Hacker News Reader

Comment by Decathect | Hacker News Reader

The First Amendment didn’t prevent our genocide of native peoples. Democracy didn’t prevent 100 years of slavery. ‘The marketplace of ideas’ didn’t keep us from torturing people to death or killing a million people in a pointless war.

The problem with liberals is they mistake the means for the end. Because their lives are insulated from consequence, they prefer the “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”. They have a fairytale understanding of the world, where Nazism can be stopped with debate instead of carpet bombings.

What matters is that the hungry are fed, the sick are treated, and the vulnerable protected, and that everyone can live free of the threat of violence or deprivation. Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not matter.

View on HN

You are arguing against the First Amendment and democracy because the delicate feelings of people you deem bigots do not matter.

I feel the same way as OP. I have been a leftist all my life. Not so much now. You are just a prime example why.

>The First Amendment didn’t prevent our genocide of native peoples. Democracy didn’t prevent 100 years of slavery. ‘The marketplace of ideas’ didn’t keep us from torturing people to death or killing a million people in a pointless war.

You don't seem to understand the function of the things you dismiss. The First Amendment, Democracy, and trust in the Marketplace of Ideas exist to make sure that society's mind can be changed as easily as is practically possible. It's not a guarantee that society will get it right, it's an escape hatch for when society gets it wrong.

And when we look at everywhere else, where those escape valves don't exist, you get nothing but mass murder as a direct result of unquestionable, unassailable government/popular policy. Think of how much more difficult it would be to change society's mind about separate-but-equal or nonstandard sexual orientations if you weren't able to talk about or vote on them in the first place; you'd never have the kind of cultural revolution you had in America in the 1950s-70s without the ability to first persuade people it should happen.

>Decorum and the delicate feelings of bigots do not matter.

Despite what you may want to believe, you are not the one who decides who is and is not a bigot. Expose your life to the logical consequence of that; I don't think you're going to like what that statement fully implies.

I think you missed my point: all those things can be tools for accomplishing a just society, but they are not sufficient or an end in themselves.

Slavery was ended by war. Labor rights were achieved by fatal street battles. The civil rights movement was legitimized by a growing threat of a domestic insurrection. Marriage equality was established by an unelected Supreme Court. Basically every time significant positive change has happened in this country has been the result of extrademocratic leverage being found and exercised, not going hat in hand to ask an uncaring majority for what you are due as a human being.

Finally, as a moral being with obligations to others I absolutely get to decide who is a bigot, just as you do.

To deny any progress happens under democratic rule, is going too far?

I mean, all those positive changes happened in an ostensibly democratic system and were later ratified by it. They just didn’t happen because ‘moderates’ were convinced by logical argument to grant people basic rights through the ballot box.

That’s the farce, that political change happens through some cosplay conception of an Athenian forum instead of the accumulation and exercise of power. It’s a fact that fascists know instinctively and the left has been waking up to. For liberals, who are enthralled by process and satisfied with the status quo, the threat of change is more serious than the reality of injustice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com