Is Free Speech in the U.S. in Death Throes?

By Jorm S @ Shutterstock.com

Daniel Henninger of the WSJ does not think that free speech is dead. Yet. But it certainly is in need of active defending, he maintains.

Aware of the natural tendency of factions and majorities to want to suppress opposition opinion, the Founders created a Bill of Rights for all citizens, including what they called, with unmistakable clarity, “the freedom of speech.”

In the U.S., the pre-liberal idea of settling disagreements with coercion has made a comeback today. This past week, editors of three privately owned publications – NYT, Bon Appetit, and the young women’s website Refinery 29 – have been forced out by the staff and owners of their publications for “writings at odds with the beliefs of the current protests,” explains Mr. Henninger.

It is impossible not to recognize the irony of these events. The silencers aren’t campus protesters but professional journalists, a class of American workers who for nearly 250 years have had a constitutionally protected and court-enforced ability to say just about anything they want. Historically, people have been attracted to American journalism because it was the freest imaginable place to work for determined, often quirky individualists. Suddenly, it looks like the opposite of that.

“Buildings Matter, Too”

The idea that you could actually lose your job, as the Inquirer’s editor did, because of a headline on an opinion piece that said “Buildings Matter, Too” is something to ponder. It sounds like a made-up incident that one might expect in a work of political satire, such as George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

“The Withdrawal of Tolerance”

The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse argued in 1965 that some ideas were so repugnant, which he identified as “from the Right,” that it was one’s obligation to suppress them with what he called “the withdrawal of tolerance.” Marcuse is a saint on the American left.

Sidestepping the Supreme Court

The ingeniousness of this strategy of suppression and shaming is that it sidesteps the Supreme Court’s long history of defending opinion that is unpopular, such as its 1977 decision that vindicated the free-speech rights of neo-Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Ill. But if people have shut themselves up, as they are doing now, there is no speech, and so there is “no problem.”