What Liberals Don't Get About Free Speech in the Age of Trump
Yiannopoulos was not “offending” anyone; he was painting a target on the backs of Berkeley students, encouraging their classmates to harass them and incite the state itself into abusing them.
I seek no protection from offence. I’m a big girl, and I can handle being annoyed by the foolishness or narrow-mindedness of others. What I protest in Yiannopoulos’ “Dangerous Faggot Tour” is that he incites action, which cannot be ignored or brushed off by its targets. Yet despite being central to the issue, it is rarely the focus of chest-beating free-speech absolutism in the editorial pages.
This also gets to the heart of why argument alone cannot be expected to prevail against this tide of proto-fascism. The futility of debate in such a scenario terrifies the good liberal reared on reruns of The West Wing, but it is a vital lesson in this dark hour.
“Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” wrote Jean Paul Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew. “They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.” He might well be talking about the “troll” tactics beloved of today’s neo-Nazi alt-right, which cloaks its anti-Semitism (and sundry other bigotries) in irony and deceit.
Writing this past sunday in the LA Review of Books, Ron Rosenbaum, a leading scholar on the rise of Nazism, described what that looked like in the 1930s:“[T]his tactic of playing the fool, the Chaplinesque clown, had worked over and over again, worked like a charm. It kept the West off balance. They consistently underestimated him and were divided over his plans (‘what does Hitler really want?’). The tactic became irresistible, as repeated always success does. Few took Hitler seriously, and before anyone knew it, he had gathered up the nations of Europe like playing cards.”
Rosenbaum links this tactic to the rise of Donald Trump and his cadre. This chameleon-like dissembling, being all things to all people, is specifically an armor against discourse, against those of us who “believe in words.” For Trump, his army of trolls, and his ideological lieutenants like Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer, words are playthings used to win a moment’s battle, to elicit a reaction, and to hide as much as to reveal. It is their actions that speak true.
Yet some liberals prefer to chase men like Yiannopoulos through a postmodern hall of mirrors.
Hannah Arendt had the right of it when, in her Origins of Totalitarianism, she explained what the purpose of Nazi propaganda was. It was not a proposition presented for debate, compromise, and rebuttal, but an alternative reality that justified its own existence:“The assumption of a Jewish world conspiracy was transformed by totalitarian propaganda from an objective, arguable matter into the chief element of the Nazi reality; the point was the Nazis acted as though the world were dominated by Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself.”
In other words, these were articles of faith that served to justify Nazism’s aims. They told the world what had to be true in order for race laws and death camps to make moral sense. This was not a matter for debate, though it had been disproven on its merits time and time again. Rosenbaum’s essay tells the heroic story of The Munich Post, a newspaper that had been a thorn in Hitler’s side for over a decade, reporting on his every move, exposing Nazi violence, even sounding the alarm about “the Final Solution” long before the rest of the world knew its true horror.
The paper was shuttered two months after Hitler’s election, with several reporters sent to camps or otherwise “disappeared.”
This puts d’Ancona’s praise for Channel 4 presenter Cathy Newman into perspective. He holds her tough questioning of Milo Yiannopoulos up as a prime example of how to deal with the man, and indeed her forthright and unwavering dissection of his empty views deserves much praise. But by d’Ancona’s logic, this should have spelled defeat for Yiannopoulos. Instead, he went on to win a lucrative book deal.
This is why we should roll our eyes every time Slate or Huffington Post declares that some satirist has “destroyed” or “eviscerated” some famous fool. It’s not just the exaggeration, but the overwhelming and naive faith in the power of merely disproving someone. All of Trump’s ideas, such as they were, were debunked time and again long before the election; it did not stop Wisconsinites from voting for him.
This is not to say that quests for truth are pointless — quite the opposite — but rather that we should understand what they can and cannot do. You cannot disprove the truth of an action; you can only combat it.This essay will undoubtedly be positioned as a defense of the violence at Berkeley. It isn’t; a disquisition on the merits of political violence as such requires its own article. But the argument I’ve made here should serve as an explanation of why, when faced with an establishment that is deaf to all reason, some may have felt setting lighting equipment on fire to be their only recourse.
Inasmuch as it stopped Yiannopoulos from radicalizing his audience into committing hate crimes against their fellow students, the protest achieved something meaningful. But it diminishes us to flush that down the memory hole of another pointless debate about tediously abstract and immature constructions of free speech. If we must do this, then let us do it properly. Let us call actions by their names, acknowledge the harms of those actions, and then, with the terms of debate and its principles properly grounded, discuss the matter.
After all, is that not what those of us who care about words are obliged to do?
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/free ... -age-trump
