If you’re curious as to what a basket of deplorables looks like in real life, perhaps you should head over to Berkeley next week, where Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and friends will gather for a “festival of free expression” at the University of California campus. Maybe they’ll oblige by arriving in a hot air balloon, to render the metaphor entirely literal.
The fact is, they may not arrive at all: Yiannopoulos, who is helping stage the series of events, has made a point of selecting “everyone who has been prevented from speaking at Berkeley in the last 12 months”. But “prevented” should be taken with a pinch of salt. Anti-immigrant firebrand Coulter, for example, decided of her own accord to cancel an appearance in April after the authorities allocated her a time slot designed to minimise the likelihood of a disturbance. “It’s a sad day for free speech,” she lamented, apparently without irony. This time around, the university administration has complained that deadlines for booking venues have been missed and fees remain unpaid. Yiannopoulos calls it a “coordinated bureaucratic mission to silence conservative voices”. Is it possible that the organisers would like nothing more than for Berkeley to insist on reasonable measures to ensure order, before flouncing off and crying censorship? Surely not.
It’s true that some faculty have called for classes to be cancelled, so that students and staff who want to stay away from the campus will not be penalised if they do so. But is this censorship, or opposition? There is a difference. At the moment, the two are being conflated by those who want to shift the spotlight from the resurgence of the far right to the left’s reaction. Bannon, Coulter and their cohorts face opposition wherever they go, because they advocate policies – such as deportation and discrimination based on religion – that do harm to hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, who have millions of friends prepared to shout about it.
It’s fine to take issue with some of the methods of opposition. Just don’t call this a “crisis of free speech”. None of these individuals have any difficulty at all getting their views across. Steve Bannon was the chief strategist of the most powerful leader in the world. Every Coulter book (In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!; ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole) has been a bestseller. Yiannopoulos, despite recently inflicting on himself the kind of scandal that would have buried most careers, enjoys the continuing support of more than 2 million followers on Facebook.
And yet they weep and gnash their teeth. Students and administrators use “Nazi tactics” to silence Coulter, she claims. “They don’t want free speech, they want to win – it is a fascistic view.” “The greatest risk to the American republic is from the unprecedented assault on free speech,” intones Yiannopoulos. But in the US – and Britain, where spurious complaints about censorship have also surfaced – free speech has never been so secure.
The reason? All citizens have the opportunity to become publishers, and many choose to do so. If the number of soapboxes at Speakers’ Corner in London has dwindled it’s because every corner of the web is a speakers’ paradise. There are fewer bounds on free speech on Twitter than in any real-world space, where insults and threats of violence are much harder to deploy anonymously. Speech is so free on Facebook that it warps out of shape, transformed into fantasy and conspiracy. And then there is the vast hinterland of the internet beyond that, and self-published ebooks and podcasts too.
What is falsely being painted as a row over censorship is in fact one about values. The failure to acknowledge this leads to some rank hypocrisy. In the accusations flung at the left – that it is po-faced and intolerant, that it wants to end a centuries-old tradition of debate in the service of “identity politics” – there is an extraordinary blindness to the restrictions placed on freedom of expression by the right. To take one example: for years prominent Republicans, including the current president pro tempore of the Senate, have been trying to make it illegal to carry out a political attack on a piece of fabric – the stars and stripes. In Britain, defacing the union flag would see you denounced from the front pages of the Sun and the Daily Mail. And there are things the right would rather you didn’t say as well. Try criticising serving members of the armed forces, for instance. These days, even drawing attention to the downsides of Brexit can earn you a rebuke from the leader of the Commons.
No, the nurturing of taboos is not the preserve of the left. Indeed, the patriotism and prudery that regulated society for much of the 20th century were mostly enforced and defended by conservatives. Perhaps the loosening of some of these strictures, from the 1960s onward, allowed us to imagine that we could achieve a world free from any kind of taboo. But that was always a fantasy, one without precedent in human history. There are, necessarily, limits to what we can say and do – a society without taboos would be a rapacious and dangerous one. The question – the battle – is about what we decide to disparage, and what we decide to raise up.
Western civilisation is undergoing a transition from one set of mores to another. Just as with the shifting of tectonic plates, the process is slow and subject to much rumbling. Over the past several decades homosexuality, divorce and sex outside marriage have all become more socially acceptable; overt racism and sexism, far less so. More recently, prejudice against people whose gender expression falls outside the norm is also becoming taboo.
As far as I can see, the direction of travel is not towards a greater number of limits on behaviour, but simply to different ones. And, though there is certainly much to argue about in the detail, these limits seem in general to be more enlightened – less about controlling people, and more about protecting them – than those of the past. The reactionary right paints this shift as a kind of tyranny: the policing of thought, an attempt to curtail hitherto unfettered freedom. But they would do, wouldn’t they, because it is their moral code that is gradually being dismantled.
Yiannopoulos et al’s appeal to free speech is politically astute because it frames this struggle over values as a one-way street, with conservatives merely rushing to the defence of a noble tradition. That can be very persuasive, convincing people across the political spectrum. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s former labour secretary, took the rightwing depiction of Coulter’s cancellation at face value, calling it “a grave mistake”. “Free speech is what universities are all about,” he said. “If universities don’t do everything possible to foster and protect it, they aren’t universities. They’re playpens.”
If academic freedom and students’ exposure to a range of opinions really were imperilled by opposition to a contentious political figure, Reich’s warning would make sense. But they aren’t. The crisis of free speech is a myth that gives cover to those who are either blind to their own attempts at social control, or want to shield them from critique. Don’t fall for it.
