Why conservatives won't save freedom of speech | Hacker News Reader

Why conservatives won't save freedom of speech

thomasprosser.substack.com

Is this really new? It seems subgroups of either side have selectively supported free speech based on whether they agree with the message.

It is new. Historically, the left aggressively defended its opponent’s right to freedom of speech and assembly on the understanding that legalized limits on free speech will ultimately be used against the left more than it will be used against the right.

An often cited American example is the ACLU defending the rights of Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members to speak freely and assemble.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

The real story is that the historical left no longer exists.

> The real story is that the historical left no longer exists.

Is there any left left in the US? From an outsider perspective, the US political scene seems to consist of right and far-right.

What would you consider left?

I don't follow a lot of the smaller proposals, but I believe some of the newer members have some "left" proposals. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be one to google.

I'm not from the US, but I would consider Biden to be a traditional left-liberal. Unfortunately, moderates like Biden seem terrified of radical progressives!

To be fair, I could consider Sanders as a traditional left-liberal.

Sanders is far more left than any government in Europe. His reforms include giving 20% of every public/large company to workers, make 45% of company boards elected by workers, the government will instruct large companies what their long term plans must be and they are legally bound to follow those rather than the owners wishes, companies restructuring their organizations must give even more ownership to the workers who were laid off during the restructure etc.

Those things are much more radical than anything you see in Europe, he isn't left-liberal, he is about as far left you can go without being outright communist. Note that I myself support left-wing liberalism very much, I want public healthcare, strong separation between religion and state, free speech etc, that isn't what makes Sanders far left, it is all the other things he also wants to do.

Everything I mentioned here is all on his homepage: https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-an...

> make 45% of company boards elected by workers

This is already the case in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Not 45%, no. Being a third and being 45% are very different in terms of power. A third means you have a voice but the other part still has twice the seats you have, 45% means you are basically equal to the other part.

Also, if it was just the 45% worker representation on boards and not the other things I'd consider him traditional left. It is a bit further than what you can find in Europe, but not overwhelmingly so, however all those combined is.

> The law allows workers to elect representatives (usually trade union representatives) for almost half of the supervisory board of directors. [..] It applies to public and private companies, so long as there are over 2,000 employees. For companies with 500–2,000 employees, one third of the supervisory board must be elected.

Ok, scratch that part. The other parts still stands. Also, Germany is relatively right wing in many other regards, cherry picking the most left wing part of every European country will still result in something far left of what you see anywhere in Europe.

I don't think most governments in Europe could be considered "left" at all, especially not right now, but most European countries have a quite healthy and significant presence of left-wing parties in their parliaments anyway, while in the US Sanders is on the very extreme end of what Democrats (who can't really be described as left-wing on the whole) have to offer already.

That doesn't apply to every European country though. I live in Poland, where left-wing parties have struggled to enter the parliament for many years now and the main fight happens between liberal right and far right. The US scene, although different in several important aspects, appears somewhat similar in this regard. We also have some individuals in the major liberal right party that could transfer into a left-wing party without raising too many eyebrows.

IIRC, Sanders specifically favors "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics".

I live in a Scandinavian country, we don't look at all like what Sanders proposes. We have high taxes and lots of benefits from the state, but we also don't have many regulations preventing businesses to run their company as they wish and we have plenty of billionaires. Sanders would be far left in my country, not just left.

Cancel culture isn't a pursuit of legalized limits on free speech, it's an expression of free speech. Only conservatives are currently pursuing anything of the sort, by attempting to regulate social media, banning critical race theory, the discussion of gender identity and sexuality, etc.

"Only"

Are they also banning religion/prayer in schools, or firearm education/imagery, etc? After Trump won, I seem to remember a lot of people supporting the idea of managing misinformation on social media. My point is that all sides do it.

No one has banned religion or prayer in schools. The Supreme Court ruled that public schools requiring the practice of a specific religion by students was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as public schools are government entities.

Granted, the campaign to ban coerced prayer in schools was led by a famous atheist activist, Madeline Murray O'Hair, but it's difficult for me to see the Supreme Court as more leftist than conservative in its decision making.

I don't know what "firearm education/imagery" refers to, all I could find was a case of a school banning gun imagery on t-shirts, but nothing about banning firearm education. I'd agree with you that this case seems egregious, but I don't see evidence that leftist ideology in particular is responsible. It's not as if the dress code only banned images of guns on shirts because the school board opposes the Second Amendment.

But even conceding that for the sake of argument - it still pales compared to what the right is attempting currently.

Yes, SCOTUS only did away with state sponsored prayer. However, the implementation of that decision tends to go farther. For example, prayer must be done privately, so most overt prayer is banned. Some schools have/tried banning religious items that would be overt, such as rosaries. So it goes farther than simply banning state sponsored prayer and becomes a 1st Ammendment issue if students are being told they can pray, but must not speak it.

For the gun topic. Some schools removed firearm education from the curriculum and even as an elective. So it's not an outright ban but a defacto one. Even when there is agreement that safety should be taught, there is a lot of debate about using a program designed by gun control groups or gun rights groups. What we also have seen are students getting in trouble for off-campus, non-threatening, lawful use of firearms. These discaplinary events are very egregious, and the schools has no basis for their actions in these cases. The only assumption that can be made is that the people making those decisions politically oppose that to the point that they are ignorant of the laws and overreact.

The issue of gun images is not a second amendment issue, but a first. School dress codes are only allowed to ban general things that would interfere with education. However, guns are usually explicitly called out. Not to mention the display of gun imagery in a manner that doesn't condone violence would not interfere with education.

"it still pales compared to what the right is attempting currently."

What is that?

I have never seen a public school that teaches firearm safety (aside from a coach teaching a marksmanship team), and never heard anyone try to claim (until today) it is some kind of historical core curriculum under siege.

But setting that aside, until recent decades schools were not routinely attacked by gun-wielding misfits, so as that circumstance changed perhaps celebrating gun culture in schools seemed like a poor idea—at least to those who don’t buy the NRA’s gun industry sponsored propaganda that the solution to gun violence is to make sure every fool is carrying one…

I'm curious, how is firearm safety education celebrating gun culture? And how is that linked to school shootings?

It wasn't a major part of any curriculum, but that's similar to D.A.R.E. It was usually (in my experience) a lesson or two on what to do if you came across a gun (and the opposite of celebrating it - don't touch it and leave to tell an adult; although some places let older kids take hunter safety education). But also, many schools (including colleges) used to have marksmanship teams. Many of those have been shutdown over the years. PSU used to have a team. They were regulated out of existence with nonsensical ever increasing demands (like everyone on the team needs to be a certified instructor or range safety officer, when in reality you only need one or two present).

How does carrying firearms fit into this? That generally has nothing to do with firearm safety education in schools. Perhaps this, and the language used, is an indication that this is a highly politicized issue.

God is not real, this is so stupid. No one supports Islamic prayer in school. This is a thinly veiled fox news argument that we should teach kids that Jesus is real and was conceived without semen.

Well, THAT went well...

The balance of power has now changed. Liberal positions are favoured by majorities; conservative positions are favoured by minorities.

Do you mean favored by minorities, or that the conservative position is the minority?

Sorry should have been clearer; conservative positions now tend to be in the minority.

The ACLU is only one segment, just as there are various segments in the other side. There are historical examples of liberals supporting restrictions on free speech going back decades (again, only some segments). For example, forced public sector union dues, various speakers being booed or intimidated to not speak, even school curriculum/speech (firearm education and images). Then there are segments that don't support those groups being able to speak, such as the SPLC.

So I don't really see much difference from historical examples. There are subgroups in both sides that may take opposing stances. To be fair, the historical versions of any party no longer exist. They evolve, that's what they do.

Whichever group seeks to push its values on others via force or compulsion will find a reason to dismiss or vilify freedom of expression and speech. Then all other groups will band together to oppose that first group of would-be tyrants. Claiming that there's something psychologically distinct about one political party or another at an individual level (which goes beyond a mere snapshot or moment in time) is to see them as ideologically driven monoliths, when they are in fact hodgepodge collectives of various interest groups.

Conservatives will support freedom of speech so long as it is a winning strategy politically and they make a cultural space for those seeking to circumvent top down censorship. Blasting this approach as disingenuous is clear cut coping. If liberals want to champion free speech, then let them do so. People are flocking to conservative parties because the ostensibly liberal ones have given them no other option. Don't blame the conservatives, even if you think this is opportunistic. Instead get your own house in order and be glad that oppositional politics provides enough incentives to ensure at least one party will champion the cause for freedom of expression, regardless of the ideological justifications they use to get there.

Yet countless academic studies find psychological differences between conservatives and liberals; see the blog for references.

If I split people along a single axis, I would be able to find all sorts of correlations. Does that pattern hold even as the lines and makeup of political parties change? Believing transient patterns to represent powerful truths is why so many social scientists theories are as temporal as their finding.

The way some people talk these days you'd think that freedom is the freedom to disable the fire alarm and lock the doors in a burning theater. (e.g. climate change and COVID-19 denialism)

"Free speech" is so 1980s. Today it is all about protecting communication channels from spam, disinformation, revenge porn and other forms of coordinated disingenuous communications.

I understand how coordinated disingenuous information is dangerous to society. But censorship of things like hateful speech (short of calls to violence which are illegal for good reason) or political misinformation has historically been abused. Even when we put that power in the hands of a transparent democratic or crowd-sourced non-governmental body we see minority views quashed by associating them with more obviously bad actors. Peer review has shown in the past the problems with letting group think suppress papers we found decades later to be accurate. I think we should use lower barriers to entry and try to create as many information outlets as possible while also using policy to make the economic or political interests behind those information sources more apparent both through financing laws and identification requirements. Free speech is one thing, anonymous free speech is another. Apart from policy, I think we should be more forgiving to those who feel differently on issues, even when we find them very important. I have some racist neighbors, and some that are prejudiced against people of certain (or all) faiths. I still talk with them all, laugh and share a beer with them, and openly disagree with them. I'm not going to try to get them fired, I'm trying to persuade them. And sometimes it works, a little. Technologically I think we have the tools to make following money trails feasible by the public, especially with a few policy changes regarding anonymity, though the scotus has made that much more difficult. If we reject anonymous donations from everyone, that would affect corporations too right? Simce they are people?

arxiv.org and the replication crisis prove peer review is a joke.

It makes my blood boil that when they do a meta analysis in clinical medicine they regularly reject 70% or more of the studies due to fundamental problems such as no control group (that study that failed to find vitamin C in the blood of COVID-19 patients but didn't test anybody else) or insufficient sample sizes.

Studies like that shouldn't be accepted for publication, in fact they shouldn't even get funded.

As long as the so-called “left” is against ideals of individual freedom, the so-called “left” is a complete joke.

Freedom of speech for working people, who have always been subject to the whims of the authoritarian workplace, has never been realized in the United States. Still, abandoning it as an ideal altogether, and nonsensically insisting its passé while inciting a war on “disinformation” in the same breath is utterly terrifying.

Since the “right” is too, we’re just screwed all around.

We didn't start the war against spam, disinformation, revenge porn, etc.

I don’t understand. Who is “we”?

Victims of spam, disinformation, revenge porn.

The silent majority of decent people who don't participate online or participate less because they are driven away by this BS.

Whilst these are undoubted challenges, I also think that there are more traditional challenges to freedom of speech. As majorities within societies have accepted liberal ideas, liberals have become increasingly censorious, threatening the freedom of speech of conservatives.

Majorities have become so tired of disingenuous and untruthful nonsense and rabble-rousing.

Tired is the right adjective. That stuff wears people out.

I'll grant that there is a small army of blog posters who write a blog post every day alleging this. It might even have a kernel of truth.

In that same day my spam filters caught 80 junk emails and I deleted another 20. If you own a cell phone you probably received multiple robocalls and junk texts in that time frame.

The fossil fuel industry has mounted a coordinated attack against our communication infrastructure and intellectual apparatus since the 1980s. to stop or delay a response to human-initiated climate change. If it leads to human extinction this will dwarf every other crime in human history.

So in a time when thousands of blog posts complaining about "cancel culture" get written every day I don't want to hear about it.

I always find it amusing when the people who deify capitalism and claim the freedom of businesses to do whatever they damn well please start telling private businesses what they must or must not allow on their privately developed platforms.

> Psychological factors also underpin attitudes towards freedom of speech. Liberals tend to be more creative and open to new experiences, these attitudes underpinning traditional liberal attitudes towards freedom of speech. If one embraces challenges, diverse viewpoints tend to be less threatening. Conservatives are different, tending to be more fearful; most studies find an association between conservatism and anxieties such as the fear of death. This is unfavourable to freedom of speech; the principle thrives when attitudes are open.

What a simplistic view. Conservatives tend to be less interested in the novel follies of the day.

Also, conservatives don't think one need be a credentialed Biologist to know to which of the two actually existing genders one was born and shall remain until death, irrespective of the latest fashionable thought.

Conservatives increasingly emphasize freedom of speech, but are their arguments genuine?

'Though the attachment of some conservatives to freedom of speech is genuine, often reflecting Burkean elements of conservatism, I worry that conservative support for freedom of speech has weak foundations, many conservatives wielding the principle as a weapon against outgroups.'

The overdogs always censor, because they can, and the underdogs always fight for freedom of speech, because they must.

I don't think their colors matter.

Completely agree

Conservatives have embraced a campaign against "cancel culture" because it's one of the few things they offer that sells. However they are hot to ban "critical race theory" even though they struggle to define it.

Cancel culture itself, paradoxically, being exercise of free expression (vocal disapproval of socially repugnant things), suggests that perhaps claiming persecution is an authoritarian, anti-free-speech position.

Ultimately most people are anti-free expression of some kind. Very few are actually ideologically opposed to censorship (public or private) of things they find unconscionable.

Free-expression cultism expands like a gas.

It's one thing to have a constitutional amendment that forbids jailing somebody because the government doesn't like what they say.

It's another thing to say that somebody has to provide you with a free printing press, that people have to read it, that communities can't protect themselves from harmful communications, etc.

Where does it stop?

Several times a week I flag a discussion on HN where somebody leads with how grievously wounded they feel because somebody downvoted their post. Free speech fetishism turns into a sense of entitlement that people are forced to not just read their dreck but we can't express disapproval of it. When are we going to be forced to grin and clap like idiots to appease their narcissism?

I think it is now safe to assume knowledge of xkcd 1357 at this point.

Private censorship is still censorship and it is still powerful, otherwise Google and Facebook wouldn't wield it as often as they do (often at the explicit legal behest of the states in which they operate).

Yes, the legal restrictions against critical race theory are very hypocritical

It's misguided, since it's not really being taught to begin with. But both sides support restrictions on curriculum, and speech in schools. So I guess we're all just hypocrites.

There is a finite amount of time in the school day so adding something to the curriculum means something gets removed somewhere else.

(Fundamentally there is the problem of "freedom from" and "freedom to". If the people get spammed with the equivalent of bread and circuses it doesn't matter at all that a few people can speak to the wind about important things.)

So should other things people in general disagree with be allowed in schools? Let's say advocacy for racism, discrimination and genocide? After all those should be free under free speech.

What is taught in schools has nothing to do with free speech. Actually let me rephrase that. A teacher doesn't have free speech in school, just like no one has free speech in the job. A teacher should yeah the school's curriculum. If a private school wanted to reach what you are proposing, it works be their right. But a probiotic school shouldn't be teaching that.

Of course you’re right that conservatives can’t define ‘critical race theory’. Almost nobody can, but regardless Freedom of speech and public school curriculum constitute entirely different political questions.

"The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." ~Ibram X. Kendi

Considering Kendi is the most well known of the "Critical Race" theorists, I think it's fair to say the above quote encapsulates the underlying goal of Critical Race Theory. This also explains why all of their "remedies" seem to center around racial preferences, and other forms of racial discrimination.

If people want to learn how to be a racist on their own time, that's on them. Teaching that shit in school is no bueno.

>The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination." ~Ibram X. Kendi

If you want to criticize CRT, fair enough, but the actual quote is "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination." If you can't (or don't even care to) get the quote right, it seems as if you're not arguing from a position of good faith.

Here's another quote to consider, which gives some of the necessary context for the one you posted:

    “The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.”

Also, regarding discrimination specifically:

    “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”

It becomes pretty clear if you look into what CRT proponents actually say, beyond a single pithy misquote, that their "underlying goal" isn't racism. Their claim is that we're already living in a discriminatory system in which the only way to achieve equity is discrimination against that existing bias in the system.

>but the actual quote is "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination."

False - "Kendi is an open advocate for race-based discrimination, arguing that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” https://nypost.com/2021/07/22/ibram-x-kendi-is-the-false-pro...

>Their claim is that we're already living in a discriminatory system in which the only way to achieve equity is discrimination against that existing bias in the system.

You can't discriminate against bias. You're right that they support the concept of using discrimination to achieve equity though. That is literally the whole point.

>False - "Kendi is an open advocate for race-based discrimination, arguing that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”

My quote is verbatim from the actual book. Your quote comes directly afterward so apparently we're both correct, but you taking a single sentence out of context and presenting it as a complete quote is still disingenuous. You didn't even try to find a neutral source to back up your quote.

I strongly suspect we're talking past one another and I think it's best to end this conversation here.

>You didn't even try to find a neutral source to back up your quote.

It's from Kendi's own writings. It's a direct quote. And you claimed I made it up. Now that you know he said, I'm guessing you still don't care how racist CRT is.

Also, while Ibram X. Kendi might use CRT for his researchs (most historians do, even those that coulb be classed "right-wing" like Furetians in France), i don't think CRT have anything to do with these quotes.

CRT, from what i've understood, is used in history to take into consideration racial interactions before trying to emit hypothesis from a text or from objects.

Critical theory is basically saying "hey other humanities, our field (sociology) is very helpfull to help you decipher weirds thing from the past!" At least that's what i understood from the lecture i got like ten years ago (eleven actually). It is also present in science history, and i guess in law studies (not sure about that).

My pet theory: CRT really took off in the US because you are less able/willing to talk about class and the spectacle of race is quite easy to find and understand, while hiding other issues.

I don't see how supporting freedom of speech can be a "weapon against outgroups". Perhaps he refers to incidents where censorship was sold under the wrong label, "War is Peace" bullshit has a long, bipartisan history after all.

The support of freedom of speech by conservatives is both selective, largely limited to issues they feel oppressed on, and temporary, likely to be dropped as soon as they have the upper hand.

Liberalism has freedom of speech as a core principle but liberals are now treated as hostile not only by conservatives but also the illiberal left.

Agreed - traditional liberalism is being squeezed and it's a tremendous challenge for liberal democracy.

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