The conservative right is winning this debate. Ordinary Americans, even those not inclined to conservatism, believe that liberal political correctness has gone too far–and that liberal thought police reduce our freedom to express ourselves. One never hears about how conservatives exercise financial and social power to constrain expression. We on the left need to reclaim this debate, and demonstrate where the real danger of censorship comes from.
King Features syndicate censored the cartoon below, because they’d been:
getting a lot of complaints from editors about the cartoonist’s left-leaning politics, and that running the cartoon could result in some cancellations.
Cartoon
One can criticize the artist for caving, and substituting an inoffensive (and terrible) replacement for his own work, but we cannot overlook the way that corporate interests constrain our freedom to express ourselves. While the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to be heard, only to speak, the framers never could have imagined the kind of corporate control over expression that exists today.
What’s so dangerous about ideas, I wonder?
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