All about ‘freedom of assembly right’ in US

The “right of the people peaceably to assemble,” as the US constitution’s first amendment calls it, is one of the pillars of liberty. That’s why all liberal democracies guarantee and protect it in some form. But is this right absolute? Could there be, in well-defined cases, a liberal case for abridging it?
This timeless question has just become newly urgent. The Covid-19 pandemic has, directly or indirectly, increased social turmoil in many countries, leading more people to assert their right to protest. But as the very different circumstances in Belarus, the US and Germany showed again this past weekend, what counts as a primal scream for freedom in one gathering easily turns nefarious and anti-democratic in another.
In Belarus, the protesters are indeed heroes deserving the sympathies of freedom lovers all over the world. Since a fraudulent election on August 9, they’ve been bravely marching as their benighted dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, stomps around carrying an automatic rifle and keeps his thugs ready to bludgeon his critics.
Types like him disdain freedom of thought, speech or assembly. That’s why philosophers since John Stuart Mill have considered these rights essential.
Elsewhere the picture is more complex, even in the “sweet land of liberty.” As Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter have blown off America’s veneer of social cohesion, some US cities have of late resembled battlegrounds. Over the weekend, supporters of President Donald Trump gathered in Portland, Oregon, and drove downtown in a caravan of hundreds of banner-draped trucks.
There they clashed with mobs of “anti-fascist” counter-protesters. Paintball guns were shot and fists thrown, until actual gunfire erupted and a man lay dead.
Clearly, neither side in this particular exercise of the right to
assemble emphasized the first amendment’s stipulation to do so “peaceably.” The intention was to antagonise and intimidate opponents, not to air arguments for the betterment of democratic discourse. The ubiquity of guns in America makes any such confrontation potentially lethal.
And then there’s the peculiar case of Germany, a country that has been sensitised by its own Nazi history to the dangers that extremists pose. Protest movements against the various coronavirus lockdowns have swept across much of Europe, but they’ve grown particularly strong in Germany. This is surprising, given that Germany has controlled the outbreak relatively well and imposed only mild restrictions.
Nonetheless, the crowds of protesters are growing. Many are spouting outlandish conspiracy theories inspired by the QAnon movement in the US and striking anti-Semitic overtones. Increasingly, far-right extremists and even full-blown neo-Nazis are mixing into the crowds.
Last week, almost 40,000 demonstrators showed up in Berlin. In the evening, the protest turned violent, as several hundred rioters stormed the barriers
protecting one entrance of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building. Many carried the black-white-red flags of Imperial Germany, a symbol that nowadays stands for the far right, since the Nazi swastika is banned. Three defiant policemen barely managed to keep them out.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, called the violence “an intolerable attack on the heart of our democracy.”

—Bloomberg