Free Speech Includes the Right to Say ‘No Thanks’

The Washington Post has published a raft of commentary recently lamenting what authors see as the decline of free speech, largely in response to the New Yorker canceling plans to interview Steve Bannon at its annual festival (FAIR.org, 9/7/18). The magazine had faced criticism for inviting Bannon, former chair of the white supremacist Breitbart News (Extra!, 1–2/17) and one-time chief strategist for President Donald Trump.

The Washington Post‘s  Fareed Zakaria (9/13/18) fears a return to the nightmare years of the 1970s, when people refused to debate the idea that “blacks were a genetically inferior race who should be voluntarily sterilized.”

The Post’s Fareed Zakaria (9/13/18) wrote that “liberal democracy” is premised on “a bet on freedom—of thought, belief, expression and action,” citing the New Yorker‘s cancellation as his principal example of these rights being under siege.

If one takes a minimalist approach to free speech, centering on the First Amendment guarantee not to be jailed or otherwise harmed by the state for expressing one’s views, then it’s clear that Bannon’s disinvitation doesn’t violate such a right: The New Yorker abandoning plans to host Bannon doesn’t prevent him from thinking or believing anything.

From a more expansive definition of free speech, holding that the right is only meaningful when a person is allowed access to the (usually privately owned) means of delivering their words, there is still no convincing argument that Bannon’s voice has been suppressed: As Zakaria himself noted, Bannon was recently showcased by the Economist (9/15/18) and the Financial Times (3/23/18), as well as on 60 Minutes (9/10/17) and CNN (6/1/18). It’s hard to portray Bannon as a free-speech martyr based on his lack of access to mass media, since he has had more such access than all but a few people in the United States.

Of all the people in the world, 99.99999 percent are not interviewed onstage at the New Yorker festival, so not having that particular platform can’t in itself be a violation of free speech.  Editor David Remnick and his colleagues necessarily have to have criteria for who is chosen to speak, and the vast majority of people can’t meet those criteria.

What seems to have rankled Zakaria and other guardians of free speech at the Washington Post is that Remnick announced that Bannon would participate and then changed his mind, after receiving negative feedback from the wider world. Zakaria cites two further instances of colleges disinviting guests as part of his effort to demonstrate that “freedom of thought, belief, expression and action” are endangered: Condoleezza Rice, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq, and Charles Murray, an advocate of the pseudoscience of eugenics.

The position, then, is that only a small group of insiders should have any meaningful role in deciding who gets to speak on prestigious platforms, and allowing the public to have input on such decisions puts free speech in jeopardy: Speech is free when only elites decide who gets to speak.

These writers seem not to recognize that “leftists” and others may disagree with the decision to amplify some views, not because they’re “opposing,” but because they’re abhorrent. Should a black person have to argue that they are, in fact, human? Is that what we mean by democratic debate? There are a great many people who believe the Earth to be flat; are their voices censored by authoritarianism, or simply deemed unworthy of serious consideration?

Zakaria went so far as to compliment Bannon, calling him

an intelligent and influential ideologist, a man who built the largest media platform for the new right, ran Trump’s successful campaign before serving in the White House, and continues to articulate and energize the populism that’s been on the rise throughout the Western world. He might be getting his 15 minutes of fame that will peter out, but, for now, he remains a compelling figure.

The implicit criteria offered by Zakaria as to who should be granted a prominent platform is proximity to power: If you gave the “new” (i.e., fascist) right its “largest media platform,” ran a “successful campaign” and served in the White House, and your brand of “populism” is “on the rise,” then of course you deserve to be onstage at the New Yorker festival.

Other people have different criteria—among others, they believe that the idea of treating entire categories of people as subhuman has long been discredited, and that holding up such ideologies as worthy of debate does more to spread than discourage them. But that position will get you denounced in the Washington Post as an enemy of free speech, and a “new authoritarian.”