The Populist Dilemma on Free Speech and Cancel Culture

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

 

The cancel-culture wars have revealed a lot of ironies and dilemmas. Here is one question that conservatives need to think harder about: Should we defend free speech and free thought as good things in themselves, regardless of their content, or should we focus our energies on defending our own substantive vision of the good?

 

Recall the big debate between populist conservatives and classical-liberal conservatives that was generated by Sohrab Ahmari’s argument with David French about a public library hosting “drag queen story hour.” The notion of a content-neutral defense of speech was a big battleground of that debate. Echoes of a similar debate can be found in the arguments leveled at legal originalists by “common-good” theories of constitutional interpretation, although how we read legal texts raises somewhat distinct questions from how we make more-general arguments about the good society. A component of the current debate about Big Tech and Internet free speech is also about the proper place of content-neutral values as well.

 

At heart, the classical-liberal position is that the freedom of speech is a good thing in and of itself, and therefore that the protection of good and true ideas requires us to extend protection to bad and false ones as well. All things being equal, more speech and more freedom are better. We should trust people to work their way through the marketplace of ideas toward the truth. We should give more space to dissenters in part because they sometimes help us find the truth, and in part because a decent respect for our fellow man should lead us to tolerate people who think differently. We are all freer, and safer, and more polite to each other if we maintain a strong culture of tolerating speech that itself may be ugly and rude. We seek protections for people we disagree with, because we may find ourselves in need of those one day. And because we value persuasion, we are also quicker to forgive those who may have said nasty things in the past that they no longer profess.

 

The populist critique is that classical-liberal conservatism is essentially contentless. In the populist telling, classical liberals are so wrapped up in defending the soapbox that they lose the soap. Conservatives who don’t insist on treating moral and factual truth as superior will, we are told, end up conserving nothing. This is something of a caricature, of course. Few people are so absolutist in their defense of free speech that they believe in no limits at all: You can still go to jail for fraud, be sued for knowing libel, or be fired from a communications job for being bad at communications. And a robust marketplace of ideas is only valuable if there are also people willing and able to sell their own ideas in that marketplace.

 

But are the populists consistent and serious about the worthlessness of the classical-liberal defense of free speech? Is their critique even popular? Consider: The biggest issue that unites and motivates conservative populists right now is the threat of cancel culture to free speech. But if you listen to conservatives around the country, this is by no means just a populist concern; it is broader even than just a conservative concern. Lots of people are worried about the stifling culture of intolerance and deplatforming on the Internet, on campus, and in the workplace. And they frequently frame those concerns in free-speech terms, and in a reaction against the biased and unfair standards applied by the cancelers. The classical-liberal argument is both popular and populist because it resonates with traditional American values and rhetoric. The actual disagreements between the populists and the classical liberals are in many cases much less than meets the eye.

 

Populist pundits fret endlessly about this stuff. But in many cases, when people are threatened with “cancellation,” even their most populist defenders will talk more about the value of free speech than about the substance of any particular idea. The firing of Gina Carano by Disney was just one example of this. Her Twitter feed was full of things that were difficult to defend, and the one that was used as a pretext to fire her was a bad Holocaust analogy. Granted, Carano’s problematic statements had virtually nothing to do with her job, and were no nuttier than the political commentary of scores of left-leaning Hollywood personalities. But the chief defense of Carano was not “everything she said was right and the studio should employ her and fire people who say things that are wrong.”

 

This is even truer when we move from cases of speech that are merely edgy, strident, or insensitive to those in which people are fired or banned from Twitter for, say, having used racial slurs or promoted lunatic conspiracy theories. Over and over, the populist Right defends these people not by defending what they said, but on grounds that sound . . . awfully classically liberal after all.

 

Of course, there are times when defenders of free speech can and should rise to the defense of the targets of cancellation on the merits — as good people, and as good ideas — and not merely defend free speech as an abstract value. Ryan Anderson had a thoughtful article in the Wall Street Journal about this, before Amazon had banned his own scholarly book on transgenderism. Anderson’s argument is that cultural conservatives need to defend their beliefs as true, not just as dissenting opinions deserving of liberty. Those beliefs include: The unborn are biologically distinct humans deserving of the natural rights of all humanity; men and women are biologically distinct genders; the traditional family of one man and one woman united for life has particular and irreplaceable value. As my colleagues Alexandra DeSanctis and Cameron Hilditch both noted in response to Anderson, the classical-liberal defense of these ideas as beliefs worthy of toleration does not need to be exclusive of also defending them as truths. But we first need to defend the right to say these things, as a prerequisite for saying them.

 

Likewise, the defense of bad speech can and should include the context of why the speaker is on balance good, or why a bad element does not spoil a larger good work. Good Dr. Seuss books are still good even if they contain the occasional bad drawing. Historical figures such as Ulysses S. Grant can be defended as good despite flaws. An artist or a scholar who crosses lines sometimes can be criticized without being sacked or disinvited from speaking engagements, not only because we value free engagement, but also because that person is actually bringing something of value to the debate.

 

The value of free speech is more urgent when the truth is being muzzled. But its value does not depend on defending only speech that is true or virtuous. The next time you hear people on the populist Right defend a speaker without defending what they said, you will know they are paying tribute to that classical-liberal principle.