In a saga that will likely be remembered as a key moment in the contest over free speech in the United States, violent left-wing agitators—with the passive support of a spineless university administration unwilling to contain them—have now successfully forced Ann Coulter, the right-wing firebrand, to withdraw from her speaking engagement at UC Berkeley.
The political theorist Corey Robin helpfully places the Coulter affair within a broader trend. While the far-Left began to argue against the airing of offensive ideas a generation ago, it usually faced pushback from liberals closer to the center. Since then, however, the political base of what might be called New Republic liberalism has atrophied, and the Left coalition at large is increasingly skeptical of the American free speech tradition.
Mainstream liberals today are far less absolutist in their defense of free speech, particularly on campuses; indeed, that absolutist position increasingly seems like the outlier among liberals. And parts of the left are now taking the more absolutist position. Once upon a time, a Jonathan Chait would denounce leftist campus critics of free speech, and it all made sense. Today, when he does that, he seems completely out to lunch: a lot of the people he’s talking about are conventional liberals just like him.
There are many plausible explanations for the decline of the kind of free speech liberalism Robin describes. It could be, for example, that during two terms in the White House, liberals grew frustrated with the limits of their accomplishments and persuaded of the need to employ more hard-edged methods to bring about change. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s freewheeling and often deliberately offensive politics could be seen an example of the importance of P.C.
But there is another intellectual shift that might help explain the center-Left establishment’s timidity on free speech questions: The much-discussed re-orientation of our politics from Right versus Left to nationalist versus cosmopolitan. Because pure cosmopolitanism, despite its pretensions to openness, is actually in tension with America’s free speech tradition.
Most of the political debates now convulsing America in one way or another center around one of two big questions.
The first question concerns national identity. What does it mean to be an American? Is the United States a creedal nation, defined by an aspirational commitment to certain ideals? Or is it something more rooted—a nation-state of the European variety where membership is delineated at least in part along linguistic and religious lines? This question lies at the heart of the fight over the Trump Administration’s actions on refugees, the border wall, and sanctuary cities.
The high water mark of American creedalism came in the 1990s, at the peak of American post-Cold War confidence. Political elites came to regard the United States, in Michael Lind’s words, as “a nationless state rooted in the philosophy of liberal democracy in the abstract.” Creedalism, while still dominant among the establishment, has come under fire from a newly nationalistic Right, which advocates a more exclusive definition of American nationhood. In its most “liberal” form, it is a nationalism that emphasizes national solidarity while acknowledging the equal status of minority citizens; often, however, it devolves into something more sinister, where the Americanness of non-whites and non-Christians is seen as suspect.
The second question concerns the freedom of speech and political correctness. Who should have the power to regulate expression? Is freedom of speech a first-order priority, or should it be superseded by the imperative that one must at all cost avoid offending minorities? The widespread intimidation of right-wing speakers at campuses across the country testifies to the urgency of this conflict.
Like the nationalist versus cosmopolitan clash, the nature of the free speech debate has changed dramatically over the past several years. Whereas most efforts to police the boundaries of public discourse once came from the conservative Right, today they tend to come from the Left—including, increasingly, a cosmopolitan center-Left that is often too intimidated to confront its fringe in a meaningful way.
It’s in the intersection of the two big questions at the heart of America’s political debates that we can catch a glimpse of what’s really going on in the phenomenon that Robin outlined. In short, the American Left, which is wedded to a more inclusive definition of American identity, sees itself as more tolerant than its nationalistic rivals. But it may be precisely this inclusiveness that is pulling it in an increasingly intolerant direction when it comes to freedom of speech. Because if Americanness is based only on commitment to certain ideas, then it stands to reason that people who reject those ideas have a weaker claim to membership in the national community.
Both the nationalistic and creedal ideas of Americanness exclude certain people. Nationalists, depending on where they fall on the fascist-to-liberal-nationalist spectrum, might exclude Catholics, or Jews, or non-English speakers, or illegal immigrants. Creedalists, on the other hand, might include all of these groups—but exclude American citizens whose families might trace their roots as far back as the colonial period, if those people embrace values seen as contrary to the American creed.
In the eyes of many of today’s liberals, especially on the campus, the rightwing politics of figures like Ann Coulter, or Milo Yiannopolous, or even Charles Murray are seen as violating the American commitment to equality. This severs them from the U.S. national community in a fundamental way. They are seen as un-American for holding certain ideas—a phenomenon that is entirely consistent with the creedal view of what it means to be an American.
This doesn’t mean that the other side has some kind of virtuous lock on liberalism. Quite to the contrary, the chauvinism indulged in by those on the alt-Right spectrum, a chauvinism that seeks to police the boundaries of a “legitimate” political community, is in extremis fatally toxic to a liberal society. But we mustn’t forget the flip side of the coin: a purely creedal definition of national identity can lead us down the path of rooting out thought criminals—those who violate one or another political faction’s interpretation of the national creed.
The key challenge is to identify a liberal nationalism that avoids not only the hard authoritarianism of the nativist Right, but the soft authoritarianism of the cosmopolitan Left. John Stuart Mill was among many Enlightenment theorists to argue that a rooted civic nationalism was complementary with liberal democracy. A sense of “national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past,” would grease the skids of free institutions, he wrote.
The retreat from free speech and open debate in key American institutions today is in part a product of our retreat from the civic nationalist ideal, which insists that Americans are Americans, no matter what beliefs they hold. Restoring free speech to its proper place in American intellectual life isn’t just a matter of defending the marketplace of ideas—it’s a matter of formulating a workable liberal-nationalist conception of what it means to be an American.
