On the assumption that the easily offended have sodded off, let us begin. Okay, full disclosure: I'm basically conservative. In practice this means I believe in Anglo-Irish notions of fair play, a strong work ethic, the rule of law, and respect for traditional values (this includes respect for religion and acceptance of the role of faith in personal life). Since my positions on most issues haven't moved much since the 1980s I find myself on the left-libertarian-ish end of the political spectrum at the moment by virtue of not being a damn fascist. This is why I end up in arguments with people on the left, the right, and the liberal/progressive sides of the aisle. Heck, I sometimes fight with libertarians. It's important that I do this not just for myself but for the unknown viewers following along online; I've been told I make people think and this is important to me.
To speak or not to speak
Freedom of speech should permit the speaker to speak or to refrain from speaking. That seems really obvious, doesn't it? Not in this world. It doesn't help that people with authoritarian tendencies are using freedom of speech and expression as a pretext to exercise control over others. So it is that a county clerk used her religion as justification to deny gay people the marriage licences they are entitled to by law. A pharmacist refused to fulfill a woman's prescription for a drug intended to speed up her miscarriage. Hobby Lobby litigated for the right to determine which contraceptives they could deny to their female workers as part of their healthcare coverage. A manager at a Red Hen restaurant refused service to Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Now Google and Amazon are facing revolts by staff opposed to the Trump regime.
When speech is compelled
One of the first examples of compelled speech that comes to mind is that time Murray Energy's Century coal mine in Beallsville, Ohio, closed for workers to cheer at a Mitt Romney rally which was 'mandatory but they didn't have to attend.' It's not as if they'd have been fired if they hadn't chanted the erstwhile presidential contender's name but it's unlikely that they would still have had jobs there the following day.
Then there's the Masterpiece bakery case. The bakers were ordered by a court to decorate the cake (they'd have done everything else except that) but the couple involved wanted them forced to do so even though another bakery offered to serve them. As I've pointed out before,
...but freedom of speech is enshrined in law: nobody has the right to either suppress speech or to compel it. Therefore the Masterpiece proprietor has the right to express his views (or not express someone else's), however misguided other people might believe him to be. If individuals are not free, nobody is. - How To Win The Culture Wars, by Wendy Cockcroft for On t'Internet
Just as I was congratulating myself on that paragraph it occurred to me that we're basically facing a war over whose conscience trumps other people's in a world where the Golden Rule applies: he who has the gold makes the rules. Could you afford to walk away from your job if you weren't happy with the things your company was doing for profit? Can you afford to bring a case to court to fight for what you believe in even if it goes against the social grain — at the risk of losing everything? Masterpiece is out of business and that Red Hen where Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied service has closed down. Cheer if you want to but that sword cuts both ways.
Your conscience or your livelihood
Speech has consequences. If you exercise your right to air your opinion by refusing service to a man in a MAGA hat you will find yourself looking for another job. I daresay the same thing would happen if someone walked in holding hands with someone of the same gender and was thrown out. So then, is tolerance of otherness the better option? Live and let live? Serious question, given that the answer "But my conscience demands..." sounds a bit too close to "The devil made me do it" for comfort. If we tolerate "conscience chuck-out-ery," what do we do if some racist git has a contentious objection to serving a patron of African origin? Where does the line on principled stands begin and end?
An actual sentence published in the New York Times: "Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo." https://t.co/tqqxVUHVds— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) June 30, 2018
That sentence is risible on its face. Free speech protects us all. It's the authoritarian control of speech in the guise of defending it for special interest groups that's the problem and I'm seeing it on both sides of the aisle.
So then, where is all the trouble coming from and what can we do about it?
Freedom is an ideal, not a reality
One of the reasons why freedom of speech is so controversial is because there are limits on what you can say at the point where somebody tries to shut you up. Basically, while we're ideally free to speak our minds, in reality we're not. I'm serious: try expressing a right-wing point of view in a space dominated by left-liberal types: they'll be falling over themselves and each other trying to get you banned from whatever platform you're on. Now hop over to a right-wing haven and express support for socialism and gay marriage. While siloing allows a degree of freedom to express yourself as long as you adhere to community norms, they also tend to foment and entrench extremism to such a degree that you end up thinking that such attitudes are normal until you stray out of the echo chamber. Freedom of speech was always supposed to be about the ability to express oneself regardless of whether or not such views were popular.
1770 Voltaire writes in a letter: 'Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.'
America's Bill of Rights was supposed to lock this down legally but what we have now is speech and counter-speech followed by suppression and counter-suppression. However, due to the utter hysterics on display at the moment (Donald Trump and enfant terrible Yiannopoulos are being blamed for the Annapolis shootings, which were the actions of a deranged stalker annoyed at being called out for his behaviour and attitude) it's impossible to have a rational conversation about it. My take: the individual alone is responsible for his or her actions — and for choosing what they allow to influence them. I don't believe that banning speech is the answer to our problems because the problems weren't created by speech; they were created by people who wanted to listen to certain speech to have existing view validated or because it's easier to whack a scapegoat than to actually try to resolve a problem. So what happens when you ban speech — effectively or legally?
Underneath the rocks
Have you ever lifted a log or a rock and seen all the ugly bugglies scurrying about? That's what it's like when you ban speech: it goes underground and proliferates out of sight and out of mind until a groundswell of support for the ideas being suppressed has reached critical mass. I addressed these issues in my posts Why Are Nazis Marching In America? and Trumpy McTrumpface: How Donald Trump Became The US President. You can't keep feeding people a line, expect them to swallow it, then act all surprised when the chickens come home to roost.
In Trumpy McTrumpface: How Donald Trump Became The US President I pointed out:
America 101: the Yanks abhor collectivism. Anything that smacks of unions, socialism, or anything like that will be dismissed unless it appeals to their pride as individuals or in their nation. Anyone who therefore tries to organise people who are inherently suspicious of them is absolutely doomed to failure. This is not due to ignorance on the part of the intended audience, but to ignorant paternalism on the part of the would-be organisers. Unless they can frame it in terms of enabling self-sufficiency or bashing the bad guys the scheme will fall flat. It's the essential failure to understand why their underlying philosophy is such utter pants that limits its appeal to social justice warriors, slackers, and well-meaning rich people who haven't got a clue.
Basically, the repression of left-liberal/progressive speech under McCarthyism gave rise to the Western hegemony we have today in which neoliberalism has co-opted progressivism to lend it an air of respectability; it's playing both sides of the aisle against the middle. Result: echo chambers of people talking at each other rather than to each other while the neoliberals pick off the low-hanging fruit. In Why Are Nazis Marching In America? I pointed out that the subsequent repression of conservatism under the auspices of political correctness resulted in an aggrieved underclass anxious to flex its muscles at the first opportunity.
It's easier by far to label such people a basket of deplorables than to actually address their issues. Where were the roads and schools they had been promised? What makes Nazism so compelling is the narrative that the underdogs have been put in that position by jealous inferiors determined to rob them of their birthright. So, if you're a loser with no direction in life and you're told a) it's not your fault and b) "Do you know you're genetically superior to Idris Elba?" it is possible that you will latch on to this because it makes you feel better about yourself.
So we've got echo chambers shouting at each other trying to divide our society into Us and Them. The bad news is, as they become more extreme, it's working. I currently abhor the Right because of their appalling lack of compassion, which, by default, pushes me leftwards even though I'm not really left wing. The Left annoys me by banging on about class instead of working to solve problems. Basically, they're more interested in being in charge than in helping the downtrodden, which makes me deeply suspicious of them. Each echo chamber is trying to silence the other and ultimately gain control of our society, to shape it as they see fit, and one of the casualties of this war is freedom of speech.
It's bad enough when the force of law — or the threat of losing your livelihood — is used to shut you up but when it's used to compel speech you don't want to make then sooner or later there is going to be a reckoning.
The trouble with authoritarians...
In my post, "How To Win The Culture Wars" I explained the rules I use to guide my thinking:
The Twofold Principle
The individual must be free to act and the will of the people must be respected.
Cockcroft's Law #1
Anyone who calls you a "liberal socialist" or variant thereof is just trying to shame you into compliance with a right-wing agenda. Besides, they have no clue what the words mean.
Cockcroft's Law #2
Don't create powers that can be turned around and used against you.
Cockcroft's Law #3
When the number of people who have suffered under a particular regime reaches critical mass, expect sudden, radical change.
I'm going to add two more here:
Cockcroft's Law #4
Any philosophy predicated on a best case scenario is ultimately doomed to failure.
Cockcroft's Law #5
The moment you resort to logical fallacies to bolster your argument, you have no argument.
Okay, what have you noticed about the Twofold Principle and the Laws? Yes indeed, authoritarians' hubris and stubborn narrow-mindedness has a tendency to hoist them by their own petards. This, for reasons only they understand, has escaped their consciousness. It's as if they honestly believe that everything they say and do happens in a vacuum and therefore has no knock-on effect. To nobody's surprise but their own, this isn't true. Hold that thought: authoritarians are going to exert authority whether we like it or not, which obliges us to push right back as hard as we can if only for our own good.
...is that they're not always the ones with authority.
Right now, across the Pond, all those lovely progressive folk, who have tirelessly worked to create protected groups of designated Oppressed Masses that We Must Not Offend, are discovering that when the boot is on the other foot, they become the unofficial oppressors and the people marked out as antagonists by default are now the ones being protected by virtue of religious virtue signalling. Needless to say they're not happy about it. What, did nobody else see this coming? Dear me! That's my Laws #2-5 being well and truly violated right there. Seriously, did no one even imagine right-wingers enacting their agenda whether we like it or not under cover of religious speech? That's what happens when you create protected groups: everybody else wants to be in one. And being in one enables you to either shut people up from saying or doing things that offend you when they express themselves or force you to make statements you don't want to make if you want to keep on being able to pay your bills.
Be popular or be quiet
So this is where we're headed: pick an echo chamber where your speech is welcome and stick carefully to the rules thereof or GTFO. That's it. That's where the erosion of liberalism has taken us. It's not freedom of speech that's the problem, then, it's the hijacking of the ideals thereof to use it as a cudgel to either force speech or silence dissent where the problem lies. The division of the electorate into Left and Right isn't helping; the axis should actually be authoritarian <---> libertarian. I've always refused to be popular; I'd rather keep my principles.
What can we do?
While some people complain that being more tolerant of fascist gits legitimises them the trouble with banning them is that they go underground, gather support, and spring back in unexpected ways. Meanwhile, the Right's suppression of the Left is rebounding on them in amusing ways; I can't see the anti-socialist panic lasting forever while the welfare state is systematically dismantled. Poor people vote. We need to talk and keep on talking. Banning stuff or rejecting ideas on principle means we can't discuss them rationally. It also makes martyrs of the banned. Honestly, I'd recommend engaging more with those people we disagree with, even if they have abhorrent ideas. Why? Better to get some sunlight on them than to hide them under a rock. Horrible ideas tend to proliferate more when they're suppressed than when they're discussed in an open forum. Mind you, I like to argue.
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