JAMES TARANTO: ‘Speech Nuts:’ Does the left like anything in the Bill of Rights?

“The First Amendment has something in common with the Second Amendment,” writes the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh: “Both are unusually broad legal guarantees that mark a difference between America and the rest of the world.”

Swells you up with patriotism, doesn’t it? (Or envy, if you’re from Canada, France or one of the other non-U.S. countries too numerous to mention.) But Sanneh means it as an invidious comparison. He writes: “Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards.”

As that parenthetical “we” suggests, Sanneh’s essay—which is about free expression, and mentions the Second Amendment only for the sake of this comparison—is more nuanced than the “speech nuts” epithet might suggest. He counts himself among the nuts, but only equivocally: “Perhaps America’s First Amendment, like the Second, is ultimately a matter of national preference.”

One further similarity between the First and Second amendments is that these days the political left is relatively hostile to both. That’s long been true of the Second but is a relatively recent development with regard to the First. Although we were not reading the New Yorker in 1987—when, as now, it was America’s leading forum of middlebrow left-liberalism—we feel fairly confident in saying an article like this would not have appeared there then.

In those days, by and large, liberals were the “speech nuts,” and they reacted with outrage when conservatives argued that free expression had in some respects gone too far. In a 1971 law-review article, Robert Bork described pornography as “a problem of pollution of the moral and aesthetic atmosphere precisely analogous to smoke pollution.” The left pilloried him for that during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1987. By 2013, as we noted at the time, no less than the New York Times editorial page was demanding federal action against “polluting” speech (though not pornography).

To the left, civil rights are like a subway. When you reach your stop, you get off.