Feehery: I miss the old left

Rep. Ted Lieu, the liberal Democrat from California, shocked me the other day: He said something I agree with. He tweeted, “The Constitution prevents government from regulating speech on Twitter.”

His comment reminded me how much I miss the old left.

When I was studying history at Marquette University, one of my favorite professors was Athan Theoharis, a distinguished historian who specialized in the abuses of the FBI during the reign of J. Edgar Hoover. 

Theoharis perfected the FOIA request, with which he would badger the bureau into revealing to him the manifold files of Hoover, the longest-serving and most-feared bureaucrat in American history. 

As students, we would plow through the files and would learn about how Hoover’s FBI would investigate such important figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Joe Louis, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and just about every other major political and entertainment figure of the mid-20th century.

With those files, Hoover, effectively using the media, would spread misinformation, blackmail opponents, and intimidate members of Congress, senators, even presidents to achieve his goals, some of which were laudable but all of which were extra-legal.

The FBI was notorious in those days for infiltrating political groups that it found objectionable, sowing discord within those groups, and finding ways to disrupt their free-speech rights as supposedly guaranteed under the Constitution. The COINTELPRO, started in 1956, was especially effective in undermining all kinds of groups on the left and the right.

While Theoharis spent most of his research investigating the FBI, he also taught us some of the more nefarious activities of the CIA, which did internationally what Hoover did domestically: undermining movements that it saw as a threat to America. 

I am not naïve and I know that it’s a complicated world where competing interests require not just statecraft but spycraft. But when America doesn’t live up to its best principles, it is usually counter-productive to American interests.

In 1971, a group of left-wing activists broke into a local FBI office in Pennsylvania and stole a thousand surveillance files held there, which they later sent to national media outlets, including The Washington Post. The Post would end up publishing a front-page expose of some of J. Edgar Hoover’s most nefarious activities. I wonder if the Post would bother to report on those files today.

Back in the old days, the left distrusted big-government institutions, like the FBI and the CIA. They didn’t trust big corporations or big pharmaceutical companies. The American Civil Liberties Union vigorously defended free speech, even free speech that it desperately opposed. 

Those days seem to be gone. 

Now, the progressive movement is so afraid of free speech that it condemns those, like Elon Musk, who go out of their way to protect it.

Unlike the old left, the new left embraces the collusion of big-tech platforms and the intelligence community to stop the reelection of Donald Trump and to silence conservative voices. 

The old left would have applauded Elon Musk for opening the files and letting the American people see how far the government would go to squash political and scientific speech that it didn’t like. The new left sees Musk as a trouble-maker who must be destroyed. 

I am a conservative and have been since my college days. But I appreciated the old left because it believed in free expression, it often battled against big corporate monopolies and it didn’t trust big government and an unaccountable intelligence community. 

But the old left is gone and now we have a new left that is more than happy to upend revered constitutional protections, all in the furtherance of a woke agenda that is, at its core, profoundly anti-American. 

I miss the old left. I may have disagreed with them, but at least they believed in the value of free speech and were aware of the dangers of unaccountable government.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).