Is it “Illiberal” to Confront and Disrupt the Speech of Leading Figures of our Domestic Insurgency?
Only if one values formal over actual democracy
There has been much criticism circulating regularly among pundits concerning episodes at Yale Law School and more recently at Stanford Law School1, where students and some faculty and administrators have confronted and disrupted the presentations of invited speakers on campus. These actions have been widely interpreted and condemned (by liberals and conservatives alike) as “illiberal,” intolerant, and otherwise beyond the pale of basic academic norms of free speech and inquiry.
The issue I have with framing the Stanford (and Yale) confrontations as simply about cancel culture, or the illiberalness of the liberals, or the denial of free speech, is that this framing is way too cribbed. It assumes that our political situation is basically in the “normal” range of policy differences between liberals and conservatives. It assumes we are living and operating in an environment where considered and respectful discourse should be normative.
But what if we aren’t living and operating in our “normal” political environment:
What if, instead, one of our two parties and tens of millions of its adherents, thought-leaders, far-right militants, and plutocratic funders are actually in the midst of engineering a national “divorce?”
And what if there is evidence everywhere (red lights flashing and alarms sounding), in our lives and politics, of the fundamentally anti-democratic purposes of the new governing approach this party and its adherents are working feverishly to enact?
Gov. DeSantis, emerging as the possible front-runner in the GOP presidential primary contest is one of many Republican Governors along with legislatures and courts that are strong arming their states into “laboratories of Autocracy,” building and modeling exactly the sorts of anti-democratic policies to which they are fanatically committed?
The stolen and packed Supreme(ly conservative) Court is clearly on an ideologically-driven course to strike down, essentially by fiat (blithely overturning longstanding precedent and inventing new Constitutional theories) to dismantle liberalism in governance, administration, culture, and economics.
And what if many younger people, especially, many of those, like these university students, are in positions to be keenly aware of all of this and either/both scared shitless and/or outraged? What if they are desperate to confront this vast and extremely threatening development in our society when it comes within their purview?
It seems to me that, if one takes the threat of authoritarianism seriously, then one has to take that into account when taking the measure of resisters’ fears and action and passing judgement on those who are rising up to confront it.
And this doesn’t pertain simply to university students. It pertains also to the much-mainstream-maligned Black Lives Matter Movement, to the teachers and parents desperately trying to push back against book banning and state-decreed curricular sanitization, to swing voters who reject MAGA crazies at the polls, to corporations trying to embrace decency and equality in their corporate cultures and polices, to people outraged by the Sarah Huckabee Sanders of the world who are abolishing child labor laws, to the millions of Democrats, led by a thoughtful and Democracy-committed president and other leaders, desperately and doggedly trying to find and pursue mechanisms to reinforce our democratic systems and institutions, and to so much more resistance that is taking place and must grow quickly, lest the truly illiberal forces gain the upper hand not simply through divorce, but through continued insurrection, and executive and judicial usurpation.
Our domestic authoritarians, like the Hungarian strongman, Victor Orban and his like in our world, are utilizing the formal normative mechanisms of democracy to circumvent and dismantle the substance of democracy. This form of usurpation of democracy via formalistic democratic mechanisms is well known and understood. Why would pro-democracy forces here in our nation submit to this? They (we) will not, of course. And this means sometimes confronting or violating the normative assumptions that might apply if this was a clash of normal parties committed to free and fair elections in a substantive democracy.
We have a continuing and growing insurrection on our hands. We may not be at the threshold of a (hot) Civil War, but we do look to be on the brink of the consolidation of perhaps dozens of Red states into a war by other means: a “Cold War Confederacy.” If we don’t confront these developments, if we don’t raise alarms -- even and especially sometimes in ways that don’t conform to the assumption of normal political discourse -- we may well find ourselves with the fait accompli of not a physical Trumpian wall, but of a much more formidable virtual wall of confederacy forming the “facts on the ground” of state-sponsored illiberal governance, law, and disunion.
And this would be a new civil war of much longer and crippling duration.
