"Leftists spend a lot of time attacking liberalism and a lot of time relying on it to protect them, like children who assume they can say awful things to their parents and their parents will still be there for them. That's true of (most) parents, but politics doesn't work that way. If you call for a bookstore not to stock your enemy's book or rejoice when a problematic classic is taken out of print, your enemy will do the same. Then it just comes down to who has more power. You won't have a universal principle to appeal to. During the McCarthy era, American communists like my father understood this. Stalinists were more liberal than the liberals, if only out of self-preservation."
At Dissent, Katha Pollitt explains why "The Left Needs Free Speech."
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