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It was the Alien and Sedition act and closely tied to a fear of foreigners, and of national collapse in general, before the country had had time to gel. You can
by idlewords 6y ago
It was the Alien and Sedition act and closely tied to a fear of foreigners, and of national collapse in general, before the country had had time to gel. You can squint and hold it up to the light and see it as a principled diagreement over free expression, but that's pretty ahistorical.
The important point here is that limits on speech and free expression in American discourse have traditionally gone hand in hand with a fear of foreign influence. If anything, that gives more of a moral edge to the argument over free speech, not less.
- tptacek 6y agoYeah, I'm referring specifically to the Sedition Act of 1798 (one of 4 "A&S" acts), which was not principally used against foreigners --- and, in fact, was exploited by its opponents (notably Jefferson) to persecute political adversaries. "Are we bound hand and foot that we must be witnesses to these deadly thrusts at our liberty?" (The thrusts were words on paper.) "Are these approaches to revolution and Jacobinic domination to be observed with the eye of meek submission? No, sir, they are indeed terrible; they are calculated to freeze the very blood in our veins. Such liberty of the press and of opinion is calculated to destroy all confidence between man and man." The target of this speech, by a proponent of the Sedition act, was Benjamin Franklin Bache, a printer and native son of Pennsylvania. My point is just that I'm deeply skeptical of moral principles encoded in the Constitution. I think it's a good system, a set of functional and useful institutions, not something I would want to fuck with, &c. Maybe not my moral north star, though.