Safeguarding freedom of speech, assembly and worship, the right to bear arms, and other constitutional protections are at the center of politics and the class struggle, and will remain so regardless of which party controls the White House after the Nov. 5 election.
These freedoms have come under serious assault throughout the nine-year-long campaign by the Democrats, Never Trump Republicans and middle-class left aimed at driving Donald Trump and his “deplorable” working-class supporters out of politics. This goes side-by-side with a broader offensive by these forces to dictate what working people can read, say and do.
Every time workers defend ourselves, organize unions or engage in political activity, we make use of constitutional freedoms won during the First and Second American Revolutions and in the class struggle since.
The U.S. Constitution enshrines the class rule of the U.S. propertied owners. But the class battles that led to its adoption and the passage of subsequent amendments forced the inclusion of crucial protections against government interference.
Workers who get caught up in the capitalist “justice system” rapidly learn that the state and its courts and cops are not neutral. These lessons are driven home during experiences on union picket lines and in other battles with the bosses.
Over decades unionists, Black rights fighters, opponents of Washington’s wars and the Socialist Workers Party have faced spying, harassment and disruption by the rulers’ political police, the FBI, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
The class character of U.S. society underscores the high stakes for working people in the unqualified defense of constitutional protections from the rulers’ state.
That’s true whether the target of their attack is a Colorado baker fighting to defend his livelihood and uphold freedom of speech and the right to worship as he chooses; the National Association of Letter Carriers, rail workers and other unionists who are told going on strike is illegal; leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party, framed-up because some of their political views align with those of the Vladimir Putin regime in Moscow; or Donald Trump, who faces a slew of lawsuits generated by President Joseph Biden’s Justice Department with the goal of rigging the 2024 election.
Liberal forces lead the attack on political rights today, yet they insist that Trump is the real “threat to democracy.”
Democratic vice presidential candidate Timothy Walz told MSNBC in 2022, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.”
When he was challenged on this on Fox News Oct. 13, Walz said his support for restricting free speech is backed by comments made by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. The judge approved jailing two members of the Socialist Party under the witch hunt Espionage Act for passing out flyers opposing conscription during World War I. Holmes said it was like admitting there’s no free speech “if you yell fire in a crowded theatre.”
But the First Amendment doesn’t contain any “ifs.” It says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Period.
Under the rubric of combating “disinformation,” Biden’s administration has attempted to impose censorship on challenges to their stances on climate change, “gender identity” and other questions.
Free speech ‘hamstrings the government’
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson attacked First Amendment protections earlier this year in a case challenging attempts by the White House and the FBI to compel big tech companies to self-censor the websites they run. On March 18, Jackson told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga, “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government.”
But that’s the point of the First Amendment. It was adopted to “hamstring” the government. It bars it from interfering in discussion and debate, including against those who hold views the capitalist rulers oppose.
Hillary Clinton complained Oct. 5 that if Facebook, X or Instagram “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.” Similar views are expressed across the Democratic Party, including by Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says, “We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in media.”
The “we” Clinton and Ocasio-Cortez seek to protect is the U.S. state apparatus. But when they talk about the government, they try to strip it of its actual class character. They hide the fact that the U.S. government exists to serve the capitalist class, their profit-driven offensive against working people, and their imperialist interventions and wars abroad.
Workers have an opposite starting point — the need for protection from that state and all of its institutions, from the government and courts to the FBI, and the ever-growing number of federal regulatory agencies that intrude into workers’ lives and impose the political agenda of the liberal meritocrats who run these agencies.
Liberals are increasingly calling for the Constitution as a whole to be dumped. They say it was written by slave owners. They ignore the fact that it was the product of a mighty revolutionary struggle against the oppression of the British monarchy, alongside subsequent battles of farmers and other sections of the toiling population.
One example is a widely touted new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school.
“Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution,” Jennifer Szalai asserts in her favorable New York Times review of the book. She adds that the Constitution fosters “the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.”
Liberal venom against the Constitution is ultimately aimed at the working class. In 1939 Leon Trotsky, a leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution, explained, “Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history.”