...unlike the New Infantilist left in the universities, on social media today, and even in some of the leftist media. This piece is a useful reminder; an excerpt:
The founders of Dissent were fiercely anticommunist, yet you’ll find them repeatedly, heatedly, defending the free speech rights of Stalinists.
I’ll cite just one example. In an article about the state of liberalism in 1955, Irving Howe criticized Americans for Democratic Action for passing a resolution that supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals.” Why would Howe have objected to this? He objected because the ADA had changed the wording of a previous draft, which supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals, including communist ideas.” They’d taken out “including communist ideas.” In other words, he was attacking them for the failure to explicitly affirm the free speech rights of communists.
The early editors of Dissent, defending the free expression rights of a political group they loathed and feared, were in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg, who said, “Freedom is always and exclusively the freedom of the one who thinks differently . . . all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political life depends on it"....
Contemporary skepticism about the idea of free expression seems to rest on two pillars.
The first is a heightened sense of distress about an old reality: the reality that the powerful can take advantage of free expression more readily than the powerless can.
The second is the startling ballooning of the idea of harm. Every affirmation of the importance of free expression that I know of, from Milton and Mill on down, comes with the important proviso that expression should be curtailed when it causes harm. What’s new in our moment is that the notion of harm has been expanded to an extraordinary degree, along with the notion of speech as violence.
It’s true, of course, that the powerful can take advantage of freedom of expression more easily than the rest of us. But it’s curious to draw the lesson from this that freedom of expression is a fig leaf for right-wing politics. The powerful can also more easily take advantage of the right to vote and the right to a fair trial. Are they fig leaves for right-wing politics too? It’s precisely because the powerful can take advantage of these rights more easily that we need to do everything we can to bring about a culture with the rock-bottom belief that these rights and the ability to exercise them must be universal. If we’re pressing for limitations on speech, we’re ultimately pressing for limitations on our own.
As for the claim that the marginalized and the vulnerable need to be protected from the harms, the violence, of unfettered free speech—well, there are many reasons to be skeptical of that claim. One reason is that history has no shortage of examples of people advocating restrictions on civil liberties in the name of the marginalized, but who’ve turned out—surprise, surprise!—not to represent the marginalized at all.
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