If there was one dominate moral component to 20th century liberalism it had to be the elevation of an individual's democratic and judicial process rights to that of equal importance to a person's explicit liberty rights. During this era newly invented Miranda rights, privacy rights, rights protection against unreasonable searches, voting process rights, rights to legal counsel, and many other democratic process and "judicial due process" rights were established as paramount over the primal desire to 'getting the guilty' - so much so that the guilty sometimes remained unconvicted if the prosecutorial authorities even inadvertently violated these protections.
And some may recall there were those well meaning conservatives, as well as reactionaries, who were appalled that in order for "one innocent man" to go free "a hundred should be released" . The most extreme among them, George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Bull Connor, and membership of the American Nazi party just didn't get it - no one's ends justified any means. You see, everyone in every group had due process rights, including "Negros", Nazi Party members, and young civil rights workers.
But as Klein has also demonstrated, there has always been another, more radical strain of left thinking (a mirror of the reactionary right) - the old Leninist belief that one does not achieve social transformation by paying attention "liberal" moralities - like the reactionaries, the radical left believed one's social ends actually do justify any authoritarian means because in order to cook the guilty plutocrats, negroes, or campus males one must be willing to "break a few eggs."
And Klein is not alone in this view. The shift by the left from its historical defense of the rights of the common person, to advocacy for the identity group in the 1980s nurtured this pseudo-religious obsession, the need to find and behead the gender or race oppressor - only now, it is not the aristocrats needing beheaded but the unruly mass of campus males sharing the XY gene.
So what if a generation of males need be sacrificed, he implies sanctimoniously, against the justice of building "new men", contrite and brought to heel by feminism? Why let obstacles like "due process" get in the way of the lavish use of campus inquisitions, gender tribunals, and metaphorical guillotines ? "Blood" must be spilled to make progress.
Its sad that the feminist left (and their male fellow-travelers and part-time apologists) have betrayed their liberal roots - perhaps a few of them need be reminded of basic due process their ideological ancestors once demanded:
“(Due Process) embodies a system of rights based on moral principles so deeply imbedded in the traditions and feelings of our people as to be deemed fundamental to a civilized society as conceived by our whole history. Due Process is that which comports with the deepest notions of what is fair and right and just.”1 The content of due process is “a historical product”2 that traces all the way back to chapter 39 of Magna Carta, in which King John promised that “[n]o free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseized or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”3 The phrase “due process of law” first appeared in a statutory rendition of this chapter in 1354....
http://www.law.cornell.edu/anncon/html/amdt5bfrag1_user.html
Sigh, one would have thought we made progress since the 13th century.
