Who's Worse on Free Speech?

I think most people understand that free speech is a seminal concept in a free society. For Ayn Rand, it was THE dividing line between a flawed but salvageable society, and one that should be overthrown by force if necessary. As long as you could still use persuasion to change people’s minds, she believed, a violent revolution was not justified. Once the government no longer allows the free exchange of ideas, then the people have every right to rise up to get rid of the government.

That said, we have never had perfect free speech in America. We certainly don’t have it now. Unfortunately, it is under attack from both the Left and the Right. Yet it is still possible to express your views in a wide variety of ways. Trump and his administration don’t like it, but you can still criticize the government. For now, at least. Recently, Trump called for revoking the broadcast licenses of ABC and NBC because they didn’t air his primetime address on “election security.” He has repeatedly made such threats. (While it doesn’t look like these threats will be carried out, I would argue that even making them has a chilling effect on free speech and is completely unacceptable.)

But even if Trump’s most recent threats go nowhere, Republicans have had an alarming level of success in attacking free speech in recent years. FCC officials have successfully pressured networks over late-night comedians and critical commentary. State-level laws and Department of Defense school directives have restricted books and prohibited educators from discussing specific topics related to race, gender, and history. Administration figures have encouraged public campaigns targeting the employment of those expressing views disfavored by the government.

In the 20th century, liberals (for all their flaws) were often champions of free speech — at least to a greater extent than conservatives. I think this is still true among actual liberals, people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Francis Fukuyama. But the rise of the illiberal Left (the woke nut-jobs who seek to blur the line between speech and violence) has created new threats to free speech. In Europe, laws against “hate speech” are already commonplace, and many would like to see such laws enacted in the U.S. But who gets to decide what is “hateful?” Trump is convinced that the mainstream media is saying hateful things about him. Should he get to shut them down? You can start to see how the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right might end up helping each other — and very much hurting those of us who’d like to continue living in a free society.

I recently got into a discussion/debate with a fellow Objectivist about whether the Left or the Right is worse on issues of free speech. I wasn’t really arguing that the Right is worse; I was more pointing out that it isn’t better, and that because Republicans are currently in power, they are the greater threat at the moment. In truth, I don’t know that it matters which is worse when both are so bad. I think the important point is that we must not overlook the reality of how bad one side is in an effort to demonize the other.

But this discussion did highlight an issue that I think is worth exploring. While I was talking about actual government actions and policies that curtail free speech, he was talking about how terrible our universities (and the professors teaching there) are on this topic. His contention was that what they are promoting is far more harmful than what Trump and conservatives in general are doing.

I tried to argue that we were talking about apples and oranges. I don’t think he understood my point, so I wanted to see if I could do a better job explaining it — because I think it’s an important distinction.

I agree with Ayn Rand that it is ideas that move a culture. And there is no doubt that the bad ideas being taught in our universities lead to all kinds of bad outcomes, including the enactment of immoral laws (like those curtailing free speech). But there is a fundamental distinction between advocating bad ideas (which everyone has the right to do in a free society) and enacting rights-violating laws (which no one has the right to do).

Yes, we need to fight the woke nonsense and cancel culture being promulgated in our universities. And yes, it is incredibly frustrating that we are not winning this battle of ideas. We need to seriously think about why that is, and how to turn the tide. But we can only do that so long as we have free speech.

What I am trying to tease out here is the distinction between the moral and the political, between the realm of ideas (persuasion) and the realm of laws (force).

Morally, a person engaging in self-harm (drug abuse, for example) may be “worse” than a person acting out in some small way, like shoplifting, and causing minor harm to others. But from a political standpoint, as long as the harm the drug user inflicts isn’t violating the rights of anyone else, it is not properly the business of the state. Whereas the action of the second person, who might be healthier psychologically and perhaps even morally, is the concern of the government because his behavior now impinges on other people’s rights, even if only in a small way.

Similarly, a professor poisoning the minds of his students may be doing all kinds of harm. But he and the student are engaging freely with each other. No one is forcing the student to be there, and no one is forcing him to accept the professor’s ideas. We, as fellow citizens, have the right to expose the professor, to urge the university to fire him, to counter his bad ideas with better ideas — but we have no right to get the government involved. The issue gets muddier, of course, when the government is already involved. Today, very few universities are completely independent of government funding. We need to change that. But the answer is to get the government out of education, not to advocate for the government to control what is being taught. We must not equivocate on the difference between narrowed choices which are largely the result of market forces, and narrowed choices which are the direct result of government intervention.

I’m not happy about it, but the fact is that most universities and colleges are dominated by the Left because they have been successful over the course of the last century or more in persuading people of the righteousness of their beliefs. It’s painful to admit, but they have won their dominance fair and square in the marketplace of ideas. As in any marketplace, the proper response should be for those who disagree to come up with better ideas, and become better at spreading those ideas. We also must keep in mind that as skewed as the current educational system is towards the Left, because we live in a free country there are still other choices available. There are institutions like Hillsdale College and Liberty University, as well as more mainstream universities that are not entirely captured by the Left (places like the University of Texas, Austin, which employs noted Objectivist scholars like Tara Smith and Greg Salmieri). There is also the newly founded Austin University, which has a free market/libertarian bent.

What Trump and MAGA want is to narrow our educational and intellectual choices by force. They want to use the power of the government to restrict ideas. This is different in kind to what the university professors are doing. Longterm, if we don’t do a better job of countering these idiotic professors, we won’t have a free country. But there will be no “longterm” for America if we don’t prioritize beating back the anti-free speech agenda of today’s Republican party. The fact that Democrats would likely be just as bad or worse if they held power doesn’t mean we should sit back and let this regime do what it likes. The proper, rational response is to defend free speech with everything we’ve got, regardless of where the threat is coming from.

What’s ironic is that if we blur the distinction between what the professor is doing and what the politician is doing, we are actually implicitly giving in to the mistaken (and dangerous) premise being promulgated by the illiberal Left — that words are violence. Words are the realm of persuasion, which is the proper way for men to deal with each other. And violence is the realm of force, which in a free society should never be allowed except in self-defense. The ideas being promoted in our universities may be bad, but the method they are using to spread them is legitimate. We need to be better at using those same methods to promote better ideas. Politicians using the power of government (i.e., force) to restrict ideas — even if it’s restricting bad ideas — is not legitimate. In fact, the content of the ideas is irrelevant. What Ayn Rand wrote about pornography half a century ago applies just as well to the filth being espoused by today’s university professors: “It is not very inspiring to fight for the freedom of the purveyors of pornography or their customers. But in the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right’s least attractive practitioners. In this case, the disgusting nature of the offenders makes it a good test of one’s loyalty to a principle.”

We can’t let our disgust at the content of the ideas being promoted turn us against the only moral method of changing a person’s mind: persuasion. If we give up on persuasion, we have given up on free speech — which means we have given up on living in a free country. I’m not ready to do that.