(NEW SERIES) Institutional Failure in America Episode 1: The ACLU
Institutions are key components of nearly every aspect of our society, but are those organizations still performing the tasks they were originally created to do?
Welcome to a new series of articles on institutional failure in America! You can expect these episodes to be sprinkled in among the other articles that I release.
I decided to create this series because I believe that the root cause of many of our problems is a lack of trust in institutions. But, it’s also important to realize that this lack of trust is completely warranted. In an ideal world, we would always be able to rely on our institutions for quality, non-partisan information, but time and time again this has proven not to be the case. As a young person in their mid twenties, I have been lied to by one institution or another about nearly every major event that’s occurred during my lifetime, from the Iraq War to the Great Recession. Those lies on their own are costly enough, but when they start to build up, it becomes more and more difficult to know who to trust. This in turn leads to the increasing popularity of crazier and crazier conspiracy theories.
Today’s institution of choice is the ACLU, also known as the American Civil Liberties Union, but this series will include organizations of all kinds, ranging from government agencies to private universities.
I chose to begin with the ACLU because to me, its downfall is the most troubling of them all. Civil liberties are a key part of what makes us Americans, and we should treasure them above nearly all else.
The ACLU has a very rich history as one of the most successful nonprofits in U.S. history, celebrating its 100 year anniversary last year. The organization made its name by defending free speech in legal cases, particularly by representing anti-war protestors. And while most of the priorities that they list in their mission statement might be considered left-leaning, it has never been a partisan organization. I believe this fact to be the key when considering if someone or something is principled, and for the longest time the ACLU was. Let’s take a look at what they stand for in their own words:
“For nearly 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty, working in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.
Whether it’s achieving full equality for LGBT people, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age of widespread government surveillance, ending mass incarceration, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach.”
I want to focus on the end of that last sentence, because this is what has made the ACLU great. “The ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach”.
The most famous case in ACLU history was incredibly controversial at the time. The official name of the case is “National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie” and is now considered to be one of the premier cases when thinking about free speech. The time was 1977, and Skokie was a majority-Jewish town. A group of Nazis based in Chicago wanted to march through Skokie, and Jewish lawyers from the ACLU defended their right to do so. I would highly recommend reading the first hand account of the case from David Goldberger, which you can find here. There were also many cases where the ACLU defended the same rights of communists, particularly throughout the Cold War.
But in recent years, and particularly since 2016, the ACLU has altered their stances to reflect a more partisan agenda. This has been building up for a while, but seemed to culminate in their latest call to action, where they argued in a New York Times Op-ed that vaccine mandates actually somehow enhance civil liberties. Now before you say “oh here we go with another anti-vaxxer” I myself have received the vaccine, and I think there are good arguments in certain cases in support of vaccine mandates. However, I would never have expected the ACLU to be the ones making that argument. I believe that we need strong, oppositional voices willing to make unpopular arguments based on principal, and that’s what I had hoped to hear from the ACLU on this issue. What makes this stance extra disheartening is that the ACLU released a report in 2008 on pandemic preparedness where they argue that coercion and mandates are the worst possible way to respond to a public health crisis.
So what changed?
There appear to be 2 major factors at play here. The ACLU is an independent non-profit organization, meaning that they mostly rely on individual donors to fund their work. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, their membership jumped dramatically from around 400,000 to over 1.8 million, with hoards of self-branded “Resistance liberals” joining the ranks. Just as the New York Times or Fox News is aware of their audience, and in turn cater primarily to that audience, that large boost in support did not go unnoticed at the ACLU. In 2018, the ACLU’s national political director at the time, Faiz Shakir was quite open about this change in thinking, saying “ACLU’s political growth and advocacy has increased since Donald Trump was elected president. We’ve had a massive growth in volunteer base and massive growth in financial resources. People have funded us, and I think they expect a return.” This seems to have reverberated throughout the organization, as many of the younger lawyers under their employ now seem to view their jobs as working against Republicans, rather than applying their principals evenly, based on individual cases.
In 2017, the ACLU defended the rights of white supremacists to march in Charlottesville, Virginia. This of course lined up with the organization’s previous commitments to protecting free speech, but the event itself became a major news story after a man drove his car into a crowd of people counter-protesting at this rally. This event caused the ACLU to reconsider it’s stance on free speech, as was leaked in a 2018 memo.
In today’s world where nearly every political issue boils down to which team you’re on (Blue or Red), institutions must fight even harder to maintain their nonpartisanship, or they are likely to be swayed in whichever direction they had previously leaned. The ACLU has always leaned slightly to the left, but it was never nakedly partisan. I still believe there is time to right the ship here, but in a time where our civil liberties are constantly under attack, we need a principled, nonpartisan ACLU more than ever.
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