But, like the MSNBC and CNN executives panicking over plummeting viewing figures, the ACLU leadership is searching for its role now that Trump has gone. The answer appears to involve drifting yet further away from litigation to defend core constitutional rights – the purpose for which the organisation was founded a century ago – and towards all-purpose progressive campaigning. Last month, for instance, it launched its “systemic equality” racial justice agenda designed to “dismantle white supremacy”. As part of that effort, the organisation will push for reparations for slavery, student debt forgiveness, expanded access to high-speed broadband and child tax credits.

...

Today, that defining commitment to freedom of speech has been subsumed into the policy priorities that increasingly make the ACLU indistinguishable from the many other well-funded progressive nonprofits that populate the political scene in Washington. As Ira Glasser explained to me in a conversation this week, a great deal has been lost in the process. Glasser ran the ACLU from 1978 to 2001 and is the subject of a recent documentary, Mighty Ira, which tells of his rise from a Brooklyn boy obsessed with the Dodgers and their star player Jackie Robinson (the first African American to play baseball in the major leagues) to a prominent and often unpopular defender of free expression in the United States.

“‘Progressive’ doesn’t seem to include any sort of commitment to or belief in the value of speech,” Glasser tells me on a video call from his New York home. “The disaffection towards free speech rights is now coming from liberal quarters.” Increasingly, Glasser (who would have been considered an impeccable liberal throughout his career) worries that those on the left, “seem to believe that free speech is an impediment to social justice”.

“And I think they believe that because so many advocates of free speech today seem to be on the right and seem to be opposed to social justice,” he says. “But whatever it is, it’s historically wrong and strategically stupid. The truth is that every movement for social justice in America has always depended upon and required free speech rights.”

Jon Cooper @joncoopertweets

The overwhelming majority of Republicans at ALL levels of government are gutless cowards.

Adam Rifkin is half-vaccinated. @ifindkarma
Replying to @joncoopertweets

It’s full-on Wizard of Oz in their leadership: No guts, no brains, no heart.