Hate crime law is basically modern blasphemy law and has more in common with state religion than anything. The use of law to punish out-crowd speech is ancient and nothing can be less classically liberal than absolute freedom of speech. Democracy is merely a mode of government and has nothing intrinsically to do with hate speech law; it's meta-government.
Modern liberal democracy has everything to do with hate speech laws. You can't just ignore the historical relevance of these institutions. Hate speech laws arose from liberal ideas about private identity and personhood, i.e. you can't slander someone because of who they are. The function might resemble punishments for blasphemy, but the historical conditions of hate speech emerge from an entirely different set of social mores and expectations. It has nothing to do with pledging obedience to a god or state, and everything to do with the emergence of the modern liberal self.
Read the history of hate crime law. It doesn't emerge from a state looking for ways to limit what people can say. It emerges from individual actors--activists, lawyers, and scholars--making legal claims about personhood and private identity. This is hardly leftist.
I didn't mention Twitter and I honestly don't even care about social media and the validity of social monopoly. I'm talking about a mother being fired from her job because her police officer son shot a criminal of a different race, a right-wing news writer being dropped from his private insurance for his politics, right-wing college students forbidden from having PayPal accounts, a business executive using the phrase "get off welfare" turning to a massive lawsuit defended at the Supreme Court, competitor social media being blacklisted by every financial power in the country, etc. This has all accelerated in the post Operation Chokepoint era where Obama dictated by fiat to various banks which businesses they may or may not provide services to. Contemporaneously, of course, these same banks ("private businesses" as you might call them) enjoy trillion dollar bailouts courtesy of the taxpayer and enjoyed almost absolute immunity from competition as Obama stopped virtually all new bank charters over his presidency and approved further mergers. The entire finance sector is more politically powerful as a private glove for public hands than it would be outright nationalized, hence, more left-wing than a lot of communism.
This is logically inconsistent. A person being fired, someone being dropped from an insurance plan or by a publisher, etc. etc... none of these are "state mandated." These are private individuals/businesses making decisions. They are, in fact, free to make these decisions. The people being "silenced" are free to say whatever they like--and those affiliated with them are free to respond as they see fit.
Nothing about that is leftist. It's actually the opposite of leftist, if by leftist we're meaning authoritarian e.g. China, Soviet Union, etc.
Operation Choke Point was an attempt to prevent fraud because of rampant capitalist and liberal market practices. So in order for the historical claim you're making to be valid, you'd have to admit that the U.S. was a neoliberal, pro-market nation at least until the Obama administration.
I was probably speaking too broadly; maybe I should have said "American corporate law".
This is even
less accurate.
Incorporation of business in 19th century America was in general fairly rare and limited to businesses that states traditionally had substantial control over, such as banks, and the use of incorporation was as much a tool to mediate state-private relationships as anything. The mere act of acquiring capital to invest in a business and produce product only required state assistance for legal reasons, not material ones. A wide small/family-business middle class defined America's economy that afaik nowhere else in the world could be compared to, up until FDR saw the rise of a new corporation-dominated landscape. The rise of the corporate class depended fully on the rise of leftist government.
I don't think you know your history. You should read Alan Trachtenberg's
The Incorporation of America:
In the U.S., incorporation appeared on a modest scale in the 1850s, notably in the railroad industry. By the 1870s, it had become commonplace, changing the face and character of American capitalism.
Other common enterprises that incorporated were wheat and cattle farming, meat-packing facilities, and other aspects of food production. The reason this was possible was that there was minimal regulation on these businesses or on the land they used.
Following the lead of the railroads, commercial and industrial businesses conceived of themselves as having the entire national space at their disposal: from raw materials for processing to goods for marketing. The process of making themselves national entailed a changed relation of corporations to agriculture, an assimilation of agricultural enterprise within productive and marketing structures. The rapid appearance of grain elevators after the 1850s indicated the change and its character; the need for storage facilities, and for standardized grading and weighing and inspecting, implied sales in high volume, direct purchases by dealers from farmers, and a distant exchange for commercial transaction. Agricultural products entered the commodities market and became part of an international system of buying, selling, and shipping.
All of this is a result of expanding modes of capitalist production and market freedom. It wasn't at the behest of the state or bolstered by it. The act of incorporation isn't a left-wing practice but a sign of deepening industrial capitalism and the growing power of a vastly productive marketplace.
The point is that civil law is now more retributive than criminal law, and the number of things one can be held liable for in either court is as high as any time in American history. Right of contract, the rights of two private parties to make agreements and settle disputes without public interference, was substantially and explicitly protected until FDR raped the commerce clause into doing his bidding. And tech giants are certainly state sanctioned and sponsored, as I already listed out: AT&T's secret government spy rooms, increasingly lengthy intellectual property protections, protection from foreign competition, no-bid contracts, all of the banking stuff mentioned above, etc.
The point, as you try to put it, is that liberal democratic institutions have given rise to a modern situation in which
individuals can choose to censure and punish others. Do politicians play along with this? Sure, I'm not denying that; but most often they aren't the ones bringing the cases (although they do on others' behalf sometimes) or initiating the behavior.
You may not like the fact that people act out by boycotting, deplatforming, publicly silencing, etc.; but no one is being told they can't say anything. You can, but then you're also responsible for the public backlash that comes your way.
My left-right axis is simply collective-individual control. I don't see where you actually explain what it means to you.
Everything we're discussing is all about individual control--you have control over what you say, and others have control over how they react to what you say.
