So I see people complain about the ACLU losing its way in a woke era, I guess by contrast with the 90s Nadine Strossen version, not living up to the legacy of Skokie, etc.

So let me explain to you a thing.

In my youth you’d still hear about the commie “ACLJew”, from “Jew York City”. And… yes! It came out of the heavily Jewish New York City leftist world in reaction to the First Red Scare as a legal defense force for a world that wasn’t all “Communist” as in agent-of-the-Comintern, many “fellow travelers” who just wanted a world (and supported methods of bringing it about) were communist as an adjective.

And one tactic of theirs was generating defensive precedent using clients as fronts. NAACP v. Alabama, 1958, the Supreme Court defending activist groups’ membership lists from inspection by a repressive state. Using a plaintiff sympathetic to Northern establishmentarians, but generating a precedent usable by…? Communists. Or at least leftists, the ACLU base’s was shaken by the OG tankie split same as the rest of American leftism.

Skokie, “the government may not suppress political marches even if the ideology is locally feared and loathed”, in 1977 who do you think that was really for? And damned if “those Jewish lawyers are just defending Nazis for their own communist ends” doesn’t sound incoherent, even where it’s true!

The ACLU was as real a part of the American left as anyone, it made an idealistic cultural turn after the ‘60s too, and after the end of the Cold War, when funds needed raising and cultural liberalism was the new boomer mainstream they oriented around that.

But like, “adopting contemporary pan-leftist positioning and intervening in current controversies towards the end of empowering forces seeking to destabilize the government and remake the country” is absolutely consistent with ACLU tradition

P.S. the reason the ACLU defended those Nazis marching through Skokie is the ACLU was founded circa the First Red Scare as a disclaimably “fellow-traveling” force and it was really about generating precedent to protect establishment-disliked communist marches, but by picking clients they made “these Jewish lawyers are protecting Nazis for their own Communist ends” sound silly even where it was true

(Like how efforts to legally protect memberships of Northern liberal-appreciated civil rights organizations in the South from state inquiry was ultimately about establishing a precedent for communist groups)