I supposed we should count this as a major victory: The New York Times editorial board has just acknowledged that we have a problem with free speech and open debate.
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.
How has this happened? In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.
The whole editorial is so good I don’t even know what to make of it. Despite opening on a slightly equivocal note—there is no “right” not to face disapproval—it does get around to the necessary distinction between government censorship, such as the restrictions now being tightened within Vladimir Putin’s Russia, versus the “culture of free speech,” the cultural norms that favor the open discussion of ideas. The Times also sums up the epistemological argument for a such a cultural norm.
Freedom of speech and expression is vital to human beings’ search for truth and knowledge about our world. A society that values freedom of speech can benefit from the full diversity of its people and their ideas. At the individual level, human beings cannot flourish without the confidence to take risks, pursue ideas, and express thoughts that others might reject.
But what has drawn the most attention is the editorial board’s assertion that threats to freedom of speech and open debate comes from both sides.
In the course of their fight for tolerance, many progressives have become intolerant of those who disagree with them or express other opinions and taken on a kind of self-righteousness and censoriousness that the right long displayed and the left long abhorred. It has made people uncertain about the contours of speech: Many know they shouldn’t utter racist things, but they don’t understand what they can say about race or can say to a person of a different race from theirs. Attacking people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society….
At the same time, all Americans should be deeply concerned about an avalanche of legislation passed by Republican-controlled legislatures around the country that gags discussion of certain topics and clearly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, if not the letter of the law.
It goes far beyond conservative states yanking books about race and sex from public school libraries. Since 2021 in 40 state legislatures, 175 bills have been introduced or prefiled that target what teachers can say and what students can learn, often with severe penalties. Of those, 13 have become law in 11 states, and 106 are still under consideration. All told, 99 bills currently target K-12 public schools, 44 target higher education, and 59 include punishment for violators, according to a running tally kept by PEN America.
This has produced a lot of angry responses, particularly from the left, where people insist that only the right threatens freedom of speech and that left-wing “cancel culture” is totally invented. The New York Times, they say, is guilty of “both-sides-ism,” a reflexive compulsion to find two sides to blame in every conflict. And then, of course, for the sin of believing that cancel culture is real, the critics demand that the entire editorial board be canceled. That’ll show ‘em.
Meanwhile, the latest editorial from my local college newspaper, the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily, demands that the University refuse to permit former Vice-President Mike Pence to speak on campus because, “Hateful rhetoric is violent—and this is impermissible.” The whole editorial reads like a parody of censorious wokeness. So perhaps cancel culture is not all in our imagination, after all.
Obviously, there are two sides to blame here, and it is an all-too-convenient dodge for either side to insist that their own transgressions are inconsequential compared to the other guy.
The surest proof that intolerance and political indoctrination coming from the left is a real issue is that the people who complain about it are not just “right-wingers” or some small faction of recidivist racists, but liberals and “progressives” themselves.
One of the biggest stories from the beginning of this year, for example, is the overwhelming vote in San Francisco—one of the most left-leaning enclaves in the country—to recall the local school board for valuing political indoctrination above education. It started about a year ago.
The board became the focus of national ridicule last February after a two-hour debate over whether a gay white dad was diverse enough to join an all-female volunteer parent committee.
But the larger problem was the board’s obsession with this kind of “woke” political posturing while it failed to develop any kind of pandemic re-opening plan.
In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools, after a committee found that the people the schools were named for had connections to slavery, oppression and racism—even if the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.
Last month, the school board reversed that decision, backtracking in the face of a lawsuit and criticism that its priorities were misguided….
Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed, even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed backed the recall because it was “important to have leadership that will tackle these [pandemic] challenges head on, and not get distracted by unnecessary influences or political agendas.” Even Mother Jones, while downplaying the idea that the vote is a rejection of wokeness, admitted that it was a “vote to put performance over performativeness.”
There was an angle of racial politics to the vote, but it’s not what you might think. The recall was spurred in part by the fact that attempts to promote “equity” in the school system, ostensibly on behalf of black and Hispanic students, have generally taken the form of racial discrimination against Asian students.
The black and yellow signs were hard to miss, their message spelled out in English and Cantonese: “Vote YES to Recall the School Board.” Volunteers with the Chinese American Democratic Club urged shoppers to get registered for the Feb. 15 election, telling them why three members of the city’s school board—all Democrats—needed to be removed from office.
Yung Chen, 73, was already convinced. “Martin Luther King’s speech, I believe in that: Don’t judge people by race,” he said. His grandson, he explained, nearly missed out on a spot at the high school he’d tested into, and the school board was responsible. “He just barely passed the line, and if he wasn’t a Chinese boy, he’d pass it very easily.”
This is part of a larger national pattern, where calls for “diversity” in school admissions often mean shutting out Asian students. Or consider a recent case in which the Asian-American performer Awkwafina was criticized for using the “blaccent” common to contemporary hip-hop music and responded with this extraordinary apology: “I think as a group, Asian Americans are still trying to figure out what that [immigrant] journey means for them—what is correct and where they don’t belong.” Ah, “diversity”—that wonderfully tolerant doctrine in which the children of immigrants are expected to learn where they don’t belong.
Woke posturing and anti-Asian bias are fused together in one central issue that has emerged from San Francisco and spread out into California’s public school curriculum: the downgrading of advanced instruction, particularly in mathematics, in favor of political indoctrination.
The [math curriculum] framework also calls for more relatable and practical instruction, whether that be through using more inclusive pronouns or word problems related to real-world issues like housing and climate change.
To critics, that sounds perilously like dumbing down math.
“They’re changing math to make it math appreciation,” said Michael Malione, a parent in the Piedmont City Unified School District who works as a private math tutor. “A part of math is learning things that are not authentic to life.”
Malione and other parents say the framework does a disservice to historically marginalized student groups by offering them a simplified version of math that fails to prepare them for the challenges of a career in science, tech, engineering, or math.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Garry Tan explains how this targets a crucial aspect of the “immigrant journey” of many Asian-Americans.
I’m an Asian-American Dem who has only done donations to Dems. I am the child of working-class immigrants who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. They’re taking away our math and our way up to study STEM. This is why I was a top donor to the recall. They want to erase me.
This was my path, and being in the Bay gave me my chance to create and build wealth from nothing. Now they want to destroy it, and they start by targeting the strong California public school rigor that allowed tech to flourish here. It's insidious, and I won’t stand for it.
The fight in San Francisco shows us the larger context in which this debate is happening: an attempt by a small faction to impose an ideological dogma at the expense of free inquiry and basic education, opposed by a silent majority of “liberals” and even by many self-described “progressives.” Pretend this is not real at your peril.
On the right, conservatives have been attempting to exploit the kind of outrage that led to the San Francisco school board recall in order to support their own solutions. But those solutions turn out to be, not a defense of free speech, but an attempt to impose their own limitations on speech.
The defense of this, from anti-woke crusaders like Christopher Rufo, is that these restrictions apply only to public primary and secondary schools, where the government has the authority to establish rules and standards for its curriculum and limit what is taught to children. That is a bit of a dubious argument and in any case just makes the case for school choice. But then along comes Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to proclaim: “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist [University of Texas] professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory. We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed.”
In Wyoming, the state senate passed an amendment to a budget bill that would simply eliminate the University of Wyoming’s “gender studies” department. I’m no fan of these academic make-work programs, but if politicians can directly dictate the ideological composition and course of study at publicly funded institutions, then those institutions are being turned into instruments of state-sponsored political indoctrination—just from the other side.
This is a power grab to suppress politically unwelcome speech and scholarship at the university level. It is conservative cancel culture.
Or consider another expansion of “anti-woke” laws, one proposed in Florida which would ban “classroom or corporate training discussions they consider ‘woke’ indoctrinations of cultural guilt.” Note that this includes training for private corporations.
“This is a trigger bill. You get triggered, you can sue. You get triggered, you can file complaints,” said Democratic Rep. Michael Grieco of Miami Beach. “I’m a lawyer. The terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ are thrown around left and right at the courthouse. But here the whole thing is subjective.”
Much of what is done in corporate training is stupid, and some of it even is stupid in this specific way. But what business is that of the state government?
The signature of this new style of legislation is that it is designed as a lawsuit factory. Many new bans and restrictions are to be enforced, not by state prosecutors, who can exercise their own discretion about which complaints are worthy of being pursued, but by lawsuits filed by employees or angry parents against anyone they regard as corrupting the youth. (Come to think of it, this is precisely the approach to law that dragged Socrates into the courtroom.) The combination of a vaguely worded statute and an invitation for private citizens to sue is clearly an attempt to create a chilling effect. Corporations and schools will seek to limits the possibility of a lawsuit simply by never saying anything remotely controversial in the first place.
The chief example of this is Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Under the bill, which has been passed and is certain to be signed by grandstanding Florida Governor Ron DeSantis:
Classroom instruction on “sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards,” according to the bill’s language.
However, the legislation does not make clear what is “age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate” because state standards for sexual orientation and gender identity are almost nonexistent for many grades.
The bill has the potential to reach beyond third grade because of its vague language, opponents warn…. The bill would also states that it would prohibit “discussion” about sexual orientation and gender identity “in certain grade levels or in a specified manner.”
What do these vague restrictions mean, exactly? Nobody knows, and that’s why the law’s enforcement mechanism is so important: “Parents could sue a school district if they believe there is a violation of any of these requirements or restrictions.” This follows the model of a (probably unconstitutional) Texas anti-abortion law that allowed for enforcement by private lawsuits, with $10,000 bounties paid to those who file them. As Tim Miller puts it, under the “Don’t Say Gay” law, “the silence will be enforced by Florida Man.”
The name given to a piece of legislation is always an exercise in tendentious branding. As I like to say, eventually every law will just be the called the “Very, Very Good Bill That Everyone Should Vote For Act.” In this case, the Florida bill is called the “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” but it was quickly rebranded as “Don’t Say Gay.” The conservatives’ counter-rebranding is revealing. They have now taken to calling it the “Anti-Grooming Bill.”
This is the revival of an old smear.
“Grooming,” as defined by the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), is “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” As examples, RAINN lists adults encouraging children to keep secrets, or escalating nonsexual contact, like hugging or wrestling into sexual contact. Grooming does not have anything to do with sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s molesters who groom, regardless of whether they’re gay or straight.
Pushaw’s tweet was telling. It dropped any bland pretense of “parental rights in education” and appeared to allude to a much uglier position: that being gay or transgender, or even talking with kids about being gay or transgender, should be considered creepy and wrong.
This is a return to the bad old days of the “no pro homo” laws passed in the 1990s (and still on the books in some states) or even farther back to the 1970s, when Florida voters repealed a law banning discrimination against homosexuals in hiring, with conservative firebrand Anita Bryant claiming “that homosexual teachers might molest pupils or ‘recruit’ them to homosexuality.”
We tend to look at today’s culture war battles in their current context and not to remember their roots in the culture wars of previous generations. I was reminded of this recently when I realized that anti-woke crusader Christopher Rufo got his start at the Discovery Institute, a Christian activist organization founded to campaign for the mandated teaching of creationism in public schools, one of the culture wars of my youth. In the case of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, tolerance for homosexuals generally won out in a previous round of the culture war, and the new laws are an attempt to reverse this, using opposition to “wokeness” as cover.
But there is another, even more ominous precedent: the “gay propaganda” ban imposed in Russia in 2013 on a similar rationale, which was widely hailed by conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who described it as evidence that God is on Vladimir Putin’s side.
Now take one other example: a proposed Missouri anti-abortion law that follows up earlier state restrictions by trying to make it a crime to leave the state to get an abortion elsewhere.
Under Coleman’s measure, anything from driving women across state lines for abortions to internet providers allowing access to certain abortion-related websites would be outlawed. She said St. Louis-area billboards advertising easier-to-get abortions in neighboring Illinois would be banned, too.
And also: “Like a Texas law passed last year, the bill puts enforcement in the hands of residents, who could file lawsuits against those they believe have violated it.” This completes the whiff of an East German style in today’s conservative culture war: recruiting us as informants against our neighbors and erecting walls to keep us from escaping restrictive laws.
So yes, illiberalism is definitely a problem on both sides, and this should be no surprise. “Free speech for me but not for thee” is an old, established attitude. It is a very rare and relatively new achievement to see freedom as a universal principle, applying impartially to all, rather than just a special privilege for one’s own tribe.
Two final links:
One thing that feeds our current illiberalism is the catastrophism and hyperbole of much of our public debate. Each side hypes up the other side’s misdeeds, making them into such an immediate and existential threat that it seems like suicide to entertain any scruples or limitations on their own response. Over at Jeryl Bier’s Pluribus newsletter, I am quoted talking with Jeryl about this problem, including the way in which catastrophism tends “to favor authoritarian solutions, a strongman who will sweep away all resistance to the drastic emergency action that is required.”
Of course, there are real catastrophes, and we are seeing one unfold right now in the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, which raises some questions about when “cancellation” might be warranted. Norms about open debate are not about entertaining literally every idea but about where to draw the lines between censoriousness and self-protection. I argue at Discourse that while some of the current anti-Russian fervor is misplaced—not every random Russian musician or athlete deserves to be ostracized—we do need to isolate the Putin regime, its supporters and hangers-on, and its state-supported media. I conclude:
The comprehensive social ostracism of “cancel culture” is a blunt weapon to be used in the most clear-cut and extreme cases, not lightly and casually, to satisfy a momentary urge to feel superior to others. It should be saved for the truly big evils that unleash mass death—that is, for precisely a case like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
A genuine atrocity like the savage war against civilians going on right now in Mariupol ought to put our own domestic squabbles into some kind of perspective and make us treasure our traditions of liberalism all the more.