The Alt-Right and the Art World
In 1950, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter stated in United States v. Rabinowitz that “[i]t is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”1 Today, in 2017, Milo Yiannopoulos is most certainly one of these people. Yiannopoulos, a British alt-right media personality, labels himself a “cultural libertarian.”2 With the goal of rejecting political correctness, he is famous for ruthlessly insulting a plethora of minority groups, including Muslims, homosexuals, feminists, transgendered people, and anyone that advocates for social justice in general. In other words, Milo is the ultimate counter to counterculture.
With the rise of more and more public figures like Yiannopoulos has come a fascinating societal paradigm shift. The political conservatives that once insisted on restricting free speech and beating self-expression down to the pulp are suddenly energetically embracing their constitutional right to say whatever the fuck they want, specifically on college campuses. If Sather Gate is the FasTrak route to freedom, the Berkeley College Republicans are lined up along it, excitedly welcoming their people in. Such irony lies within the recent conservative obsession with unrestricted free speech at universities — an obsession targeted at students who want blatantly racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, (and whatever other “phobic” I’m forgetting) speakers such as Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and Ann Coulter to be silenced. Let us dive into a brief history of conservative suppression of free speech…
In the nineteenth century, “freedom of inquiry” was strongly restricted on American college campuses, as post-Enlightenment Christians gained an increasing level of power over academia, including what views were acceptable and unacceptable to share on campus. During that time, “no views deemed blasphemous or heretical were welcome or permitted.”3 When slavery became more and more controversial, Southern colleges did not allow for the discussion of the topic.4 In fact, when a professor at the University of North Carolina openly expressed sympathy towards the 1856 Republican presidential candidate, students burned him alive.5 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory of evolution was excluded from higher education within religious institutions, a Cornell professor was fired for a pro-labor speech that a donor didn’t agree with, and a Stanford professor was fired for the same reason after voicing his views on immigration. Many more university faculty members were let go after openly expressing concerns regarding World War I, in universities such as the University of Nebraska and the University of Virginia.6 The rise of communism sparked the same fear, and thirty-one University of California professors were fired after refusing to sign an anti-Communist oath.7 The trend continued for professors who supported racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s. As stated by Geoffrey Stone, “And so it goes, into the 1960s and beyond, as conservative commentators, religious leaders, educators and politicians called for the punishment of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, of students demanding racial equality during the civil rights movement, of anti-Vietnam War activists at colleges and universities across the land, of students and faculty members who supported the gay rights movement, and on and on and on.”8
This trend of suppression has historically casted its shadow not just on verbal speech, but on art. Merriam-Webster defines censorship as “the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and removing things that are considered to be offensive, immoral, harmful to society, etc.” Art, beautiful for its ability to provoke, contradict, seduce, disgust and much more, has a long, messy history with the word. In 1565, many prominent Catholics rejected Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment” for its distracting use of nudity. In 1865, Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” stirred up controversy for its depiction of a naked women, deemed by society to be a prostitute because of her direct, front-facing gaze and suggestive necklace. One year later, Gustave Courbet created “The Origin of the World,” a painting of a vulva that is even censored today, on Facebook.9 The pattern continues all the way to countercultural art of the 1960s and 1970s, when artists and writers such as Bruce Conner, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane di Prima, to name just a small few, were criticized, censored, and shut up within mainstream culture. However, unlike the professors of the 20th century that fell victim to the suppression of their values, artists rose up, took up space, and cultivated their own idea of culture. The concept of victory for them was not mainstream acceptance. Thus, it was impossible for them to lose.
I return to the question of why the sudden shift in conservative values. Is alt-right conservatism simply the counterculture of conservative culture? Is alt-right advocacy of free speech merely an attempt to get away with the use of harassment, slander, and defamatory rhetoric on college campuses? (Probably.) Have liberal advocators of free speech become the victims of their own historical game? Whether this be true or false, at least we still have art.
Endnotes
- United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter J., dissenting).
- Bokhari, Allum. “Rise of the Cultural Libertarians.” Breitbart. N.p., 31 July 2016. Web. 01 May 2017.
- Stone, Geoffrey R. “Political Conservatives Suddenly Embrace Free Speech On Campus.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 01 May 2017. Web. 01 May 2017.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Frank, Priscilla. “A Brief History Of Art Censorship From 1508 To 2014.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 16 Jan. 2015. Web. 01 May 2017.
