nifesto and the other turned on the question of injustice. The Dewey-and-Hook “Statement of Principles” hazarded the idea that injustice might come from multiple directions—from the extreme right, but also from the extreme left. The Committee of 400 entertained no such possibility. Injustice, in the view of the 400, came only from the right. And if you insisted on saying that it might also come from the left—well, you were a “fascist or a friend of fascists.” Which is to say: Given the opportunity, you should be, as it were, “canceled.”
Here, I think, was the difference between liberalism and the more radical left—the expansive American liberalism of those days that had room for socialists and anarcho-syndicalists and other leftists, but was, even so, a liberalism, with its belief that injustice is multiple; and the more radical left that could not abide the idea of multiple sources of injustice. Here was something further, too. Here, in the Dewey-and-Hook “Statement of Principles,” was a liberal mobilization determined on drawing the line between liberalism and the non-liberalism of the left.
Liberalism is still having to fight those battles, defending freedom of thought and freedom of expression from a hard left dressed in new 'woke' clothes. But underneath it's the same old Stalinist crap.
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