Why fight to defend constitutional freedoms is key for working class – The Militant

[....] 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 Sates, 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.”

Why fight to defend constitutional freedoms is key for working class – The Militant