When Republicans argue that it is a bad idea for government to spend money on infrastructure except for an oil pipeline, you can be sure that you are hearing the voice of corruption. When you hear Republicans tell you that climate change does not exist, some are presenting the voice of corruption; others are captured by the voice of ignorance.
Ross Douthat who is often perceptive (albeit on the wrong side of the political fence) took on the voice of ignorance in the Sunday New York Times. The column was provoked by another essay of ignorance, penned by Jonathan Chait. Chait’s essay on PC (see here) has been pounced upon throughout the blogosphere. Chait objected to the tendency of women and people of color to denounce others as racist and sexist. Some of the examples he parades are worthy of criticism.
But he goes awry in fundamental ways. He claims that it is wrong to maintain that your opponents are illegitimate because it shuts down reasonable argument in the marketplace of ideas. When we live in a country where politicians are controlled by moneyed interests, however, it is a political responsibility to speak out against the illegitimate exercise of power and call it illegitimate. Ditto when police shoot unarmed black men without consequences and when Republican politicians engage in naked attempts to keep African Americans and others from being able to vote, etc.
Chait ventures from his particular criticism of examples to speak out in favor of his version of free speech. He essentially maintains that Catharine McKinnon is the apostle of censorship in that she favored regulation of sexist speech. And he maintains that proposals for racist speech codes are undemocratic. Apart from the fact that he comes close to calling McKinnon illegitimate (violating his newly minted ethical code), he is simply wrong on the facts. McKinnon was careful to say that sexist speech in general should not be regulated. She did argue that sexual harassment should not be protected; and she argued that pornography should be regulated on the ground that it is harmful to women. In a country that exempts obscenity from free speech protection (does this make our country undemocratic?), McKinnon would regulate pornography instead of obscenity. With some modifications in her proposal, sexually oriented speech would be less regulated (and more targeted at the speech that causes harm) than it is today if it were adopted.
As to the claim that racist speech codes are undemocratic, surely this is overblown. Honest and intelligent people can disagree whether racist speech (or pornography) should be regulated. But the claim that racist speech codes are undemocratic depends on the assumption that democracies do not exist outside the United States since racist hate speech is almost universally condemned in western countries and elsewhere. Those countries understand that racist speech does not contribute to the marketplace of ideas, is an unnecessary assault on the dignity of individuals, undermines equality, and is a threat to order. Most of the people who say that protecting racist speech is the price we pay for free speech are precisely the people who are not harmed by the speech and the people who say that have rarely focused on the children who are harmed by the speech, or the college freshman away from home for the first time in a seemingly hostile environment.
Perhaps the rest of the civilized world is wrong in regulating racist speech, but the notion that they are undemocratic for that fact is wildly over the top. Moreover, it is galling to hear that our country which is now a plutocracy, not a democracy is in fact the only democracy in the world because it tolerates the kind of speech favored by the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
I will discuss Douthat’s column in part II.
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