That so many people were willing to embarrass themselves by signing their names to a letter which credits the conservative conspiracy theory of a war on expression being waged by the left alas is unsurprising. John Stoehr’s latest isn’t a direct response to this letter but it might as well be.
Free speech is not in crisis. Not in the way that “First Amendment warriors” mean. What they mean is that some people, usually “conservative intellectuals,” are being “silenced” by “mobs” of “angry radicals” intolerant of “liberal values.” To be sure, some conservatives are “disinvited” from campus speaking engagements. Some have even seen “angry radicals” throw stuff at their cars. But they are not silenced. First of all, they complain non-stop about their poor treatment, and powerful people take their complaints very seriously. Second, these people have enormous followings on social media, lucrative book contracts or cushy gigs at Washington think tanks. Saying they’ve been “silenced” would be laughable if it were not also conventional wisdom.
There is, however, a real crisis of free speech. It’s the same crisis all out-groups have faced in the history of our country. College students, very often students of color, use their free speech to express views contrary to the interests of those with the power to establish the terms of debate. Put another way, young people of color are establishing new terms, and those invested in the old terms are reluctant to change. That’s fine. That’s what the marketplace of ideas is about. But partisans aren’t paid to let the marketplace work things out. They’re paid to accuse college students of suppressing speech, thus creating conditions in which student speech is effectively suppressed.
“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” noises about a “need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences”—it never uses the term “cancel culture” but you know that’s what they’re on about—but as Stoehr notes that’s the very point: the people punching down at the marginalized are not now, nor ever have been, engaged in “good-faith disagreements”.
That’s just the one of the many phrases they wield as if an abracadabra summoning for them a total freedom from consequences. There are many names on there I’m unsurprised at (Brooks, Frum, Pinker, Rowling, Singal, Weiss), but at least one (Nell Irvin Painter? really?) that saddens me.
The sad thing here is that so many people somehow really felt that signing onto this letter was a pressing need, when all it really does is steady the hand of the powerful when they claim they are the oppressed. At least we know whose side they are on.
As a footnote of sorts: that’s around 400 words on the topic, when this tweet not by me is so much better: “Real Time with Bill Maher panelists are a step closer to unionizing.”
Addenda
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Unsurprisingly, Alan Jacobs has chimed in to agree with Fredrik deBoer’s take.
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Please, think for a minute and consider: what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left?
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Thing is, it isn’t generic; or, rather, it attempts to genericize itself as a preemptive defense. What it’s defending, though, isn’t “free speech” but the privilege of being able to write and otherwise express oneself in a manner which punches downwithout consequence.
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I’d forgotten all about this aspect.
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It’s heartbreaking that Margaret Atwood and Noam Chomsky signed on to a letter railing against “cancel culture” just four days after President Trump gave a racist speech at Mount Rushmore railing against “cancel culture.”
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It takes no guts whatsoever for people of privilege and standing atop their respective fields to “speak up” against a culture of accountability.