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The Shifting Agenda
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10169 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1986 |
2,375 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
THE POLITICS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION
William A. Donohue
Foreword by Aaron Wildavsky
New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1985
William A. Donohue's brilliant book is an exposé that is not deliberately sensational, but which, in a careful and scholarly, way, recounts the real history and values of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU, unfortunately, is an organization much of whose reputation has depended on its true purposes and allegiances remaining hidden. More than most organizations, the ACLU has tended to rationalize and hide many of its past stands, and many of its admirers feel that it has betrayed its past. Yet, as Donohue shows, there is a consistency behind the organizations zany gyrations. Donohue outlines the evolution of the ACLU's actual policies and values and relates them carefully to the general development of liberalism in modern America. And, as Aaron Wildavsky demonstrates in his foreword, the ACLU, however much it has pretended otherwise, ahs never been a nonpartisan group simply devoted to the protection and preservation of the Bill of Rights. Rather, as Wildavsky sums up, it is an organization of people "committed to a shifting agenda of substantive policy change as dictated by the political perspectives of its most active members." Civil liberties as they are usually understood have been a tool, not an end in themselves. Donohue brilliantly relates the shifts in the ACLU's program to the evolution of American liberalism in general in this century. The result is a work of much broader interest than its title might suggest. The Politics of the American Civil liberties Union is very useful to the student of modern American society.
Transitions
As Donohue shows, the ACLU's history demonstrates and expresses the changes in American liberalism since World War I. The development of the organization itself, while partly a reaction to wartime events, coincided with a shift in liberalism from an individualistic orientation, opposed to centralization and interference with a free market economy, to a collectivistic approach, if anything positively enthusiastic about planning and interference with private initiative. Liberalism and always tended toward egalitarianism, rationalism, secularism, optimism, and opposition to authority and tradition; during this period equality, rather than liberty, tended to become the prime value for liberals. And, during the lifetime of the ACLU, the interpretation of equality has itself undergone a dramatic shift.
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