Free speech is under attack all over

From nutty defamation verdicts to federal warnings about "misinformation," from French efforts to criminalize vaccine criticism to Germany's political crackdown, democracies no longer want debate.

(FIRST IN AN OCCASIONAL SERIES)

In 1941, as the United States neared war with Germany and Japan, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listed the “Four Freedoms” vital to life - and offered “freedom of speech” as the first freedom, even before “freedom from fear.”

Roosevelt’s stirring words were part of a centuries-long American tradition of protecting free speech - a tradition the United States spread globally. Free speech became a core value, a way for democracies to set themselves apart from dictatorships.

No more.

Democratic societies suddenly seem to have forgotten the value of speech and debate. Elites inside and outside government lash out against “misinformation” — a word they can rarely if ever define — and demand measures against it. Most stunningly, the media itself now regularly demands that speech be suppressed.

The reasons why are complex, but the heart of the crisis seems to be that the elite institutions have lost confidence in their ability not just to win arguments but to set the underlying rules for them.

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(Free speech is under attack. Help me defend it, for 20 cents a day.)

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In the 1990s, a Michigan conservative thinker named Joseph Overton articulated the idea that political outcomes exist in an acceptable window of possibility.

A candidate who advocated a preemptive nuclear strike on China wouldn’t have a chance at winning. Neither would one who advocated demobilizing the American military.

In general, the arguments fall on a narrower spectrum - should the defense budget be held flat, or increased 10 percent? Should the United States expand its forces in space, or work to strengthen treaties to keep space free of weapons?

Like most good theories, this theory is intuitively obvious once it has been explained. After Overton died in a plane crash in 2003, it became known as the Overton window, giving him a prominence in death he had never enjoyed in life.

Big, quick shifts in Overton windows can and do happen - often either after an outside shock or with a lot of societal discomfort or both. (In other cases, such as the growing acceptance of legalized cannabis and other recreational drugs, the shift comes more slowly and quietly, the result of well-organized and -funded pressure campaigns.)

But for the most part, the elites set the boundaries of acceptable discourse - the edges of the Overton windows.

I myself ran have now seen firsthand what happens to anyone with a voice who dares to stand outside an elite-set policy measure too strongly. At first, if you are considered reasonable, friends encourage you to reconsider. Those appeals rapidly morph into full-on attacks. Then then, if you persist, the attacks turn into a kind of eyes-averted disgust, an unwillingness to engage at all. As someone wrote me recently:

I hope I did not seem cavalier when I mentioned that I first discovered you on Twitter and tried to figure out if you were a reliable source or a crazed right wing conspiracist in the early lockdown days.

Turns out, for the purposes of Covid public policy and then mRNAs, I was both.

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(You were here. You remember.)

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This is why Donald Trump, and his electoral success, has come as such a shock to the elites of both parties. Stylistically, Trump has always been unacceptable - gaudy, obnoxious, vulgar, a poor man’s idea of a rich man. (I will confess to this snobbery too.)

But now Trump is pushing major policy changes that are well outside the Overton window - potentially blowing up NATO, for example, or sharply tightening immigration rules. Immigration in particular is an issue where the elites have tried hard to shape a consensus which Trump is threatening to upend. They simply cannot conceive that he would go so far as to send people who have no right to be in the United States back to their home countries.

And so when the Washington Post writes that Trump wants “mass deportations,” it does not understand that although it may find his position as unfathomable as a preemptive nuclear strike, much of the country agrees with him.

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The elites control the vast majority of the media, all of academia, and the White House for 11 of the last 15 years. Technology and social media giants are largely sympathetic to their causes. Yet despite their power, they have not only failed to destroy Trump, they seem to have made him a more viable candidate than ever since 2021.

In their fury at their inability to dominate the debate on important issues, to close the Overton window, the elites have moved to Plan B, shutting out (or down) disfavored speakers and views.

These attacks take different forms, but they all are aimed at the same outcome, reducing protections for speech and raising the legal, financial, and in some cases criminal risks to the speaker.

So I think it’s important to look at these various attacks as what they are - skirmishes in a broader war on what until quite recently was viewed as a basic democratic right, the chance to speak freely, to make one’s case in the marketplace of ideas, for better or worse.

Starting with the bizarre defamation verdict earlier this month against two writers who had criticized a climate change scientist, I hope to return to the topic regularly, trying to put individual cases and events - sometimes in different countries - in context.

Let’s just hope Substack doesn’t get shut down, or lose its nerve.

I’m kidding.

Mostly.