The Great Rollback

Our Rights of Conscience Are Under Attack (Footnote Added)

Photo from Freedom Forum.

The First Amendment is under threat.

From assaults on campus speech by conservative forces to efforts to rein in the rights to protest, we are witnessing a dangerous moment of rollback when it comes to our basic rights.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution essentially protects our right to follow our conscience. In its five freedoms — to speak, believe, publish, assemble, and criticize the government — we have the broad promise of what America is supposed to be and the tools needed to ensure that these promises are met.

American history offers proof of the value of these tools — in the labor movement and the various rights movements that forced the United States to expand its vision of itself beyond its early white, male, Christian identity to include multitudes, as Whitman wrote.

This expansion did not occur by accident, nor did it happen because good always wins out. It does not. The expansion of who can claim citizenship (both legally and metaphorically) didn’t just happen; it was forced upon the ownership classes by workers and farmers and all of the dispossessed through organizing and protest and speech.

These successes, of course, were met with pushback and often with state violence. The early history of the labor movement is one of violent struggle, in which workers were forced to take up arms against the well-funded and violent armies of capital. Black liberation in America also was met with violence — everything from billy clubs and fire hoses to genocidal riots and assassinations.

Each advance made by a dispossessed group was met with backlash. Today, we are witnessing another retrenchment, a multifaceted attack fueled by capital that seeks to divide and that wishes to take us back to a concocted before-time.