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Disclaimer: I am not a US citizen or resident, and I am only idly pontificating. As I see it, free speech is – and has always been – one of the simple rallying

by teddyh 3y ago

Disclaimer: I am not a US citizen or resident, and I am only idly pontificating. As I see it, free speech is – and has always been – one of the simple rallying calls of the underdog, and has therefore not really been part of older civilizations, and those civilizations which are still ruled by the same old class/rules/traditions still do not emphasize free speech as something important. But I think most countries at some point had a somewhat clean divide where older traditional regimes gave way to modern more-or-less democratic ones, and since the democratic factions were the underdogs, free speech was incorporated into the new founding principles of those countries. This was especially clear in the USA, but has evolved further there. The conservative US citizens – the “right” – have, since then, had free speech as one of their Important Core Tenets, and since they were in power for much of US history, it was cemented. Especially, since the opposition, the “left” (being the underdog) also liked free speech (since they want to criticize the ruling powers), free speech was a very popular and politically safe position for everybody, no matter what side. (This can be contrasted to other countries where a democratic revolution has happened, but where free speech was not (for whatever reason) very strongly incorporated into its new founding principles. This allowed conservatives of those countries to mostly be skeptical of free speech, and the oppositions being only mostly in favor of it.) But something odd then happened in the US. The left, having been pushed too far by something or other (Trump being the usual cited example), began to reason that since the “right” had free speech as a value, the “left” were free to oppose it. This is where I believe the new trend of what has been called “cancel culture” comes from. The “right”, seeing this, and since the ”right” was in power (de jure or de facto), saw no reason to keep free speech as a core value, since free speech is, as I said, mostly a tool for the underdog. Therefore, US “right” also began dropping free speech as a core value. And therefore nobody in the US today really values free speech. This is a complete reversal from the US of some – not very long – time ago. Another way to view this is that both the “right” and the “left” today have changed from seeing themselves as underdogs, and now see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed rulers” (to paraphrase a famous saying commonly attributed to John Steinbeck), and so both sides feel free to call for censorship, believing that they will never (at least for long) be on the losing side. (Some ”right”-minded people try to square the incongruity (of still having free speech as a written core value) by painting themselves as underdogs, thus allowing themselves to value free speech. But since the ”right” are also conservatives, which by definition stands for old traditional power, this rarely looks plausible. The “left”-minded people who do the same merely look old-fashioned, but those people are not very influential anymore.)

Georgelemental 3y ago
> But something odd then happened in the US. The left, having been pushed too far by something or other (Trump being the usual cited example), began to reason that since the “right” had free speech as a value, the “left” were free to oppose it. This is where I believe the new trend of what has been called “cancel culture” comes from. Left-wing intolerance in the United States became more publicly prominent after the 2016 elections, but its roots are far older. A full accounting can be found in the books "America's Cultural Revolution" (Christopher Rufo, 2023) and "The Origins of Woke" (Richard Hanania, 2023), but the TLDR is: The most extreme, intolerant, and revolutionary fringes of the 60s civil rights movement (Angela Davis et al.) completely failed in the end to achieve their goals of violent overthrow of the government. So instead, they pivoted to taking control of institutions, like university and government bureaucracies. They were greatly aided in doing so by civil rights law; specifically, by activist judges and bureaucrats who twisted the laws that Congress passed, so that every major corporation, university, and government department lived in constant fear of being sued for "disparate impact" or "hostile workplace environment." It turns out, that instituting speech codes and hiring the radicals into your HR department is a great way to ward off the lawsuits (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-...). So free speech lost in the institutions, and only then came under threat in the town square.

by teddyh 3y ago

Georgelemental 3y ago

> But something odd then happened in the US. The left, having been pushed too far by something or other (Trump being the usual cited example), began to reason that since the “right” had free speech as a value, the “left” were free to oppose it. This is where I believe the new trend of what has been called “cancel culture” comes from. Left-wing intolerance in the United States became more publicly prominent after the 2016 elections, but its roots are far older. A full accounting can be found in the books "America's Cultural Revolution" (Christopher Rufo, 2023) and "The Origins of Woke" (Richard Hanania, 2023), but the TLDR is: The most extreme, intolerant, and revolutionary fringes of the 60s civil rights movement (Angela Davis et al.) completely failed in the end to achieve their goals of violent overthrow of the government. So instead, they pivoted to taking control of institutions, like university and government bureaucracies. They were greatly aided in doing so by civil rights law; specifically, by activist judges and bureaucrats who twisted the laws that Congress passed, so that every major corporation, university, and government department lived in constant fear of being sued for "disparate impact" or "hostile workplace environment." It turns out, that instituting speech codes and hiring the radicals into your HR department is a great way to ward off the lawsuits (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-the-case https://www.richardhanania.com/p/wokeness-as-saddam-statues-...). So free speech lost in the institutions, and only then came under threat in the town square.