No knowledgeable observer doubted for a moment that Flynt's legal counsel would eventually spring him. Serious defenders of civil liberties laughed when the vicarious civil libertarians compared Flynt to Soviet dissidents. For the most part America's vicarious civil libertarians of the 1970's are the same meretricious celebrities who provide crises and good causes for the Republic's intellectualoids. IIlustrative of their character is the fact that prominent among them during the Flynt affair was Mr. John Dean, Watergate's Mary Magdalen turned author. If there were a serious threat to civil liberties in America, you can be sure that this pack of impostors would be over at Elaine's or another of their toney Manhattan saloons, primly sipping aperitifs, quoting the late Paul Elmer More, and eagerly awaiting the opportunity to stride forth on the pages of the New York Times as principled advocates of chaste reading and uplift.
Nothing is more revealing about our vicarious civil libertarians than their biographies.
Since 1974 Alexander Solzhenitsyn has spent nearly a million dollars on the cause of civil liberties in the Soviet Union. A sorry reality of contemporary America is that those bogus civil libertarians who make the noisiest spectacle of themselves on issues of human liberty generally know little about liberty and care less. They are either opportunists, posturers, or ignoramuses. This is true not only in the asinine debate over the First Amendment but also in the hyperbole of civil rights. Those hinds who have monopolized the public discourse comparing their conditions as women or as homosexuals to the historic oppression of blacks are frauds, freeloading on the misery of the past and on the compensatory impulse of the present.