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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'm not sure why you are implying that "not conservative republicans" = progressives, since the most conservative politicians in that period were southern Democrats (there were, of course, essentially no elected Republicans from the deep South in that period; see here, here, here and here )
As for the Comics Code, it grew out of the 1954 investigation by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee members during the hearing were : Robert Hendrickson (R-New Jersey),Estes Kefauver (D- Tennessee), Thomas C. Hennings, Jr. (D-Missouri), and William Langer (R-North Dakota). By the time the linked report was issued, Olin D. Johnston (D- South Carolina) and Alexander Wiley (R-Wisconsin) were on the committee, but they did not participate in preparing the report.
Anyhow, the idea that moral censoriousness around images of sex and violence is the sole province of progressives, rather than conservatives, is very odd: Moral objections to that sort of material is pretty much a part of the definition of being "conservative" in the USA, and certainly when you look at efforts to remove books from schools and libraries, the pattern is clearly that liberals object to books that are ostensibly racist, and conservatives object to books that depict sex, nudity, or violence. And, of late book challenges are most common for the latter reasons.
One, you're conflating moral objections with legislative action.
Two, I didn't say it was the sole province of progressives, I was pointing out that support for censorship has always been a component of the progressive platform and the narrative being repeated by the OP and others in this thread that progressive democrats have always opposed censorship and conservative republicans always supported it only for the positions to flip in response to Trump is either deeply ignorant, or dishonest revisionism.
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