Be a Free Speech Absolutist

(It's bad, but it's better than the alternative)

This country might be beyond redemption. It might be evil and rotted right through. But it’s had a couple of good ideas, however poorly executed, and one of them was the first amendment. American free speech rights are taking a serious battering right now, and it’s going to get worse. But these rights are—even in the 21st century, and even compared to similar countries like the UK—genuinely unusual in their scope. This is a good thing. It is a good thing when people are using their free speech to create beautiful works of art and write radical texts and criticize despots. It is also a good thing when people are using their free speech to say disgusting, untrue, hateful, or harmful things. That is not because horrible and hateful and false speech is good. It’s because free speech in and of itself is an unequivocal good, and you cannot have the pleasant forms of free speech without the unpleasant ones. Conversely, you cannot limit the unpleasant forms of free speech without limiting the pleasant ones. 

It’s true that absolute freedom of speech isn’t really possible. But that doesn’t mean freedom of speech, as an aspiration, is worthless. Rather, it means that we should constantly work towards absolute free expression, with the understanding that concessions—though they are unavoidable—should be as limited as possible. 

In the 1960’s, free speech was a cause celebre of radical student movements. It was seen to go hand in hand with antiwar protests, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and every other sweeping reform of the era. It was a left-wing principle. But by the time I was in college, around the beginning of Donald Trump’s first, successful campaign for the presidency, many people on the political left and in the center seemed to simultaneously think two things were going on: