re: #280 lostlakehiker

Republicans remember the shelling they took when they nominated Goldwater. And Goldwater was far to the left of Cruz, and far more acceptable to the general public. There is, after all, a Republican “establishment”. It likes to have a chance of winning presidential elections, and it likes to have some voice in the positions a presidential candidate of its own party takes. Cruz won’t have the support of this establishment, because he’s too far out there to win the presidency and because he’s too much his own parade, too little willing to play ball.

This doesn’t prove that he can’t possibly win the nomination, but it means that the odds of that happening are long.

Well, I want the protections of the constitution that apply to one and all to apply to bigots as well. Freedom of speech includes the right to say things that others find ridiculous, offensive, or abhorrent.

It includes the right to “symbolic speech”, such as burning the US flag. It is, to some extent, exactly because that flag stands for liberty, including the right to burn it to show that you hate it, that it merits being loved rather than hated.

Whipping up a crowd with calls to action such as “burn it down”, or “lynch him” falls outside the limits of free speech. Advocating the necessity and desirability of the forcible overthrow of the government, again, outside the bounds. But that’s about where the boundary is: things like that.

One has a right to say just about anything else. Calls for the repeal of the amendment banning slavery are abhorrent, but they’re not prohibited speech, for example.

The speaker will not be met with much approbation. He won’t attract a following, except in a negative sense. But he shouldn’t go to jail for having said it. Nor should his business of selling T-Shirts advocating the repeal of that amendment be outlawed. Let the public vote against him with their dollars.

A simple left-right scale doesn’t really work for comparing Barry Goldwater and Ted Cruz. Goldwater’s conservatism was secular in nature, whereas Cruz has a heavy dose of evangelical Christianity injected into his ‘conservatism’.