Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vezzy-fnord | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Are you saying you disagree that the Constitution is considered less relevant today than it was in the earlier history of the United States?

Yes.

If anything, our First Amendment rights are now more robust than they were in the past. We have almost nothing like a modern-day equivalent to Anthony Comstock. The amount of obscenities you can get away with these days is higher thanks to people like Al Goldstein, Lenny Bruce and Larry Flynt setting historical free speech precedents. Labor movement violence is a thing of the past. The sexual revolution means pornography went from obscene to "meh, whatever". Film censorship no longer happens as much as it did in the period before the 1960s. The export restrictions on cryptography have been heavily softened to the point of being almost practically irrelevant. Left-wing politics, though hardly major, are no longer subject to any real suppression beyond punditry's ignorance.

As for the other amendments you listed, I presume they're in reference to mass surveillance. In which case, civil asset forfeiture dates back to maritime law, NSA has been documented to intercept ingoing telegraphs as far back as 1945, Operation Mockingbird had the CIA meddle with U.S. media, FBI has had COINTELPRO, DCSNet and other operations, so on and so forth. Nothing here is new.

You're viewing the past through exceptionally rose-tinted glasses, honestly.

>Left-wing politics, though hardly major, are no longer subject to any real suppression beyond punditry's ignorance.

This is not really true. Left-wing political groups are still actively suppressed by police organizations on a regular basis, as well as Islamic groups (religious and secular), LGBT rights groups, and generally anyone involved in protesting. Police see protest groups as antagonists and act to disrupt them pre-emptively if possible.

The sources for this claim are broad; I would recommend looking into the leaked maryland state police spying documents (which show infiltration of non-violent activist groups), the FBI, local police, and bank conspiracies to disrupt the Occupy movement (long before any actions in the real world had been conducted by any group identifying as Occupy), and the Green Scare.

Combine this with "free speech zones," protest permits, and other before-the-fact restrictions on free assembly, and you can see very clearly how political speech outside the mainstream is suppressed in the United States.

(Interestingly, right-wing groups, white nationalism groups, and similar are not often targets of these investigations and are often protected by police during their protests. In many cases this is the result of local connections, but you have to wonder why animal activists are such a higher priority than white nationalist extremists, especially after Charleston.)

It's a far cry from The Red Scare, though, which was his point.

In what sense is it a far cry from the Red Scare? Which Red Scare, for starters? There have been two purges of leftists from American civil society in the 20th century, and both of them attempted (from the look of the outcomes) to marginalize leftist politics as far away from the mainstream as possible, to wreck the lives of anyone involved in leftist politics, and to discourage people from those politics due to the fear of the Inquisition turning its eye on them.

Of these goals, the first is no longer relevant (the media keeps leftists and similar out of politics far more effectively than periodically purging the State Department of leftist party members ever did). The second is very real and continues to be accomplished by various police agencies. Because of modern "terrorism" laws, various methods of protest are criminalized as terrorism (mostly pertaining to protests that disrupt businesses, like picket lines or sit-ins), and so protest groups can find themselves targeted by fusion centers, special anti-protest task forces, and federal policing agencies (like the DHS).

Finally, the last goal continues to be enshrined today. Free speech zones and militarized police presence at protests makes protesting a much less empowering act than it was in the 60s and 70s -- imagine if Norman Morrison had burned himself in a free speech pen miles from the Pentagon! Going to a protest now entails locking oneself in a cage and being stared down by beefy, roided-up cops that are actively trying to attack protesters and see protesters as an enemy force. Use of grand jury investigations, fusion centers, task forces, entrapment, and finally, the persistence of social media, makes it hard to join nonviolent groups without the fear of "something" coming up that could ruin you for life. The programming in American educational systems about "keeping Facebook friendly for colleges and employers" supports this self-censorship.

If you look into what is actually going on, possibly by researching some of the topics I mentioned in my last comment, you'll find that modern suppression of non-mainstream politics is indeed comparable to the red scare. The fact that it no longer occurs to such fanfare indicates that such behavior has been normalized on the part of the state.

Very well. I tentatively stand corrected on the historical significance of unconstitutionality as an effective means to stop unconstitutional government behavior.

Nevertheless, and perhaps in part because the Constitution has in fact been routinely steamrolled in the past, it seems that bringing it up as a counterargument to any law today is just short of pointless.

Part of the issue is that the very first people to steamroll the Constitution were... well, some of the very people we're supposed to look to as having known exactly what the Constitution meant. The Alien and Sedition Acts, for example, became law in 1798, and were passed and supported by some of the people who just a decade earlier had been expounding "the original meaning" of the Constitution to people in an attempt to get it ratified.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com