Why Free Speech Must be at the Heart of the Political Restoration
And also, the best argument we can use to support it
Restoring free speech is perhaps the most important part of the political restoration that I envision. This article will explain why free speech is so important, and provide a philosophical justification for why, and how, it should be safeguarded.
In the second half of the 2010s, as incidents of cancel culture ramped up rapidly across the West, and anti-free speech philosophical theories appeared to get some mainstream traction, a new free speech movement arose in response. While there was only mixed results when it came to defending free speech itself, there was at least a revival in interest in classical liberal values, which I thought would be sustained for at least a generation. Sadly, it appears that the 2010s free speech movement has fizzled out rapidly. You don’t hear much about the importance of free speech these days, except from a handful of dedicated activists like myself.
Surprisingly and sadly, some who supported the free speech movement in the 2010s have turned to an authoritarian-right politics that includes bans on everything from controversial books to drag queens. Elon Musk’s supposedly pro-free speech takeover of Twitter has been disappointing, with the platform now so full of open racists, conspiracy theories and culture war stuff that it is arguably worse for rational discourse than before (which I didn’t imagine was even possible a year ago). Musk himself also turned out to be no better than the previous people in charge of Twitter: for example, he declared that the word ‘cisgender’ would be treated as a slur on Twitter. While I don’t use that word personally because of its controversial connotations, this still represents censorship on behalf of one side of the culture wars. It just shows that Musk is not above meddling in the marketplace of ideas either. Meanwhile, some people (who I will not name), who used to defend free speech all the time, have now become very friendly with the ‘postliberal’ authoritarians associated with MAGA, while trusting Trump to do ‘whatever it takes’ to ‘crush wokeness’, and accordingly, they never seem to discuss free speech anymore. Instead of defending classical liberal values, they now blame these values for giving rise to ‘wokeism’, against all reasonable logic. Sometimes, it seems that very few people are truly dedicated to free speech these days.
Having thought about all this for a while, I now think that the 2010s free speech movement stalled because something was missing: we were good at defending free speech and opposing cancel culture. But we weren’t putting enough effort into arguing why free speech is necessary. The necessity of free speech is inherently linked to the marketplace of ideas. The reason we need to support free speech and oppose cancel culture is because we want all ideas to get a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas, so the most sound ideas can win out. If this is the vision we are committed to, then we would also recognize that we need to have good speech too. What I mean by good speech is speech that is delivered in a good faith attempt to get to the truth, rather than to score culture war points, promote the interests of political parties or particular politicians, or simply to ‘troll’ your enemies. I think we can all agree that blatant racism, ‘triggering’ your opponents, and deliberately selecting stories to create a biased perception about particular issues aren’t examples of good speech, at the very minimum. Sadly, I’m seeing way too much of this kind of speech in so-called anti-woke circles lately. If we truly believe in a healthy and functional marketplace of ideas, I think we need to call out such bad faith speech when we see it, to halt and prevent its proliferation. If we allow this bad faith speech to grow unchecked, it will poison the marketplace of ideas, no less than cancel culture and censorship.
I now want to focus on bad speech in the service of culture war purposes in particular. I think an important thing we need to stress is that free speech must be above the culture wars. The example from Twitter cited above is a good example of the ridiculous things that can happen when free speech is not placed above the culture wars. In the 2010s some on the political right attempted to place free speech within the culture wars, and in hindsight we should have much more strongly resisted this move. Seeing free speech not as a universal value but as a culture war weapon is what has led to the kind of hypocrisy we now see among right-wing culture warriors, where it is not OK to de-platform their favorite speakers, but it is good to de-platform books they don’t like, drag queens, Bud Light ads, and the Pride section in Target. People with this kind of attitude are no better than the cancel culture activists on the left, and they should never have been welcomed into the free speech movement in the first place. I apologize on behalf of the whole movement for having been too lenient on them back in the 2010s. Going forward, the free speech movement must be impartial and dedicated to a fair marketplace of ideas, and it can only be that way if it remains above all culture war politics, and left vs right politics more generally.
As classical liberals and moderates, we believe in the importance of having a functioning and healthy marketplace of ideas. Our commitment to free speech, free debate, and freedom of action as long as it does not harm other people, are all basically rooted in our commitment to the marketplace of ideas. The reason we believe in the marketplace of ideas is because we don’t believe any one individual or group of people can have all the best solutions for the problems we face. In fact, this is almost impossible, because of the complexity of the problems themselves. No individual or group can have all the information they need to solve everything effectively. Besides, even if they have all the information, there is no guarantee that they would come up with the best solutions. Life is a process of trial and error, and allowing competing views and solutions to play out is the only way we can know which ones are more sound.
Another important function of the marketplace of ideas is the negotiation, remixing and sometimes even fusion of ideas and solutions. The best ideas and the most effective solutions are often the result of compromise or fusion. Free debate in the marketplace of ideas allows this process to happen, as long as there is plenty of room for rational and respectful debate. This is why the polarization, division and echo chambers that have characterized the past decade should be a major concern for any true liberal.
In contrast to liberals, neither the illiberal Left nor the illiberal Right have any time for the marketplace of ideas. It is from this that they reject things like free speech. What the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right have in common is that they don’t see, or rather refuse to see, the complexity of our problems, the vast amount of factors that interplay in various issues, and the fact that life is often a trial and error process. This is why they believe their simple solutions will magically work to resolve everything. For the illiberal Left, the magic solution is blindly opposing and deconstructing all aspects of the status quo, and remaking society using their theories. For the illiberal Right, the magic solution is to force society to return to a previous state, even if at the cost of trampling on freedom, democracy, and long standing standards of decency and compassion. There is no reason to expect these all-encompassing solutions to work well at all, but the fact that they haven’t been tried yet seem to be enough justification for keeping the faith in both cases.
The problem with the attitude of both the illiberal Left and the illiberal Right is that they don’t seem to have any use for historical lessons, rationality or logic. While rational thinking would demonstrate the errors in their way of thinking, and history also provides plenty of evidence against their views, for the illiberal faithful, all this don’t seem to be able to penetrate their worldview. Therefore, what they have is actually blind faith. It is blind faith, rooted in a kind of reality-defying romanticism, that is sustaining the current surge of illiberalism in the West. I believe that, the more we point this out, the sooner people can wake up from this.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.
One thing with culture wars is that at the end there are no winners, only loosers. Plus that it ends up in 50 shades of collectivism