s and 60s or trying to get D&D and violent video games banned in the 80s and 90s, it was people like Fredric Wertham, and Tipper Gore.
I wonder at the extent to which this is true. I remember William Bennett and Joe Liebermann handing out "silver sewer" awards to "cultural polluters". I likewise seem to remember support for obscenity laws and public decency standards among the Red Tribers of my youth. I don't remember a lot of legislative action, but I do seem to recall a fair amount of cultural pressure.
What's the model, here? Did Red Tribe never care about corrupting content or public indecency? Did they merely never care about it from a legislative angle? This seems like a thesis worthy of a deeper dive.
It's not that the republicans never "cared about corrupting content or public indecency", it's that legislative action seeking to silence it against it has always a been a distinctly progressive (think blue-tribe "Karen" archetype) phenomenon.
Remember that William Bennet was a Democrat when Reagan hired him and that your other central figures, Joe Liebermann, Tipper Gore, and Brian Williams, were not exactly "Red" by any stretch of the imagination.
Joe Lieberman explicitly profiled himself as a moderate Democrat, not a progressive, though, going as far as to endorse McCain in 2008. My understanding is that so did Al Gore in 80s. PMRC had four founders - "The women who founded the PMRC are Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius", says Wikipedia - and apart from Tipper, others were wives of Republican politicians or activists.
As I said to another user, I think this says a lot more about how far "the center" has moved to the left than it does anything else]
I don't follow. My points, to spell them out, were:
Saying that "Joe Lieberman (...) was not exactly "Red" by any stretch of imagination" is incorrect; you could do it with some stretch of imagination, particularly around 2008
PMRC wasn't simply some Democratic effort, as some posts in this thread portray it; apart from Tipper, there were numerous (presumably) Republican women involved.
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