The ACLU Wants to Be the NRA, Without All the Guns

The crowd of Midwestern civil libertarians was in an aggressive mood when Faiz Shakir of the American Civil Liberties Union took the stage on Oct. 1 at a rally in Lawrence, Kansas. He ticked off the messages he had been hearing President Donald Trump send to immigrants and minorities. “We want to wall you out, we want to ban you, we want to surveil you,” he said, speaking faster and louder as he recited the crises competing for the ACLU’s attention. The crowd cheered, and Shakir caught his breath. “If you have a whites-only, white-power view for America,” he said, “you’ve got an ally in the White House. So that’s what we’re up against.”

Shakir, the ACLU’s 38-year-old national political director, was dressed like a politician, in a dark suit and a purple tie, hair combed carefully. Like any good stump speech, this one used dire warnings as a preamble to an optimistic climax in which the speaker congratulates the crowd on its impending victory. It wasn’t just the 100 or so lawsuits he said the ACLU has filed against the Trump administration, or the record-high five cases it was arguing before the Supreme Court this session; those are expected from a nonprofit lawsuit factory that has always measured itself in the italicized names of court cases. For the previous nine months, in a major departure for the 97-year-old civil liberties organization, ACLU supporters have been holding protests and demanding meetings with police departments and other local officials, with only loose direction from headquarters.