By Noah Daponte-Smith
Friday, July 21, 2017
Sometimes in the course of our political life, someone
proposes something so mind-bogglingly stupid that it’s hard to know exactly
what to say about it. Senate Bill 720 is one of those things.
Over the past few years, a small but prominent movement
has cropped up, using the age-old tactic of boycott to protest what it sees as
Israel’s unjust occupation of territories that are assumed to belong rightfully
to the Palestinians. Called “BDS” (boycott, divest, sanction) after the
strategy it employs against the state of Israel and goods produced therein, it
has acquired a certain notoriety on college campuses, not least for its
uncomfortable associations with veritable anti-Semites.
Israel’s supporters in the Senate, justifiably seeing
this as a problem, have come up with an innovative solution: Make participation
in BDS or other boycotts of Israel a felony, punishable by enormous fines and
up to two decades in prison. The Israel Anti-Boycott Act enjoys remarkable
bipartisan support: It’s not often you can get Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse to sign
onto a measure alongside Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. Its proponents
number 43 in the Senate and 234 in the House.
The American Civil Liberties Union opposes it. “This bill
would impose civil and criminal punishment on individuals solely because of
their political beliefs about Israel and its polices,” the organization writes
in a letter to senators. The thrust of its criticism is simple. Many companies
and individuals conduct no transactions with Israel, for lack of a need to; the
bill would make illegal such an action only if it bears a political motivation.
The bill therefore penalizes political beliefs and so is both unconstitutional
and unconscionable.
This is correct, and we should be pleased that the ACLU
has taken a break from mind-numbing Resistance-focused anti-Trump litigation
and has rediscovered the meaning of the “civil liberties” so prominent in its
name. This proposed legislation is indeed unconstitutional and unconscionable,
an abridgment of the right to free speech, which is quasi-sacred in American
life and enshrined in the founding document of our government. The senators who
currently support it should be, quite frankly, ashamed of themselves; they have
lost sight of one of the founding principles of American government, allowing
it to be overshadowed by the spectral world of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute.
This condemnation will, I would hope, suffice for those
on the Left whose first instinct, on hearing the news of the bill’s
consideration, was to ask somewhat sardonically when the ostensible right-wing
defenders of free speech would profess their opposition to the bill. Sean McElwee
wrote on Twitter: “I expect our valiant campus speech warriors will stay
silent.” From The New Republic’s Jeet
Heer: “It’s interesting how silent free speech absolutists are when attack is
not on campus but from Senate.”
This point, now made rotely on the left, is meant to
insinuate that those on the center and Right who care deeply about the state of
free speech on campus — Conor Friedersdorf, Nicholas Christakis, Jonathan
Chait, even some at National Review —
are in fact nothing but reactionaries dishonestly appropriating the “free
speech” argument to keep the boots of the rich, white, and powerful stamped
down upon the backs of leftist agitators.
This is, of course, total bunk. A significant number of
prominent supporters of campus free speech have also expressed opposition to
the Senate bill. Nicholas Christakis has; Jonathan Chait has; Yair Rosenberg
has; Walter Olson has. The hypocrites whom those on the left desperately wish
their opponents to be have not materialized; they are, by and large, a highly
principled bunch.
Such is exactly how most debates over free speech have
played out recently. Consider the case of Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at
Essex County College who was fired after making controversial comments on Fox
News. Leftists jumped on the apparent lack of outcry as prima facie proof of
conservative hypocrisy on the subject: Conservatives care only when it’s one of
their own facing opprobrium. One commentator wrote:
In contrast to other free
speech-related controversies on college campuses, there has been almost no
media coverage of Durden’s ouster. That omission is part of a pattern: When
wealthy, right-wing speakers encounter protest, the tendency among both
right-wing and centrist writers is to scold “snowflake” students while
dutifully preaching the virtues of diverse ideas in a college education, no
matter how outré or dangerous those ideas may be. When marginalized faculty,
often women of color, encounter professional censure, the same centrist writers
say nothing. Once could almost conclude that the “PC-run-amok” and “trigger
warning” controversies exist solely to reaffirm existing power dynamics. It’s
not really about free speech on campus at all.
And, yes, when it comes to Mike Cernovich and Milo
Yiannopoulos or Tomi Lahren, that’s more or less correct; they really are
distasteful hypocrites who care not one bit about free speech and who use the
principle instead to advance their particular cause. They are of the new breed
of conservatism that views its primary goal as melting special snowflakes and
doesn’t give much of a damn about anything beyond that. But we knew that
already; we’ve always known they’re unprincipled actors seeking only to
aggrandize themselves. Their silence on Lisa Durden tells us nothing new or
interesting about their character. Their place in the intellectual debate over
free speech is marginal in any case, and what really matters is not what they
think but what the more rational, principled minds of the Right and center say.
From them we might be able to glean whether the defense of free speech is
something truly principled or is just a veil for contemptible beliefs.
From them we hear a near-universal condemnation of
Durden’s firing. Jonathan Haidt of Heterodox Academy, a centrist talisman for
the free-speech cause, wrote that “in 2017, it’s clear that the threat profile
is now bipartisan.” Jonathan Marks, a conservative, said, “I am no fan of Lisa
Durden. . . . Yet it is precisely as an academic conservative that I must say,
to coin a phrase, ‘I’m with her.’” Similar reactions could be found across the
span, from right to center, of defenders of free speech. Again, the supposed
hypocrites were not what they were presumed to be.
As goes the debate over free speech, so drifts the
broader current in our public sphere. Over and over again, it seems, we care
more about scoring partisan points in the eternal shouting chamber of Twitter
than we do about achieving concrete change in the tangible conditions of
everyday life. Rank partisanship has allowed us to rest quite content with
having uncovered hypocrisy on the other side. This tactic is nothing but a
cheap cop-out. We blissfully avoid all the difficulties of a serious debate
that challenges our intellectual precepts. It is possibly the least edifying,
most counterproductive way to run a civil society. It only heightens the
tensions already latent in our partisan system. It distracts us from the
content and merits of the issue at hand.
I’ve focused on the Left so far, but I don’t mean to
suggest that this phenomenon occurs only there. It’s prominent enough on the
right as well — publications like The
Federalist specialize in a sort of “Obama did it too!” smarminess, always
allowing them to the elide the actual issue at hand. Through this strategy,
they decline to express an opinion on the content of the actual matter, instead
directing their ire at the Left. This is a convenient way to avoid being
trapped in the contradictions and convulsions of the Trump administration, but
it’s a terrible way to run a public sphere in a democratic society.
What, then, is a reasonable path forward? Besides taking
a Luddite approach to Twitter — a remarkably poor platform for any sort of
reasoned and constructive discussion, prone more to aggravation than to
conciliation — the world might be a substantially better place if we simply
decided to step away from the partisan register in which we conduct our
debates. Stop thinking about what the other side thinks, at least for a while.
Start looking more critically, with a more penetrating eye, at what you and
your side think. Otherwise the cycle of finger-pointing will do little but
deepen, and our public sphere become all the more barren.
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