George Leef’s latest Forbes column focuses on a change in focus for left-of-center partisans and politicians.

In the America I grew up in, the “liberals” were content to use government coercion to confiscate people’s money so they could spend it on their panoply of social engineering and vote-buying projects. They got to compel people to “join” Social Security, subsidize National Public Radio, pay for legions of needless bureaucrats in offices not authorized under the Constitution, bail out political cronies who cried “We’re too big to fail!” and so on.

That kind of “liberalism” was bad enough, but the disease has of late developed new and far more vicious strains. Those involve attacks on Americans for not holding the right beliefs.

In America’s brave new world, the law is more and more used as a weapon against people who challenge the governmental leviathan and even against individuals who quietly dissent from progressive orthodoxy and merely want to be left alone.

Liberals used to be all in favor of free speech, but that was before they consolidated their power sufficiently to feel safe in trying to silence critics. The First Amendment, sacred to old-school liberals such as Justice William O. Douglas, no longer even gets lip service from hyper-aggressive attorneys general who are eager to bring RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) cases against companies and think tanks for having questioned whether climate change is a crisis demanding an immediate and permanent increase in government power.

These attacks are flagrantly unconstitutional (read this piece by Competitive Enterprise Institute attorney Hans Bader if you have any doubt) but to modern “liberals” such as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, winning is the only thing that matters.

n the same vein, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has proclaimed that among her top priorities if elected will be amending the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court’s pro-free speech decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. (That case involved the funding of a movie critical of Mrs. Clinton and leftists have no qualms about stifling such criticism as much as they can.)

Years ago, more honest liberals such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan might have spoken out against the abuse of power to tilt the political playing field in favor of statism, but today there are no prominent Democrats willing to defend our fundamental values and the rule of law.