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For millions of Americans, the phrase “I like beer!” will forever call to mind one of the most unscrupulous figures of the Trump era having a lengthy meltdown before a dais full of senators en route to a lifetime seat on the United States Supreme Court. It’s also a sentiment that Brett Kavanaugh shares with Adolf Hitler, Al Bundy, and, um, me. (Awkward!)
Obviously the fact that bad people like beer or claim to like beer says nothing about the millions of peace- and freedom-loving people who also like beer, and it would be completely crazy to tar beer fans by association with their worst fellow drinkers.
Now here’s the question: Can we transpose this trivial observation onto the sentiment “I like free speech”? Many if not most liberals would be inclined to say yes, as though the concept of “free speech” were as bounded and specific as the concept of beer (weird flavored stouts notwithstanding). And so we have these semi-regular flare-ups, like we did this week after Harper’s published an open letter—addressed to no one, signed by dozens of prominent writers, including friends of mine—in support of “the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters” under threat from those on the left who have “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
Sounds pretty unobjectionable, right? Nope! Lots of objection and drama predictably followed, as did recriminations both for certain signatories and others who expressed disappointment that a prestigious magazine published it. There was also one troubling blind item about foam.
Viewed from one angle, this was a clever trap sprung by a group of political liberals who signed a fairly anodyne letter that invited a backlash that seems to prove their point. After all, what does it say about currents on the left if a bunch of writers band together to say, in essence, ‘free speech is good,’ and a bunch of progressives rise to object? What does it say if a well-meaning liberal stands up to say intellectuals shouldn’t face public or private retribution for questioning new dogmas about protest or police funding, only to be scolded for being in league with bigots?
But try it on this way: Imagine being a black or female or transgender person navigating the complexities of public life, who’s watched repeatedly as prominent writers have published articles and manuscripts “raising questions” about black intelligence and female facility in math and sciences, or calling trans people dangerous and mentally ill—and then responded to boycott pressure by posing (successfully!) as martyrs for “free speech.” Suddenly free speech isn’t just a foundational tenet of modern liberalism but also a term of rhetorical abuse opportunists use to wallop legitimate opposition to discredited sexist or eugenist ideas. A can you opened assuming it was beer, but which is in fact a warm Lime-A-Rita.
No actual liberals—whether they signed the letter or agree with the letter or think the letter is terrible—disagree with the notion that certain ideas merit some level of social and professional censure. I work for a progressive media company that abjures true censorship, but if I started writing articles about how Donald Trump’s view of immigrants is actually good, I would expect to lose my job. The boundaries are wider at mass media organizations, where columnists can and frequently do endorse polite versions of the Trump worldview without retribution, but if they began advocating for IQ-based sterilization, they’d also be fired, unobjectionably (and would then probably make a fuss about free speech and the censoriousness of liberal elites in the esteemed pages of Breitbart).
So when someone or a group of prominent writers organizes a letter consistent with the notion that this form of censure is always wrong, it’s easy to understand why some progressives see a stalking horse. That this isn't about 'robust debate,' but about making it anathema to call out intellectual tormentors for bigotry.
When I wrote about an earlier iteration of this same controversy a couple weeks ago, I made a point of noting that the way we argue among ourselves is as important as our premises and that “we have to be clear eyed about our terms and about what the real threat to liberal values is the whole way through.” And here we see why. The Harper’s letter includes signatories whose commitment to the equal dignity of all people I would never doubt, genuine intellectual lions, and others whose work product I’d happily boycott, and I don’t believe for a second that these very different kinds of writers mean the same thing when they decry “an intolerance of opposing views,” or the “steadily narrow[ing] boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.” And yet here they are, endorsing the same text as if “Open Debate” were immutable, and as accessible to everyone as foamy beer. As if going to bat for young intellectuals who are scared to say they disagree with the farthest-reaching demands of the Movement for Black Lives means you can’t also support deplatforming Charles Murray.
I became aware of the letter only after Harper’s published it, wasn’t asked to sign it, and wouldn’t have if asked, because I disagree with both its framing and premises. I don’t believe that speech norms, as haphazardly as they sometimes evolve on the left, are anything like the genuine censoriousness of the authoritarian right. I also think this sentiment—“the way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away”—while correct in most instances, isn’t a truism and that it’s lazy to treat it as one. Undemocratic ideas can’t be “defeated” because their adherents don’t accept defeat. The most extreme of those ideas should be rendered absolutely toxic, even as the Constitution rightly protects them from being illegalized.
There’s a version of a letter like this I could imagine signing, one that implores civil society leaders to exercise tremendous caution before censuring nonconformists, while cautioning them to be wary of those who argue that free speech means being able to say anything at all, without fear of boycott, in the name of “Open Debate.” Free speech, open debate, these should be our terms, and we should guard them just as jealously from real, illiberal left-wing speech policing as we do from those who brandish them to smuggle dangerous ideas out of the ash heap and back into respectable discourse.
But until we establish guardianship over those terms, we have to be aware that they aren’t one dimensional or static in meaning. When some people take a stand for free speech, they do so as earnestly as Kavanaugh and I might stand up for the virtues of beer; when others claim the same mantle, they do so with all the sincerity of Norman Bates trying to convince the world he wouldn’t harm a fly.
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