The Left Is the Free Speech Party Now

The height of the George W. Bush presidency was a hell of a time to be a free speech warrior. One iconic moment among many instances of self-satire during that Administration was how then-Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department ordered that a decades old bare-breasted statue of Justice be covered up with a drape. It was a perfect summary of a “family values”-driven administration determined to tell Americans how to live, all while silencing both dissent and anything that seemed to offend them. 

It certainly did little for their popularity. The political left made great hay of such incidents in years to come, in no small measure because it’s easy to gain popularity by appearing to say the unsayable and traffic in the forbidden. It’s an age-old impulse that has a special resonance in democratic politics, riven as it is by debates on speech and its impacts. 

Which brings us to this perilous moment, where the US government is exercising a truly extraordinary amount of coercive power over speech. It is not “soft power,” as right-wing podcaster and unpaid FCC spokesman Benny Johnson would have it, but the simple exercise of a government’s authoritarian capacities, using threats, regulatory coercion, and the never-more-aptly-named bully pulpit.

The crusade against disfavoured speech is clear, led not by a grassroots movement, but by well-connected, powerful people eagerly donning the vestments of hard institutional power like children playing dress up in mommy’s uniform. From a professor fired in Texas for teaching that sex and gender were different things, to Jimmy Kimmel, to the attempted silencing of pro-Palestinian protesters, to assaults on F-1 visa students who exercise the freedoms that liberal education prepares them for, to promises by the Attorney General to crack down on “hate speech” by protesters, to the most powerful people in the land trying to go after an Office Depot employee for refusing to print something, to the Heritage Foundation telling the FBI to go after any transgender person who publicly argues that the Trump Administration threatens our existence, the danger is clear.

And yet it’s precisely the exercise of that power, the sweep of its ambitions, the Olympian perch from which Trump’s minions flail their stolen thunder, that might prove to be their undoing.

The danger of this moment cannot be overstated. But where there is danger, there is also always opportunity.

One of the undeniable challenges faced by the whole left spectrum over the past decade is the stench of censoriousness that began to hang over it all—liberal, socialist, communist, progressive, social justice, the label didn’t matter—only the idea that we had become the Establishment telling people what to do and what to think. More importantly, we were seen to be telling people what not to think.

“Seen to be” is the operative phrase here. As with far too much in politics, factual reality didn’t matter so much as the stickiness of perception, and the “wokescold” censor stereotype clung to the left like molasses. That perception hardened each time someone, however deservedly, experienced consequences or accountability for, say, episodes of public bigotry or sexual harassment.

The result was a years-long moral panic, fuelled by influential epistemic elites sprinkled throughout the very establishment that perceived itself to be under siege from the ‘woke.’ This was how the real damage was done; elites talking to each other, blowing smoke that portended a raging fire and making great hay out of any episode of a conservative being criticised for bigotry or experiencing professional consequences for it. 

It is something that right-wingers are gleefully crowing about now, however unwisely—for instance, Matt Walsh tweeting, “These are the repercussions that conservatives have been experiencing for years for infractions not nearly as egregious. Good.” The obvious lust for revenge betrays the game here: a yearning to harm their enemies using any means necessary. But that libidinal pleasure of ‘owning the libs’ that now passes for modern conservatism is going to become more costly for them as time wears on.

The cackling enthusiasm behind every right-wing influencer’s “now it’s your turn” illustrates how blind they are to a simple fact: it was the perception of this sort of behaviour on the part of the left that helped Trumpist Republicans win power. But, having won this battle, they may yet lose the larger war as Trump and his cadre seek to turn these influencers into the 21^st Century equivalent of state media.

What was dogging the left throughout the late 2010s was the perception that they’d become an Establishment wielding cultural power to silence disfavoured views—a perception eagerly aided by many in the press who were all too eager to debate the experimental discourse of college students and random social media users. It’s how every twitch and moan of university protesters or trans catgirls on Twitter became the obsession of the New York Times and Atlantic cocktail set of sinecured columnists, after all, and why leftist protests on Ivy League campuses aroused so much hand-wringing.

Much work had to be done to spin this dead straw into the living gold of a constitutional threat, but it was done, and it captured the imagination of swathes of the public. 

Speaking to Vox, polemicist Thomas Chatterton Williams defended the famous 2020 open letter he spearheaded for Harper’s Weekly, decrying that perceived left-wing censorship. “We were all stunned and disturbed by the intolerant and censorious mood setting in at cultural and media institutions,” he told Zack Beauchamp. “If you are worried about that chilling force sweeping through your institution but feel incapable of sticking your own neck out, this letter is there to show you that many other people are sticking their necks out too.” 

In his more recent book Summer of our Discontent, published with pitch-perfect comic timing just as Trump’s genuine crackdown on speech and dissent was getting underway, Williams tries to characterise the hot summer of 2020 as a nadir of “woke” authoritarianism, saying, for instance, that a “multi-ethnic mob of junior employees” was responsible for pressuring former New York Times editor James Bennett to resign after publishing an infamous op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for US soldiers to be deployed against Black Lives Matter. 

There are many exemplars of the genre. Andrew Sullivan declared that “we all live on campus now.” He argued that the entire climate of speech in America was moving “away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based ‘social justice’ movement,” adding that “the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well.” Why? “The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment—untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights—are now routinely understood as mere masks for ‘white male’ power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.” (Yes, Andrew, I’ve been on Twitter too. But as a university lecturer, this characterisation would be news to several classes of students who heard me teach both about the Enlightenment and why it’s valuable. I’ve never once met the actual student he caricatures here.) But oh how he went on in 2020, “In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program—and those few left are being purged.” 

Some further examples of overheated prose: consider Bari Weiss’ resignation letter, which claimed  “intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability” and that being a centrist in a newsroom requires “bravery.” Or Yascha Mounk lamenting, “Companies and cultural institutions fire innocent people for imaginary offenses; prominent voices alternate between defending cancel culture and denying its existence; and an astonishing number of academics and journalists proudly proclaim that it is time to abandon values like due process and free speech.”

This was, and remains, a confected crisis; it was a moral panic. But the critical thing about it was that because of all the chattering class tongue-wagging, the panic was largely persuasive to the powerful across the political spectrum. From lavishly paid columnists and world-famous professors to politicians of every stripe, a sense of “woke” hegemony became almost unquestioned. 

Even in the current moment, so obvious in its parodically authoritarian dangers, writers feel compelled to pay obeisance to this increasingly obsolete idol. Other editorials about Trump’s aggressive authoritarian push in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination are converging around the term “woke right” to describe what’s happening (itself a coinage of far-right activist James Lindsay). Even in criticising the most classic kind of authoritarianism, we can’t talk about it without using that recently-confected label used to tarnish the very dissent that is now being violently suppressed.

Whatever one calls it, and despite some conservative critics, the Trumpist right is eagerly going ‘it’s our turn to be the scolds!’ Except they now control the Justice Department, whatever is left of the Department of Education, federal police forces, and the rest of the full faith and declining credit of the United States government. 

There could not be a clearer effort to compel speech here, given recent events, with demands for enforced public mourning and commentary that matches an official line. The hypocrisy of Pam Bondi threatening an Office Depot employee who refused to print a flyer is a case in point. The spectacle of the nation’s top law enforcement officer going after a random working-class person over something like this far exceeds the darkest nightmares peddled by the conservative movement about liberals, progressives, and leftists.

The satirists brave enough to continue speaking are already echoing past critiques of the post-9/11 era of neoconservative censorship. They’re replaying a well-worn Greatest Hits album with good reason.

Perhaps sensing the danger, some right-wingers have criticised the idea that suddenly they should be the party opposed to nebulously defined “hate-speech.” The hypocrisy is glaring, particularly in light of figures like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio lecturing other nations about free speech. Naturally the fascistically-inclined do not care about hypocrisy, only whether they can get away with raw exercises of power. The hypocrisy is as much the point as the cruelty; to prove that they can be so inconsistent; to indulge the delusion beloved of all dictators and their cronies that they can bend reality to their will, that “free speech” really does exist only for them, and it’s whatever they and Dear Leader say it is at any given moment.

But that’s not the point here. The point is that this particular exercise in hypocrisy strains credulity in a way that violently undercuts a core emotional message that has resonated with millions of people who either voted for them or looked the other way. We know all too well that people are not voting rationally, and that they’re no longer even voting with their pocketbooks—at least, not in the way they used to. We are deep in the era of vibe-voting, and the aura that Trump and his people had cultivated was one of anti-establishment and gilded counterculture. “Comedy is now legal,” famously crowed Elon Musk just before he began his own campaign of pettily personal censorship on the platform he bought.

Well, here we now have the President openly musing about abusing the FCC’s regulatory capacity to ensure comedy isn’t legal if it targets him. The textbook autocracy here, in addition to being repellent to the most tepidly democratic mind, is going to turn one of Trump’s strengths into a massive weakness.

Imagine you’re a young person looking for today’s unsayable, where the eye of the state is suddenly upon you if you speak in any way about a recently assassinated pundit, where grief is compulsory, where state-friendly media conglomerates are airing hagiographic patriotic celebrations of that person’s life in lieu of the comedian who dared to make fun of the man’s ideological confederates. Where would the allure of the forbidden lead you?

It's notable that we’re living through a time when South Park’s shtick is now brutally thwacking the Trump Administration, because it has become that broad target that’s easy enough for it to strike while drunk: the up-its-arse establishment telling you what you can and can’t say.

There are other, powerful forces at work here. The role of cynicism and distrust in systems, perceived elites, and experts, is a huge part of what has led us here. Turbocharged by a social media that tells any individual what they want to hear, plated with a patina of resistance, that collective cynicism is now largely driving politics. It can elect populist wannabe authoritarians, but, by its very nature, it will have a hard time keeping them in power.

Especially when they drastically undercut their countercultural appeal by banning counterculture. “Conservatism is the new punk rock” indeed. 

*By now it should be beyond obvious that the people who ran on “restoring” free expression are doing its opposite. For years they successfully cast the political left as the Orwellian censor and earned support from people desperate to be offensive, crude, and rude, who genuinely believed that their fortunes lay with the political right. 

Trump’s re-election unleashed a wave of exuberance from powerful men. One man described as a ‘top banker’ in the press gushed: “I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled … it’s a new dawn.”

It’s as clear a statement as any about what some people meant by free speech. In that way of looking at things, everything is perfectly consistent with the Vance-Rubio Doctrine: free speech is the right to demean disfavoured groups, not the right to make fun of the President. But from the perspective of young people, tastemakers, and median voters alike, the distinction is irrelevant; speech is speech, and the spectacle of the state bearing down on its critics will be both potent and memorable for them.

No one should be in any denial about how perilous this moment is. It’s another degree’s tilt towards the abyss. But we are not idle on that knife’s edge; we remain engaged in the fight for democracy and the values that underpin it—free expression highest among them. This is, if nothing else, very easy and favourable terrain on which to fight, which the right has almost completely evacuated after years of building battlements and fortresses upon it. With outlets named things like “Unherd” and “The Free Press” they portrayed themselves as “heterodox” warriors (some of whom even joined the so-called Heterodox Academy). They styled themselves sayers of the unsayable. Now we’re staring down the possibility of Bari Weiss being enthroned as a director at CBS News, the greying string-section of the news establishment.

Whatever countercultural cachet this new right garnered for itself has been fed into the woodchipper with astonishing speed. It means that the political left is now the coalition for free speech, the right to say the unsayable, the crude, the rude, the offensive. If we are to be persuasive, this is an easy pitch to make and one that will win with a generation of people watching the US government curdle itself into a gigantic state media apparatus. State approved podcasters, regulatory abuse to punish critics, regimented broadcasting that only puts out the approved message and, above all, no making fun of our Glorious Leader.So, practically, what does this mean? It means talking about free expression at every available opportunity, from every rostrum allowed to us. It means seizing the words “free speech” back from a government that could never be trusted with them. But if there’s advice to be given—knowing that controlling what every fool says on social media is an equally foolish errand—it would be to try and avoid hyping up manufactured controversies like the Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” nonsense.

Every headline about conservatives being offended and censorious is a victory; every headline about MAGA running from the chain-rattling ghosts of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims is a victory; every headline about Trump’s cataclysmic inability to take a joke is a victory; every headline exposing the latest puncture in the microfibre-thin skin of the conservative movement is a victory. By contrast, episodes like “Sydney Sweeney’s jeans” are that rarest of things in the current political climate: a genuine distraction.

Amidst the DDOSing of democracy that has been a regular hallmark of Trumpism, many are tempted to say this-that-or-the-other outrage from the Administration is a mere distraction from some truly important affair. The grim reality is that it is all important; the somewhat more amusing reality is that few of these people, least of all Trump himself, are capable of engineering distractions.

As with far too many wounds suffered by the left, moments of genuine distraction are self-inflicted—largely because social media makes it easier than ever to ensure we can’t help ourselves. It’s impossible to control the wild growth of grass roots, but it is worth asking if some purely cultural controversy like the hidden subtext of a jeans ad is worth making a fuss about.

The intent of the Trump government is to demolish opposition. They never wanted free speech, only the power to attack the speech they didn’t like. As ever, yes, their every accusation over the years was a confession of intent. Now they hope to do what all authoritarians do: resolve the contradictions with a bulldozer made of state power. 

But the public will still have its say, and meme politics is a poor substitute for genuine popular will. 

Understanding Donald Trump requires understanding that time stopped for him sometime in the mid-1980s, as his senescent tics and obsessions reveal (consider his frequent musings about Arnold Palmer’s little Arnold, frequent obsessions with what Mike Wallace would’ve thought about him, or how his approach to tariffs is shaped by the anti-Japanese anxieties of that era). He is the apotheosis of the dark nostalgia that animates most right-wing politics. But that also means that his particular cargo cult approach to authoritarianism is going to invoke very old tropes of top-down, aggressive rulership. It’s why he idolises regimes engaged in their own culturally-situated nostalgia for times gone by. What do Russian or Chinese or North Korean military parades do but refuse to look straight ahead, after all?

And it also means that Trump and his people are going to quickly cede the countercultural cachet they lucked into, which relies on a new information environment that does not easily yield to the state. More than ever, they are the establishment now, and Trump is enacting his fantasy of what that looks like: a nation devoted to worshipping him, where every organ of government serves to protect him from a moment’s doubt, from the crippling realisation that he might not be the most wonderful human being to ever exist. 

The idea of the far-right being punk rock was always farcical, but the weight of that absurdity has now, in the manner of a collapsing star, punched a hole in the fabric of the universe itself. It’s time to take advantage. 

This is a fight we can win. We need only speak as we see fit. 

Featured image is "Freedom of Speech," cropped, Normal Rockwell 1943.