There are three points I would like to make about the Williamson-Atlantic controversy. First is the most obvious one: that free speech is not an absolute entitlement. If people dislike what you are saying, or if they believe your views are irrelevant, then they will not hire you to write for them, and they will not read your columns however you manage to publish them. They can’t put you in jail—that would be unconstitutional—but they can hold you in deep contempt and refuse to have anything to do with you. That’s part of what free speech means.
Or, they may aggressively oppose you at every turn. If you show up to speak at a campus, then students are perfectly free to heckle you and chant during your speech. They don’t owe you a respectful hearing—-Lincoln and Douglas were both heckled during their debates, and are you more deserving than they?
Aggressive audience participation is most definitely a part of the democratic tradition, and anyone who pretends that the audience is supposed to just sit there and listen to disagreeable nonsense—for the sake of politeness, of all things—without protest or heckling should be ashamed of themselves. As Walt Whitman put it, “There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.”
The right to talk back to an oppressor is basic. Mockery and defiance of cruel or plainly false arguments is one way people express their love for the truth.
Granted, a nice civil speech with questions held until the end has a comfortable feel to it, and I like that sort of event myself. But the audience is never under any obligation not to protest or heckle or talk back, just as the speaker is never expected to necessarily respect the audience or avoid lying. How many speakers in this country have claimed that Obama was born in Kenya, without being forced to leave the podium?
A respectful hearing has to be earned. You don’t get that just because you arrived in a limo. Likewise, Kevin Williamson doesn’t get a job with The Atlantic just because.
Secondly, in Williamson’s case, what possible good can come from publishing his views? The theory of free speech is that many of us have some light, and that by freely debating the issues reasonable people will separate the wheat from the chaff—and at times a compromise or even a synthesis of opposing viewpoints will emerge.
But Kevin Williamson has advocated the death penalty for women who have abortions. What possible use can this genocidal fantasy be, and what good could come from debating it? Williamson has excluded himself from reasonable discourse, and that is part of the process of free speech producing wiser policies—-by debating alternatives to difficult issues (like abortion) we learn to exclude obviously bad ideas, and we often exclude their proponents as well.
Free speech implies no mercy for bad ideas, because the purpose of free speech is to find the best ideas through open debate. We don’t practice free speech to make everyone feel important and valued—quite the contrary, because many people will inevitably feel ignored and even humiliated by this process, just as Kevin Williamson must be feeling this evening, on April 9, 2018.
American history is littered with the debris of ideas that were tested by debate and events and found wanting: slavery, the gold standard, prohibition, isolationism, McCarthyism, and perhaps someday even billionaire capitalism, if the gods smile on our cause.
The idea of the death penalty for abortion is certainly one of the shortest-lived of our bad ideas. There is no constituency for killing, what, fifteen to twenty million women? That would certainly teach everyone—once and for all—to value life, wouldn’t it? I expect Kevin Williamson feels himself vastly superior to the Khmer Rouge.
In mathematics, we call this “reasoning to a contradiction.” If we assume that the pro-life movement is truly motivated by a respect for life, and if in the process of pursuing their goal of eliminating abortion they advocate the execution of millions of women (incidentally leaving any children the women already have orphaned, and any children they might bear in the future unborn), then we’ve reasoned to a contradiction: our original assumption is incorrect, and the pro-life movement is not motivated by a respect for life. Or at least Kevin Williamson isn’t.
His short-lived career outside the bubble of right-wing journalism is actually an example of how freedom of speech should work. He and his ideas have now been discredited and this lends focus and context to the ideas that remain current.
Because free speech is something we all practice, and we all benefit from. It’s a system, not a “right.” Sure, part of the system is that individuals can’t be jailed (or “hanged,” in Williamson’s elegant phrasing) for speaking their minds, but the individual part of free speech is only part of the picture. The collective part is the concluding and decisive part of free speech, where we say: “the solution to abortion, if there is a solution, isn’t anything like what Kevin just said. Let’s think of something else, and never mention his name again.”
That is free speech.
Because, although individuals can’t be silenced by the force of law, in effect individuals can be—and sometimes must be—silenced by the judgement of public opinion. If your nonsense is too offensive or tiresome then people stop listening. And that’s an essential part of freedom of speech, as Kevin is finding out right now.
Thirdly, there’s the asymmetry of Williamson’s career inside the right-wing echo chamber and his career outside it. Within, there was no accountability for bad ideas—Williamson rocked along for years working for the National Review without either his editors or readers (if any) pushing back against his femicidal daydreams.
Why didn’t Williamson get slapped down by the National Review? Basically, it’s because free speech, as I’ve described it, doesn’t exist inside the right-wing media bubble. It sort-of looks like free speech, but it’s just propaganda. Because propaganda has no self-correcting mechanism—public opinion never steps in and says, “STFU!” when the rhetoric gets too savagely inhumane or transparently false. Propaganda is just a top-down narrative with no ability to differentiate between good and bad ideas.
And how did the right-wing bubble lose the capacity for free speech? After all, the people who inhabit that world weren’t born unreasonable, and they probably had teachers or parents who respected the truth in some way or another.
What happened was that the right-wing bubble developed different priorities than society at large. And these priorities dictate different values. Inside the bubble, anything that furthers the concentration of wealth is “good.” This includes the care and feeding of the political coalition that supports tax cuts and other economic privileges for the very wealthy, and this coalition includes many people who don’t care about tax cuts, but who do care about abortion. Now, anyone who follows politics has known for decades that probably nothing will ever be done about abortion, least of all by the Republican Party. But, to keep the coalition together, the National Review and the rest of the bubble have to sometimes pretend to care about abortion. And they have to change out the rhetoric to keep it fresh, right?
Bear in mind that the coalition supporting the concentration of wealth has a narrow base of relevant opinion-makers. The average anti-abortion Catholic or evangelical need never read or approve of Williamson’s proposals—in fact they would probably reject them as too extreme—but as long as Archbishop Chaput and the fanatics at Operation Rescue (or whoever) approved, Williamson saw only smooth sailing.
And that’s why there’s no true dialog between left and right in this country. Dialog exists where there are shared values but different opinions about how to realize those values. But the right-wing today views the concentration of wealth as the highest value, and any social or political force that opposes the concentration of wealth—even indirectly—as evil. This means that the right-wing does not share values with anyone outside the bubble. Furthermore, when conservatives venture outside the bubble, as Williamson did briefly, they experience normal rough-and-tumble free speech as unspeakably harsh and unfair. “Why are liberals so hateful?” they ask themselves.
And if we look at specific issues, where is the common ground between those who believe climate change is a hoax and those who believe it is a serious threat to the environment and to civilization? What values do these two groups share? What sort of synthesis or compromise can emerge from a debate between those two points of view?
Where is the common ground on education or health care? Abortion? Immigration? What about inequality or the breakdown of majority rule?
Everywhere you look, there is a lack of common values. Kevin Williamson’s effort to legitimize femicide as a “pro-life” position is just one more example. Who can take that point of view seriously, other than as a threat of mass murder?
The Socialist Investor 