What the ACLU ultimately does is defend the rule of law from being usurped or cast aside by conflicts over speech.<p>Defending speech one hates is a way to maintain and develop the integrity of the law as an institution, and I think this is the underlying mission of the ACLU. The examples of what they do protect the right of individuals and groups to say this or that, but the real work of the ACLU is to be a grinding stone to refine the law the way an official opposition party works in a parliamentary system. While hard cases make for bad precedents, it is in the hard cases that ensure the law is fit for purpose.<p>In this sense, the ACLU are not reliably progressive activists or allies, even if they often outwardly behave as them, because they in-effect take a fundamentalist position on the principle of the rule of law over the effects of speech. In this view, progress may only occur on a foundation of the law, and this is what offends radicals and fanatics alike. The material of the speech they choose to defend is secondary to, and even independent of, whether the parties are saying something evil or not.<p>What I do not think they were prepared for is the co-ordinated assault on language itself, where we have real uncertainty about whether the rule of law can withstand a cultural movement in which words have no fixed or shared meaning. Arguing the meaning of a text, and unmooring the text from meaning as a means to selectively reconstitute it are very different problems. The integrity of the ACLU to its principle maybe a useful canary for how much the culture can withstand.