E-Pluribus | Apr. 21, 2021
Here is a round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Spencer Case: You Have the Right to Remain Politically Silent
Just as freedom of religion does not imply that citizens are obligated to choose a religion, freedom of speech does not compel speech. This is Spencer Case’s thesis at Arc Digital where he explores the free speech implications of politicizing all aspects of society.
Hyper-politicization undermines freedom of speech in this broader sense. If most major corporations, scientific organizations, universities, and other prominent entities are committed to political goals — especially the same political goals — then personal neutrality will be difficult or impossible to maintain. Many people will be conscripted into political speech when they’d rather remain silent. Some of this will be mere lip service, but presumably some people will actually rush to comply under social pressure. Some will resolve their cognitive dissonance by changing their convictions to be consistent with their assertions, rather than the other way around.
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Politics has its place, but that place shouldn’t be everywhere, all the time. When politics is pervasive, it is worse. There must be space for political neutrality, and this means that we must be able to remain silent on political matters in most contexts without (too many) adverse social consequences.
Read it all at Arc Digital.
David French: The First Amendment, Now More Than Ever
One of the perverse effects of selective application of the First Amendment is the danger of ending up on both sides of the argument depending on the preferred outcomes. David French writes of the corner Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is painting himself into as he tries to rein in Big Tech.
This is the future that parts of the right and the left and striving mightily to achieve. And in each case, there is a political opponent just too pernicious to protect. Democratic attorneys general push through the First Amendment to stop Big Oil. A Republican attorney general pushes through the First Amendment to stop Big Tech. The same Republican attorney general protects Big Oil even as he attacks Big Tech.
But here’s the core problem — if Paxton wins against Twitter or if the Democratic attorneys general win against Exxon, they’ll simply hand their ideological opponents yet another weapon to wage war against their own enemies. And, perversely enough, if the right undermines corporate free speech in the name of protecting conservative voices, it will give big government exactly the tools it needs to force Big Tech to censor more.
Read it all at The Dispatch.
Michael Tracey: Why Media Liberals Have To Lie About “Cancel Culture”
While freely acknowledging that liberals do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy and overreach over “cancel culture,” Michael Tracey writes that the Dixie Chicks/Iraq War episode in the early 2000s has been particularly egregiously misrepresented.
…Is Judd really arguing that because the exact term “cancel culture” was not literally used in reference to a controversy involving the Dixie Chicks in 2003, the arguments associated with opposition to “cancel culture” circa 2021 are rendered invalid? It would seem so. This reasoning makes zero sense because, as should be obvious to anyone in possession of a functioning brain, the term “cancel culture” did not meaningfully exist in 2003. The whole concept of “cancel culture” gained prominence in the late 2010s as a derivation of the concept of “call-out culture,” which is thought to have flourished in particular due to the ascendance of social media — with the idea being that social media has created an environment whereby people are being unduly demonized and/or “called out” for committing relatively trivial ideological or speech code infractions. When these people face excessive professional or social repercussions, they’re then said to have been “canceled.” Perhaps someone should inform Legum that social media as we know it today did not exist in 2003.
Legum’s contention makes even less sense when you consider that the 2003 Dixie Chicks episode did provoke an enormous amount of contemporaneous controversy and debate. Many high-profile people (see below) objected strenuously to the backlash engendered by lead singer Natalie Maines after she said she was “ashamed” to be from the same state as George W. Bush. Full quote: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
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None of this is to deny that the term “cancel culture” is often invoked in contexts that are extremely tedious. Notice I didn’t use the term in anything other than scare quotes within this post, given all the incredibly annoying baggage it carries. The tedium accelerated massively over the past year as Republican elected officials began using the term to petulantly dismiss run-of-the-mill political criticism, and the final death knell for the term’s utility might’ve been in February when the annual CPAC conference was titled “America UnCanceled” — like attending the Republican Party’s premier youth feeder conference is some kind of extraordinarily edgy statement of rebelliousness.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter
A new law in Florida takes aim at “people who take part in property damage or violence during protests,” but critics charge that it’s an attack on free speech:
More out of Florida:
A thread on the H.R. 1 election bill current in Congress:
Simon & Schuster is under internal pressure to drop Mike Pence’s book:
