However, condemnation of attempts by Trump and his administration to wring maximum political advantage from the killing was perfectly justified. Yet, coming from those on the illiberal left of American politics, they were also deeply hypocritical. After years of promoting cancel culture, no-platforming and weaponising hate speech laws as an excuse for the political censorship of right-wing opinion, it’s a bit too late for the left now to complain when their ideological enemies do the same thing to them.
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Once one side of politics embraces an authoritarian mindset – even if it is the soft cultural authoritarianism of political “correctness” – it’s only a matter of time before the other side will do the same, adopting its arguments, mimicking its techniques, quoting it back against itself. That is precisely what Trump and his surrogates are now doing.
It was, after all, censorious American liberals – corrupted by their belief that everyone should think like them, and refusing to share the public space with views divergent from their own – who made freedom of speech a dirty word(s). Authoritarians of the right, actuated by quite different motives, are now copying the playbook the liberals wrote – with a vengeance.
In Australia, unlike America, liberalism has not mutated into an ideology of the political left. Our liberalism is of the classical variety, inherited from the English political tradition represented by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill – the nineteenth century’s most eloquent defender of free speech – and Isaiah Berlin. Robert Menzies’ genius in basing Australia’s centre-right party on the values of classical liberalism – “our liberal creed” was how he liked to describe it – has meant that, for all their many differences, liberals and conservatives would be allies.
Not so in the topsy-turvy world of American politics, where liberals have long forgotten that liberalism is fundamentally about freedom – of which there is none more important than freedom of speech – while those who claim to be conservatives have abandoned conservatism’s elegant defence of constitutional governance and established institutions, in favour of radical, and increasingly authoritarian, populism.
The events following the Kirk assassination should – but probably won’t – ring an alarm bell for America’s left-wing liberals: if you sell the pass on free speech – as they did years ago – you shouldn’t be surprised if you reap what you have sown.
George Orwell would have recognised the phenomenon. As he wrote in the famous last sentence of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
George Brandis is a former Liberal Party senator and attorney-general. He also served as Australia’s high commissioner to the UK.
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