Chait Criticizes Exactly The Kind Of Speech We Should Want More Of

pc-pota

Jonathan Chait’s attack against “Political Correctness” is the talk of the interwebs.

He mixes a few examples of genuinely bad, but also rare and unrepresentative, anti-speech efforts (MacKinnon in 1992 (!), a student whose anti-feminist article led to his apartment getting egged, a professor who stole a pro-life display) with a laundry list of people – well, progressives – using their free speech to protest or criticize:

You may remember when 6,000 people at the University of California–Berkeley signed a petition last year to stop a commencement address by Bill Maher, who has criticized Islam (along with nearly all the other major world religions). Or when protesters at Smith College demanded the cancellation of a commencement address by Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, blaming the organization for “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” Also last year, Rutgers protesters scared away Condoleezza Rice; others at Brandeis blocked Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s-rights champion who is also a staunch critic of Islam; and those at Haverford successfully protested ­former Berkeley chancellor Robert Birgeneau, who was disqualified by an episode in which the school’s police used force against Occupy protesters.[…]

Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students. UCLA students staged a sit-in to protest microaggressions such as when a professor corrected a student’s decision to spell the word indigenous with an uppercase I — one example of many “perceived grammatical choices that in actuality reflect ideologies.” A theater group at Mount Holyoke College recently announced it would no longer put on The Vagina Monologues in part because the material excludes women without vaginas. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional.

Ken White once called this argument “The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker“:

The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn’t like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks “why was it necessary for you to say that” or “what was your motive in saying that” or “did you consider how that would impact someone” to the second person and not the first. It’s ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression.

There are responses to speech that I think are genuinely anti-speech – harassment (Anita Sarkeesian recently posted the harassing comments she gets on Twitter in a single week – extreme trigger warning on that link), threats, attempts to get people fired.1 But Chait’s examples of unreasonable speech are… well, just unreasonable. More often than not, Chait objects to people using their free speech to criticize what others have said. It’s hard to make what he’s saying into anything principled or even coherent.

Chait sometimes attacks the kinds of political arguments we should value the most. For instance, Chait puts on his laundry list “Stanford recently canceled a performance of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson after protests by Native American students.”

The real event was much more complex. For one thing, no protests took place; for another, it was voluntarily cancelled by the student thespians themselves, not cancelled by Stanford.2 Instead, Native American students met with the theater students and had a series of long discussions in which the groups tried to resolve their differences.

“[‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson’] more or less uses Native Americans as a prop to tell the story of Andrew Jackson and his controversial presidency,” Brown said. “It uses Native people as a foil, or a backdrop to tell his story, which we felt took away from the legitimacy and historical narrative that is very real and exists for a lot of Native students on this campus.”

Stern and her team proposed a variety of potential solutions to ensure that a positive dialogue came out of the show, including cutting certain songs and making small script changes, or finding a show written by a Native American author to be funded by ATF and put on in conjunction with “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.”

After a month of meetings, which included Stern, the co-producers, SAIO, ATF and various faculty moderators, it became clear that the problems of representation in “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” could not be fixed.

This process – in which two groups that disagreed sat down for in-depth discussions – is exactly the kind of free speech that we should admire. When they walked away from the table, the two groups still didn’t fully agree with each other – but they both praised the other sides’ good intentions and willingness to talk.

When a local newspaper, The Fountain Hopper, published an article making a Jonathan-Chait-like article about freedom of speech under threat, one of the theater students objected:

Knarr expressed equal frustration with the article.

“No one from the Fountain Hopper contacted anyone from our team,” she said. “I think the whole process does bring up questions about, ‘When is it okay to say that something artistic should not be put up?’ but I did not come away from this process feeling like my freedom of speech had been restricted.”

I’m not saying what went on at Stanford was perfect in every way. But it was good enough so we should consider it an example of conflict and speech to strive for – and Chait should explain why this is the sort of speech he wants less of.

Angus Johnson makes a similar point:

When someone protests a campus speaker, they’re engaging in an act of speech. When they complain about microagressions, they’re engaging in an act of speech. When they challenge their professors, or trend a hashtag on Twitter, or write trigger warnings into their syllabi, or accuse each other of racism, or criticize our country’s conception of free speech, they’re engaging in acts of speech.

Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do? Isn’t that what [Chait’s] looking for?


A quote from Chait:

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.

What I find interesting about this quote is that it remains perfectly true even if the first three words are deleted.


Some good blog responses to Chait I’ve read, in arbitrary order:

  1. Chait Speech I’d call this a “steelmanning” of Chait’s position; that is, it restates Chait’s argument in a way that is stronger. (And much shorter.)
  2. What exactly do you want, Jonathan Chait?
  3. Jonathan Chait and the New PC | The Nation
  4. All politics is identity politics – Vox
  5. ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES: The Language Police Is Coming To Get You
  6. The truth about “political correctness” is that it doesn’t actually exist – Vox
  7. Some Thoughts on White Anti-Racists and Angry Black People |
  8. Amanda Marcotte: P.C. Policeman Jonathan Chait Can Dish It Out, But He Can’t Take It
  9. But Wait…There’s More! — Crooked Timber
  1. Scott Alexander discusses this in more detail. []
  2. To be fair, if the production had gone ahead, there would probably have been protests. []
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49 Responses to Chait Criticizes Exactly The Kind Of Speech We Should Want More Of

  1. 1
    nobody.really says:

    I hope I don’t seem like a perpetual neophyte, but I am endlessly impressed with Amp’s skill in finding illustrations for his posts. This one can’t be topped.

    Well, maybe “Soilent Green in politically correct!“? Nah….

  2. 2
    Ampersand says:

    Thank you! I was really very pleased with myself when I found this cartoon. (I think that in the original context it was making fun of some lefties who were arguing that human rights should apply to chimps.)

  3. 4
    RonF says:

    “The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn’t like.”

    I think that if someone is speaking – or wishes to speak (e.g., showing a musical like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and someone else finds that objectionable, I think that the objectors have every right to raise their objections in any legal format they wish. What I do not think they have a right to do is to prevent the first speaker from speaking if, regardless of the feelings of the objectors, they intend to speak anyway.

    Examples would be pounding desks, blowing horns and pulling a fire alarm during a speech, chanting to drown out the voice of a speaker, standing and shouting, climbing in a venue’s windows and storming the podium – the list is amazingly long, and they seem to be disproportionately skewed towards the left disrupting the right’s ability to speak. It’s also rather amazing that in most cases, the response of the administrators has been to stand and watch rather than do something.

  4. 5
    Rfox says:

    You may remember when 6,000 people at the University of California–Berkeley signed a petition last year to stop a commencement address by Bill Maher, …. These sorts of episodes now hardly even qualify as exceptional.

    Those are successes in shutting someone up. In some of those cases, the threat of disruption was essentially a heckler’s veto. Certainly the protesters were exercising their free speech rights – but their objective was not to merely register their political or social opinions. Their objective was to stop someone else from doing the same. I have no problem with Person A speaking and then based on the content of what they had said suffering “non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn’t like.” What I think is quite odious is action that prevents Person A from speaking in the first place.

    When I was a student, Henry Kissinger came to Boston to speak. I protested against him at the time – quite memorably, in fact. But I never dreamed of attempting to stop him from coming to Boston and speaking in the first place.

  5. 6
    Ampersand says:

    No, their objective was to stop their university from honoring and paying a six-figure fee to Bill Maher at their commencement, not simply to stop him from speaking.

    I wouldn’t approve of a petition to stop him from speaking (for instance, if student group “A” invited him to speak at student group A’s event, and student group B started a petition). But a petition to stop him from being the commencement speaker is not at all the same.

    Bill Maher doesn’t have a First Amendment right to be a commencement speaker, or to be paid an insane fee by the U of CA. He has a first amendment right to speak; he doesn’t have a right to that specific platform.

    And protests are not a heckler’s veto unless the protestors heckle continuously, or otherwise disrupt the event in a way that prevents the speaker from being audible.

  6. 7
    Myca says:

    This comic from The Nib entitled “Chaiters Gonna Chait” is pretty good.

    —Myca

  7. 8
    LT says:

    Gigantically good. Thank you.

  8. 9
    closetpuritan says:

    What I do not think they have a right to do is to prevent the first speaker from speaking if, regardless of the feelings of the objectors, they intend to speak anyway.

    That seems like a useful distinction. I think I agree in principle, though I’m already seeing some differences in how we would apply it. Also, I think in many cases, it would be hard to distinguish between trying to make their own voices heard (especially if raucously) and trying to prevent someone from speaking.

    I think a case where the university has invited someone to speak, especially in the case of a commencement speaker, and the students are expressing their disagreement with their university’s decision to invite the speaker, is quite a bit different from disrupting a speech by making it inaudible. Disagreeing with inviting someone to speak at a place that in some sense belongs to you is different than suppressing the ability to express an idea in the public square. I’m in favor of any members of an organization expressing their disagreement when leaders of the organization invite a speaker that the members do not think should be invited, whether it’s because of their ideas or because they are a poor-quality speaker or are demanding too high a speaking fee.

  9. 10
    Ampersand says:

    I thought this was good.

    Everyone Tell Jonathan Chait to Shut Up « The Hooded Utilitarian

    There’s a couple of problems with Chait’s thesis, though. First of all, there’s just nothing in his article or in his examples that makes a case that discourse on the broadly defined left is somehow nastier than discourse on the right, or in the center, or out in directionless space. The first controversial piece I wrote for the web was for The Comics Journal. I reviewed Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and my piece was headlined “In the Shadow of No Talent.” TCJ readers lost their shit and at least one person wished for the death of me and my family. It was exactly the sort of intemperate lashing out at dissent that Chait denigrates — but it didn’t have anything to do with political correctness or a culture of Marxist intolerance. It had to do with comics fans not wanting to hear me tell them that the thing they liked wasn’t any good.

    Since then I’ve been told that I am stupid and that I should shut up by lots of Men’s Rights Activists, some feminists, some romance fans, many comics readers, fans of Breaking Bad, fans of The Hobbit, some leftists, and many right-wingers. I’ve even been abused by a fair number of supposedly free-speech-loving liberals and libertarians, who, when it comes to online behavior, aren’t any more tolerant of dissent than anyone else as far as I can tell. In a recent discussion of Charlie Hebdo, one First Amendment lover told me that if I didn’t like America, I could leave it — because free speech means exiling folks who say things you don’t like. Maybe, as Gawker’s Alex Pareene says, the liberal Chait is especially thin-skinned when it comes to criticism from his left. But one thing’s for sure: In terms of yelling at each other online, there are no red states and no blue states. There are only states of intemperate ire, and lots of them.


    The discussion in the comments is sometimes really interesting, as well.

    Ron, Amanda Marcotte argues here that the right is worse when it comes to censorship. I don’t know if she’s right or not; it appears to me she is correct, but of course I’m very biased towards agreeing with her about that. Similarly, I think you’re biased towards seeing the left as worse than conservatives.

    I’m not certain that there’s any actual way of studying and measuring this question (“is censorship more frequent on the or the right?”). But neither your impression, nor Amanda’s, is very convincing to me. Nor am I sure this is even an important question to ask. I think it’s more important for people to oppose censorship and anti-free-speech tactics – especially when it comes on their own side – than it is to figure out which side is worse by this one specific measure.

  10. A post from Academe, Disinvitations on Campus, takes on FIRE’s 2014 report, which claims that, since 2000, conservatives are almost three times as likely to be disinvited from campus speaking engagements than liberals/progressives. I haven’t read either piece in a while, and so the details are foggy in my mind. I’m posting it here just because it seems relevant that an organization like FIRE has tried to keep count in a systematic (if flawed, if you buy the Academe post’s critique) way.

  11. 12
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    This is really about the degree to which people use labels to try to avoid even the semblance of discussion.

    Remember that other discussion we were having? You know: the one where folks pointed out that people could certainly have a discussion of “why you think your position is more correct than mine” without resorting to labels like “bigoted” or “racist” or “derailing” and so on.

    THAT is the heart of Chait’s argument, I think, though he didn’t make it extremely well.

    1) It starts with social stigma which gets attached to behavior which is widely accepted as inappropriate and bad. (“Jews should be killed;” “it’s OK to beat and rape your wife;” “the government should discriminate against blacks and prevent intermarriage.)

    2) That behavior gets a label (“antisemitic, sexist, racist”) and the label gets socially accepted as “bad shit.”

    3) At some point, people want to make an argument and think “well, this argument is hard. I’m not sure I can win. But I know I can win by expanding the stigma to include it.”

    4) So they try. (“Failure to support israeli policies is antisemitic.” “Failure to support title 9 due process changes is sexist.” “Arguing against a disparate impact approach is racist.”)

    5) If they are effective, the stigma expands.

    6) If the stigma expands, arguments which might be correct and which certainly are non-frivolous get taken entirely out of the discussion due to the label.

    7) This is a bad thing.

    The interesting thing about these terms is that they don’t work the same way as generic insults. Things like “stupid” or “pointless” or “irrelevant” have lost their power because they don’t carry the same negative associations. If you think an argument isn’t “stupid,” it doesn’t mean YOU’RE stupid, much less that you “generally support stupid things.” (Sure, people will say that, but it doesn’t have the same traction.) Also, those terms have some generally understood meanings.

    The same isn’t true for the labels I mean. Not only do they have broad negative associations but they’re also very hard to define and often have no common meaning. That is why they are so popular.

    Do conservatives do it as much as liberals? Well, they WANT to and they TRY to. But the tactic only works if there is already a powerful negative-association social label in place. And right now it does seem like there are more of those available labels on the liberal side, at least in the US.

    That hasn’t always been true; there have been plenty of times where the most powerful social labels were held by people with conservative goals. “Un-American,” “pacifist,” “communist,” “supporting terrorism,” “not focused on safety,” etc. Those times will come again I suspect since it seems to swing back and forth.

    But even though I think the tactic is universal, I think that right now the liberals have a better arsenal of terms to use as weapons. As a result of that disparity, I sense that liberals are doing it slightly more successfully these days. Hasn’t always been true though.

    I may be wrong. Here’s an interesting group test:
    1) How many conservative labels can we collectively identify in this category?
    2) Do you think they have the same broad social credibility as terms such as racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, and discriminatory?

  12. 13
    Ampersand says:

    Richard, thanks for those links!

    G&W, I don’t think that was the argument Chait was making at all. I think it’s the argument you’re making.

    It’s interesting to note that your “label” argument would work just as well if we filled in the blank with the label “politically correct.” But I wouldn’t make that argument myself, because the argument seems pretty bad.

    1) It starts with social stigma which gets attached to behavior which is widely accepted as inappropriate and bad. (“Jews should be killed;” “it’s OK to beat and rape your wife;” “the government should discriminate against blacks and prevent intermarriage.)

    The historical ignorance in this statement is pretty stunning. Not all these behaviors “start[ed]” by being “widely accepted as inappropriate and bad”; rather, they were once commonly (although not universally) accepted, and suggesting they were bad was a controversial position that many people argued against. For instance, at one time many argued that by definition a wife could not be raped by her husband, because she had consented to sex by marrying him. At one time, many people believed the government should prevent intermarriage and discriminate against blacks.

    2) That behavior gets a label (“antisemitic, sexist, racist”) and the label gets socially accepted as “bad shit.”

    This misstates the sequence of events. In your recounting, the label comes after the widespread acceptance that these behaviors were bad. However, in real life, the label comes before widespread acceptance that the behaviors are bad. For example, certain behaviors were labeled “sexist,” “woman-hating,” and “rape” as part of the process of persuading most Americans that physically forced sex in marriage is rape. “Racism” and other terms meaning the same thing were used in the arguments against Jim Crow laws. And so on.

    If no one had been allowed to named behaviors like spousal rape, wife-beating, and Jim Crow as what they are – “racist” and “sexist,” among other things – it might have much harder, and maybe impossible, to build a consensus that these activities were wrong.

    ) At some point, people want to make an argument and think “well, this argument is hard. I’m not sure I can win. But I know I can win by expanding the stigma to include it.”

    This seems to presume bad faith on the part of people who say that “X policy is racist/sexist/transphobic/etc,” as if no one ever makes these arguments sincerely.

    You might respond by saying “when I said ‘people,’ I didn’t mean all people, just some people. Surely you don’t disagree that some people argue in bad faith.”

    If so, I’d reply that surely all arguments – including the anti-political-correctness argument Chait makes – are sometimes made in bad faith. Why single out arguments against bigotry, when virtually all arguments are sometimes made in bad faith? Couldn’t your own argument be made in bad faith – for instance, by someone who thinks “Well, arguing against anti-racism is hard. I’m not sure I can win. But I do know I can win by saying using the word racism is an unfair attack on me”?

    Furthermore, even if you don’t claim all anti-bigotry arguments are in bad faith, your argument ignores that there are some people who use these terms in good faith. It’s unfair to tarnish all anti-bigotry arguments broadly, as you’re doing here, because some people make them in bad faith. Nor do you provide any principled way to distinguish arguments made in good vs arguments made in bad faith.

    In the end, your argument is ad hominem. It relies, not on any actual refutation of the argument, but on unsupported claims about what people making an argument you disagree with are supposedly thinking.

  13. 14
    Myca says:

    Couldn’t your own argument be made in bad faith – for instance, by someone who thinks “Well, arguing against anti-racism is hard. I’m not sure I can win. But I do know I can win by saying using the word racism is an unfair attack on me”?

    Great point, Amp. Even ignoring the questions of bad faith, I’d expand this out to the question of “does doing this shut down discussion?” It seems to me that generally, when there have been accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia here, it’s been far from stifling to discussion.

    In fact, it seems like it’s far more common to see someone leap into an active discussion and announce that so-and-so’s charge of racism is an attempt to shut down all discussion, as we are all discussing it. It’s the weirdest fucking thing.

    The thing is, you’re still allowed to talk, so if someone says “hey, this thing you said was racist,” and you disagree, then explain that and explain why. It’s how ‘talking with other humans’ works. It seems like a lot of the time, the objection is more like it’s somehow wrong for other people to give a shit that you said something racist, which … like … I can’t really help you with. I’m sorry that other people’s preferences differ from yours?

    —Myca

  14. 15
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Amp, you do realize that I’m arguing for what amounts to a “process that happens to favor liberals at the moment due to their political supremacy, has often been used by conservatives and will be used that way again, and is generally bad” and not “something that liberals do wrong?”

    I ask this because your reply is bizarrely hostile, whether it’s suggesting that I literally didn’t know the history (I realize I could have written this more clearly, but seriously. You didn’t think I didn’t know that? I mean, “he has posted three extremely well-known facts which people including him have discussed on Alas many times and oddly enough gotten each one of the three completely wrong, because he has completely forgotten all history” is an interesting choice over “he’s not explaining his point well.”

    Even this:

    In the end, your argument is ad hominem. It relies, not on any actual refutation of the argument, but on unsupported claims about what people making an argument you disagree with are supposedly thinking.

    Which people do you think are the “people making an argument I disagree with?” You? conservatives? Liberals? Again, did you notice that I am arguing for a general trend rather than a point against people?

    In terms of your actual argument:

    This seems to presume bad faith on the part of people who say that “X policy is racist/sexist/transphobic/etc,” as if no one ever makes these arguments sincerely.

    I don’t think all such arguments are made in bad faith. I think that the process of arguing that way makes it easier to argue in bad faith, and makes bad faith arguments relatively more successful. When something is easier and also relatively more successful then the frequency will increase.

    For example, if you make it easier for cops to justify shooting people; and if you make it difficult to investigate properly and catch people in lies; and you make it easy to defend the cops even if they do it wrong; and you make it very unlikely that people will convict; then you will expect that more cops will shoot people. ETA: Some shootings are justified. This would tend to increase the unjustfied kind.

    And so they do.

    ETA: conversely, if you make it harder for cops to lie about facts (by using cameras;) and if you make it more likely that they will be charged (by policies and behaviors;) and less likely that they will escape the consequences of a bad shooting; then bad shootings will go down.

    And so they do.

    (I don’t know if you disagree. If so, we either should be having a basic economics debate or should stop wasting our time.)

    Same thing here. Broad social responses to labels create incentives to misuse them. If someone can’t get a neighbor’s contract through competition but can get it by calling her “un-american,” then you’d expect “un-american” to come out there pretty fast. And so it did, when that was an effective label. Surprise!

    If so, I’d reply that surely all arguments – including the anti-political-correctness argument Chait makes – are sometimes made in bad faith.

    Yup!

    Why single out arguments against bigotry, when virtually all arguments are sometimes made in bad faith?

    by “single out” I assume you’re asking why I didn’t, for example,
    (a) list conservative example terms;
    (b) state that conservative misuse of terms has been dominant in the past and will be again;
    (c) explain why I thought liberal ones happened to be more common right now;
    (d) concede I might be wrong (about the liberal dominance, not the conservative past); and
    (e) ask the board to help provide evidence if I was wrong?
    (f) ETA: also, concede that conservatives want and try to use this tactic?
    Because that is what I actually did. You seem to have missed it.

    Couldn’t your own argument be made in bad faith – for instance, by someone who thinks “Well, arguing against anti-racism is hard. I’m not sure I can win. But I do know I can win by saying using the word racism is an unfair attack on me”?

    Yes, absolutely. And that depends on, as I said, whether “there is already a powerful negative-association social label in place.”

    As evidenced by Chait and folks like him, I do think that the “false/inappropriate accusation” social label is growing in strength, though I don’t think it’s as strong as the label itself.

    However, with my preferred method of argument that defense loses power, because it only gains prevalence in the first place as a response to those labels.

    Furthermore, even if you don’t claim all anti-bigotry arguments are in bad faith, your argument ignores that there are some people who use these terms in good faith.

    Sure. How am I ignoring that? I’m arguing for a way which IMO does not prevent good faith arguments for points but deters bad faith ones from both sides.

    It’s unfair to tarnish all anti-bigotry arguments broadly, as you’re doing here, because some people make them in bad faith.

    You keep suggesting that I am aiming at “anti-bigotry” arguments. I’m not sure if you’re picking this up, because you keep suggesting otherwise, but I am arguing against labeling generally, not labeling as used by liberals. Some sort of acknowledgment of that would be courteous.

    Nor do you provide any principled way to distinguish arguments made in good vs arguments made in bad faith.

    Actually, I’ve done that in considerable detail in a related thread, within the past month. I’ve given examples of arguments which I thought were appropriate. And you participated in that thread.

    An argument made in good faith is, very generally speaking (not trying to provide a perfect definition here) one which provides the supporting foundation and which relies on the point, not the label, for its force. I think it’s preferable to make the point without using the label at all but certainly, as I said, you can use it it in an appropriate way.

  15. 16
    desipis says:

    g&w @12, I think you’ve missed a couple of steps in your list. In terms of being a free speech issue, I would see the key steps as being:

    1) It starts with social stigma which gets attached to behavior which is widely accepted as inappropriate and bad. (“Jews should be killed;” “it’s OK to beat and rape your wife;” “the government should discriminate against blacks and prevent intermarriage.)

    2) That behavior gets a label (“antisemitic, sexist, racist”) and the label gets socially accepted as “bad shit.”

    2b) The “bad shit” gets proscribed by various levels of authority. This doesn’t (usually) happen at the criminal law level in the US due to the constitution, however “anti-discrimination policies”, “codes of conduct” and “boycotts” get used to police speech through having the power to cause unemployment, social exclusion or economic harm.

    3) At some point, people want to make an argument and think “well, this argument is hard. I’m not sure I can win. But I know I can win by expanding the stigma to include it.”

    4) So they try. (“Failure to support israeli policies is antisemitic.” “Failure to support title 9 due process changes is sexist.” “Arguing against a disparate impact approach is racist.”)

    4b) These labels often come with the explicit or implicit threat of enforcement through the means descibed above. Sometimes those who use them even resort to vigilante bullying.

    This is how I see it as a free-speech issue. When the same language is being used to both police speech and to criticise it, it becomes difficult to see the difference. I think it’s understandable and right to push back at the bluring of this divide.

  16. 17
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    I personally don’t see it as a “free speech issue,” to the degree that means “prevention of speech.” Obviously folks are not prevented from actually saying what you want. (functional prevention can happen at the extremes with vigilantism, i.e. “I am scared to publish mohammed cartoons due to fear of being killed” but that isn’t what folks are talking about here.)

    It is, obviously, at times a deterrent to speech. But that isn’t really a “free speech issue” either, since arguing against deterrent speech would prevent the classic “fight speech with speech” solution.

    Nonetheless I see it as a related and important issue. That’s because the inherent goals of free speech support are to enable and promote discourse, especially with respect to competing views. (As the old saw goes, if it wasn’t oppositional we wouldn’t need to protect it in the first place) IMO this trend is–for the reasons I set forth above–a practice which seems inherently opposed to good discourse.

  17. 18
    desipis says:

    It is, obviously, at times a deterrent to speech. But that isn’t really a “free speech issue” either, since arguing against deterrent speech would prevent the classic “fight speech with speech” solution.

    I’m not sure you can neatly categorise these things into “free speech issue” and mere “deterrent”. To me there’s a spectrum going from death to mere rudeness. That spectrum will go through imprisonment, fines, getting fired, getting kicked out of class, being harassed, being bullied, being socially ostracised, etc. I think the issue with ‘political correctness’ is one that exists across that spectrum.

    I do agree that it’s the goal of open discourse and the clash of ideas (rather than a clash of people) that suffers as a result.

  18. 19
    pocketjacks says:

    @desipis & @gin-and-whiskey,

    I agree with desipis. gin-and-whiskey, I’m confused at your position now. How are accusations of racism or sexism, which you have been arguing against, not also merely “deterrents” to speech? No one’s being legally prevented from speaking due to them, after all.

    I think that “vigilante bullying” of the type desipis talks about, even if it avoids using the r-word, is a very big deal and has a massively chilling effect on free speech, while mere invocation of the r-word on an otherwise safe platform such as an online message board is not an issue whatsoever. You seem to have the opposite perspective, which is puzzling to me.

    No, their objective was to stop their university from honoring and paying a six-figure fee to Bill Maher at their commencement, not simply to stop him from speaking.

    I wouldn’t approve of a petition to stop him from speaking (for instance, if student group “A” invited him to speak at student group A’s event, and student group B started a petition). But a petition to stop him from being the commencement speaker is not at all the same.

    Bill Maher doesn’t have a First Amendment right to be a commencement speaker, or to be paid an insane fee by the U of CA. He has a first amendment right to speak; he doesn’t have a right to that specific platform.

    This standard sounds like it could be stretched and abused infinitely, however, to effectively oppose free speech for your opponents. After all, most speakers need to be paid for their time. It seems like someone could always block speakers from opposing sides from speaking while citing “Fees! Specific platform!” as excuses.

    The very first link that RonF linked to seems like absolutely the most clear-cut example of preventing someone from speaking. It included events such as:

    1:46 –Protesters pound desks and blow horns continuously to disrupt the presentation.
    4:50 – Protesters start arguing with attendees/organizers. Eruption of clapping/laughter at 5:21. Horn again at 5:45. Yelling by protesters. Security is called. Protester says “I have the right to make some noise” at 6:10 (the classic argument of “my suppression of others’ speech is my form of exercising my free speech”). Various catty arguments by protesters, punctuated by horn blowings, laughing, clapping, and so forth.
    8:00 – Organizer tells protesters that if they have something to say to please hold it for the Q&A session. Protesters ignore him and continue blowing horns and banging on desks.
    9:11 – Organizer informs Dr. Fiamengo that security will be there soon to remove disruptive protesters.
    11:00 – Protester argues that the mere presence of CAFE is a disturbance to the atmosphere at the University of Ottawa.
    12:30 – More banging on desks.
    13:26 – Organizer says “may we carry on [with the event]?” Protester yells “no!”
    14:40 – Update by organizer for livestream audience. Listeners can barely hear him over protesters yelling. Argument continues among crowd after he finishes.

    And it all culminated with the fire alarm being pulled to disrupt the event after campus security (admirably) ended up doing their jobs.

    It seems like this is exactly the type of thing Chait is talking about. I wonder how many people are unwilling to openly denounce this behavior, thus vindicating him.

  19. 20
    mythago says:

    It seems to me that generally, when there have been accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia here, it’s been far from stifling to discussion.

    The ‘stifling to discussion’ argument reminds me of the time when it was conservatives and libertarians mocking the claim that there was such a thing as ‘silencing’ or ‘shaming’. Grow a thicker skin, went the response; counter it with more speech, but don’t expect the rough discourse of the intellectual marketplace to take special care with your precious feelings.

    How the world turns.

    Re Chait specifically, I don’t know why we’re pretending this happened in a vacuum. Chait has been repeatedly called on his Lincoln-liberal bullshit, including having his ass badly handed to him by Ta-Nehisi Coates (who infuriates the Chaits of the world because his calm and civility makes it impossible for them to credibly stuff him into the trappings of the Angry Negro), and over changes at The New Republic.

  20. 21
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    pocketjacks says:
    February 1, 2015 at 5:24 am
    @desipis & @gin-and-whiskey,

    I agree with desipis. gin-and-whiskey, I’m confused at your position now. How are accusations of racism or sexism, which you have been arguing against, not also merely “deterrents” to speech? No one’s being legally prevented from speaking due to them, after all.

    Technically they ARE simply “deterrents.” But they are deterrents whose communicative/discourse value is vastly outweighed by their attack/anti-discourse costs. Moreover, those costs can be wholly avoided by saying whatever it is you actually mean without using the disputed words.

    When a strategy has low social value, high costs, and easy alternatives, then society would be better off it it wasn’t used. That is why I think we should argue against the strategy.

    Why IS it so popular, then? Because the individual experience is different from the social one: from the perspective of the speaker it has high value (it helps them win their argument) low cost (it’s a simple accusation, inaccuracies are rarely challenged by valued peers, and has minimal consequences;) and complex alternatives (it is much harder to explain things than to just break out a label.)

    The desire to use a first strike weapon is tempting, and effective, but wrong nonetheless.

    I think that “vigilante bullying” of the type desipis talks about, even if it avoids using the r-word, is a very big deal and has a massively chilling effect on free speech, while mere invocation of the r-word on an otherwise safe platform such as an online message board is not an issue whatsoever. You seem to have the opposite perspective, which is puzzling to me.

    I don’t have the “opposite perspective,” I just have not detailed this beyond a general trend. Obviously there will be specific hypotheticals which require further details;or which are simply exceptions to the rule. I just haven’t pointed them out. Similarly, it is obvious Amp or my other opponents would not support people screaming epithets in an effort to silence opposing views; they just haven’t bothered to specifically say so.

    That RonF example can be generally called “disruptive heckling.” It’s not actually speech, at least in the eyes of free speech advocates. You can turn your back on someone; wear an oppositional t-shirt, put on a competing rally, make your point in the Q&A, lobby your school for a panel with opposing experts instead of a single speaker; and so on. But pulling a fire alarm isn’t “speech” of the kind we’re talking about. Sure, some folks do it on both sides, but most folks (also on both sides) properly condemn it.

    mythago says:
    February 1, 2015 at 10:10 am

    It seems to me that generally, when there have been accusations of racism/sexism/homophobia here, it’s been far from stifling to discussion.

    The ‘stifling to discussion’ argument reminds me of the time when it was conservatives and libertarians mocking the claim that there was such a thing as ‘silencing’ or ‘shaming’. Grow a thicker skin, went the response; counter it with more speech, but don’t expect the rough discourse of the intellectual marketplace to take special care with your precious feelings.
    How the world turns.

    What are you saying here?

    Re Chait specifically, I don’t know why we’re pretending this happened in a vacuum

    Probably because it doesn’t matter what he personally thinks.

    Chait isn’t writing about HIMSELF, but is trying to write about a TREND. Which is to say: whether or not folks like Chait or anyone else has nothing to do with the question of whether he has made a cogent argument about discourse. And it has shit-all to do with whether someone else entirely is exhibiting the problems that we’re trying to talk about.

    Chait has been repeatedly called on his Lincoln-liberal bullshit, including having his ass badly handed to him by Ta-Nehisi Coates (who infuriates the Chaits of the world

    that’s…. odd. I read that exchange when it came out and just read it again, and “infuriate” doesn’t seem at all accurate to describe like Chait’s position. Nor TNC’s, for that matter. Frankly that argument was about as model as you can get.

  21. 22
    mythago says:

    What are you saying here?

    That the complaints about ‘political correctness’ are, as Amp touched on, both hypocritical (because it attempts to shut down discourse in the same way it professes to despise, i.e. attaching negative labels to the speaker or type of speech) and contrary to the principle that you fight reprehensible speech with more free speech.

    And yes, Chait is writing about himself, in the time-honored tradition of making one’s personal unpleasantness into a Huge and Serious Trend that Should Concern Us All. This kind of navel-gazing is a hallmark of chattering class journalism.

  22. 23
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    mythago says:
    What are you saying here?
    That the complaints about ‘political correctness’ are, as Amp touched on, both hypocritical (because it attempts to shut down discourse in the same way it professes to despise, i.e. attaching negative labels to the speaker or type of speech) and contrary to the principle that you fight reprehensible speech with more free speech.

    Yes: Saying “that’s P.C.” to win an argument is certainly in the category of stuff I oppose.
    but as I am saying–and as I think Chait is implying by his article–we should be having a different type of discourse, which he mihgt sum up as the “classical liberal” approach.

    But I don’t have nearly as much interest in defending Chait (who I don’t much care about one way or another) as in finding out whether your problem is with Chait or with the concept.

    And yes, Chait is writing about himself, in the time-honored tradition of making one’s personal unpleasantness into a Huge and Serious Trend that Should Concern Us All. This kind of navel-gazing is a hallmark of chattering class journalism.

    Can you explain how an article that is filled with descriptions of–and quotes from–third parties and which contains almost no “I” statements is properly construed as “writing about…one’s personal unpleasantness?” It seems sort of strange.

  23. 24
    mythago says:

    Somehow, I don’t think this “me and my friends are the entire world” thing would be so hard to discern in other contexts. If I go through an ugly divorce, and then post a long screed, full of cherry-picked examples, about how the divorce courts these days hate women and punish mothers, even if I never mentioned myself once, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch for anyone to read that as a very thinly disguised rant about how angry I was about my experiences, generalized to the entire world because it sounds more intellectual and neutral that way.
    Also, as noted in Gawker, of all places:

    “Do you know who else once called for a journalist to be fired for allowing wrongthink to be published? Jonathan Chait, who in 2009 called for the firing of a Detroit Free Press editor for allowing a columnist with opinions about the head coach of the University of Michigan football team to report on the head coach.”

  24. 25
    closetpuritan says:

    Ta-Nehisi Coates (who infuriates the Chaits of the world because his calm and civility makes it impossible for them to credibly stuff him into the trappings of the Angry Negro)

    @mythago, that reminds me

    LOL. Here is the thing: it’s impossible to read this piece and imagine (perhaps as Chait would wish us to) that, for example, a black woman wrote it. One might notice in the current media scene that the minority liberal writers who have made it to institutional prominence (and I’m talking The Atlantic and The New Yorker, not the truly ineffectual supplicant-gathering of Twitter fame) are gentle and kind and reasonable and empathetic to a point of miraculousness.

    Chait’s piece, on the other hand, is coldly devoid of sympathy. More bluntly, it’s smarmy as fuck.

  25. 26
    closetpuritan says:

    Regarding labels… I think terrorism is still pretty powerful, across the political spectrum, even though it’s not what it was in 2002 America. This post on the threats against Anita Sarkeesian and the school she was scheduled to speak at is an example of “Hey! We can use this label to get other people to condemn the behavior!”

    But not, I think, in a bad way. That incident should be considered terrorism. And certainly the terrorism label is not being used inaccurately there. I think “terrorism” might help some people, on a gut level, understand how this is bad in a way that explaining, “Well, it’s bad because making threats makes people fearful to speak” perhaps does not. I’m not entirely sure how to draw the line between labels that detract from the discourse in the way g&w says and just plain new words. Is any new word with a connotation of “this is bad” too intellectually lazy? And I think that Amp is right that the labels come before widespread disapproval of the behavior. I think the labels do help expand what’s considered bad behavior by pointing out the similarity between less-severe forms of racism, terrorism, etc… but they do also enable people to do so in a shorthand, without spelling out how. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, or even if “good or bad” is appropriate for what is basically a tool.

  26. 27
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    [shrug] like I said, it’s not as if i care especially much about Chait, but I’m still not sure whether you’re opposed to the speaker or the message.

  27. 28
    mythago says:

    When a message is that badly shot through with a personal tantrum, half-truths and bad logic, g&w, I’m not all that inclined to shovel through the shit to see if maybe there’s a pony hiding inside.

    Others have already written quite a bit about why his whining about political correctness is silly. For a good time, read the comments on that thread at Popehat as commenters try to square the circle on ‘I totes adore free speech of all kinds’ and ‘nobody is allowed to say mean things about privileged white dudes’.

  28. 29
    closetpuritan says:

    Moving back towards the larger conversation, in between a couple posts I didn’t think much of (Angus Johnson responds well), Freddie deBoer makes a good point:

    As I have gotten older, I have grown more and more convinced that the most important element of politics is stakes. Stakes. Skin in the game. And the accelerants demonstrates how a difference in stakes can render the most ardent allies into a part of the problem. For the urge to simply intensify every conflict demonstrates an indifference to political progress that can only emerge from privilege, from a lack of stakes. Why not throw gas on every fire, when you know you’re never going to get burned? Chait discusses the way in which burnout develops from these kinds of conflicts, the way people end up giving up out of exhaustion. And, indeed, I have observed in my life some of the more vituperative political voices I know grow jaded by the nastiness they themselves have helped create. But this is where stakes comes in most directly: because these people are white and educated and financially comfortable, they could withdraw from politics in a way that people of color and the working class simply can’t.

    The idea that A) marginalized groups should not be expected to remain dispassionate when their rights or other issues important to their lives are being discussed, B) marginalized groups do not have a duty to educate people, and C) the tone argument, are all important when applied to actual marginalized people, not allies. (Well, some of them apply to some degree with allies, but less so.) I still hear allies invoking them. I don’t have any better evidence than deBoer–just anecdata–but it does seem like, both on an individual level and on a “what is this site’s primary audience” level, white, educated, and middle class people are more likely to be vitriolic when disagreeing with people about social justice. deBoer mentions Michelle Goldberg, and I’ve also seen Goldberg criticized for painting it as “white women on one side, women of color on the other (the harsher side)”.

  29. 30
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Which popehat thread? I don’t see one on chait but my browser doesn’t always show popehat right for some reason.

  30. 31
    mythago says:

    I agree with some of his points – that being vitriolic ‘because you can’ is not a virtue, and that sometimes fanning the flames gets other people burned. (Witness how Black Twitter activists started a “day of peace” to commemorate Michael Brown’s killing and the events in Ferguson, and Anonymous activists tried to jump that into a “day of rage” – not thinking or caring who would have to deal with the fallout of a “day of rage” started from behind the comfort of their keyboards.) But as he admits, it’s easy for him to lecture other people to sit down, shut up and watch their tone.

  31. 32
    mythago says:

    g&w, it’s the “Preferred First Speaker” thread, which I think is the most eloquent summary of the no-tagbacks school of Free Speech thinkery yet:

    https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/21/ten-points-about-speech-ducks-and-flights-to-africa/

  32. 33
    RonF says:

    Amp:

    No, their objective was to stop their university from honoring and paying a six-figure fee to Bill Maher at their commencement, not simply to stop him from speaking.

    I’ll go along with that, then. There was someone who came on the MIT campus to speak – and get paid a fee – and I protested. When someone told me that I was opposing free speech I replied “No, I’m opposing PAID speech. Let him get on a soapbox on Boston Common and talk all he wants and I’ll have no objection.” But even under that circumstance, I was willing to protest his paid appearance but I would never have disrupted it.

  33. 34
    RonF says:

    pocketjacks:

    This standard sounds like it could be stretched and abused infinitely, however, to effectively oppose free speech for your opponents. After all, most speakers need to be paid for their time. It seems like someone could always block speakers from opposing sides from speaking while citing “Fees! Specific platform!” as excuses.

    Protesting that someone should not be hired to speak by an institution supported by your money seems a legitimate exercise of free speech to me. Disrupting said speech once said institution puts on the event anyway is not.

  34. 35
    RonF says:

    Do you think they have the same broad social credibility as terms such as racist, sexist, homophobic, antisemitic, and discriminatory?

    Some of which are words that the left, in my opinion, has used to attempt to impose a viewpoint by their very use.

    “Racist” – many on the left now claim that this must include not only thoughts or acts based on a belief of racial inferiority but must also include the ability of the person holding such thoughts or committing such acts to impose consequences on the object of their animosity; they must have power to enforce such. Certain groups are believed to not hold such power, and thus cannot be racist. This is not a broadly held belief outside of academia, so this should be considered a work in progress by the left.
    “Homophobic” – and for good measure, “Islamophobic”. “Phobia” means “unreasoning fear”. But these words are very often used to describe any expression of disapproval towards homosexuals or Muslims, thus trying to establish the concept that any such disapproval must a) stem from fear and b) be unreasonable, and to thus depict the people expressing such views as fearful and unreasoning.
    “Discriminatory” – to discriminate is to choose among alternatives on the basis of some property they may have. Indeed, discrimination on the basis of race (to select on example) is odious. But the word is used by the left as universally wrong. That’s not true.

  35. 36
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    mythago says:
    February 1, 2015 at 1:39 pm
    Somehow, I don’t think this “me and my friends are the entire world” thing would be so hard to discern in other contexts. If I go through an ugly divorce, and then post a long screed, full of cherry-picked examples, about how the divorce courts these days hate women and punish mothers, even if I never mentioned myself once, I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch for anyone to read that as a very thinly disguised rant about how angry I was about my experiences, generalized to the entire world because it sounds more intellectual and neutral that way.

    Honestly I don’t care what someone DOESN’T write; I care what they DO write. Somewhat unsurprisingly, people tend to think of general terms because of personal experiences.

    So what?

    I would hope that if you tried to write about generalized experiences, any subsequent attacks on your post wouldn’t insert or assume words or opinions biases which you deliberately didn’t discuss, ignore general statements and third party references which you deliberately did write, and otherwise go on as if you had written something other than what you actually decided to put online.

  36. 37
    closetpuritan says:

    I wonder if part of the reason people are focusing on Chait himself rather than his ideas is that other critiques of social justice callout culture have been done before, and done better IMO, than Chait’s. One recent (but still earlier than Chait’s) example: You’re not being tone policed, you’re just an a**hole

    There are also 4 different examples listed at the bottom of this post, though I haven’t read them all.

    RonF: Some of which are words that the left, in my opinion, has used to attempt to impose a viewpoint by their very use.

    This doesn’t seem meaningfully different than other types of appeal to emotion, to me.

    ETA: “This”=using racism, etc. in such a way as to implicitly argue for a particular definition of racism.

  37. 38
    Patrick says:

    Part of the reason for the Chait beat down is that he used to work at a magazine that was run by a very, very, VERY racist guy, Marty Peretz, who used the magazine to promote seriously racist ideas. Just to be clear- this isn’t one of those “oh, maybe liberals are just being overly sensitive” racism accusations. He spent years essentially calling Muslims animals who need to be put down.

    Other than that one jerk, the magazine was relatively liberal, and, well, jobs as writers are few and far between, so everyone who worked there kind of sucked it up and pretended the racist guy wasn’t really there, and wasn’t really representative. When the magazine folded, instead of the send off that the writers wanted (everyone praising them for their hard work, and thanking them for the memories), Ta Nehisi Coates, a better writer from a competitor outlet, essentially went to the wake with a dagger to make sure the corpse didn’t try anything funny. Chait was upset, and Coates very gently tore him to pieces.

    So everyone’s interpreting Chait’s article in light of that event.

  38. 39
    mythago says:

    gin-and-whiskey: as Patrick has eloquently noted above, there is this thing called “context”. If I were writing a rant that was supposed to be about Trend X, but was really a projection of my personal and very public negative experiences with X, it would not be improper or wildly speculative for people to read my rant in the context of the latter.

    Similarly, as I’m sure you’re fully aware, it is also possible to write about “I” and “me” and “you” without using those exact words. For example, if Amp and I were disagreeing about whether it was right for me to boycott a company, I could certainly say “Amp’s criticism of me is wrongheaded and unfair”. I could also say “You know, it’s a shame that some people have a myopic view of the power of boycotts and are needlessly vicious to those who see the social utility of those boycotts applied to well-deserving targets” – and I think even you would call me out if I tried to pretend that second expression was merely a generalized observation musing on a social phenomenon, rather than a snarky statement directed at Amp.

    Also, as many others have pointed out at length, it’s not just that Chait is expressing his personal hurt fee-fees tarted up as a grand statement about Political Correctness and Free Speech; it’s that he does kind of a shitty job of trying to prove what he says he’s trying to prove. That will happen when you’re not really constructing a careful argument as a result of evidence.

  39. 40
    Christopher says:

    The ‘stifling to discussion’ argument reminds me of the time when it was conservatives and libertarians mocking the claim that there was such a thing as ‘silencing’ or ‘shaming’. Grow a thicker skin, went the response; counter it with more speech, but don’t expect the rough discourse of the intellectual marketplace to take special care with your precious feelings.

    That time is now.

    In my experience people who argue against political correctness are making the same damn argument as people arguing for it.

    Look at how many responses to Chait’s article involve telling him and the people he writes about to get thicker skins.

    The Crooked Timber post linked to above responded to his story of a dude who had his home vandalized and lost his job with what amounts to “God, stop being such a whiner.”

    Or, for example, it mocks Hanna Rosin’s story because oh my god, she’s afraid of a hashtag. I wonder if that same standard applies to, oh, say, Felicia Day and #gamergate?

    I’m not going to defend Chait, either, because he’s making the same damn argument, where upsetting stuff aimed at people he likes is a terrible way to shut down discourse, but upsetting stuff aimed at people he doesn’t like is something his opponents just need to get over.

    Here’s a quote he gives from one woman regarding her experience talking about how she feels expressing controversial opinions on a certain online forum:

    “The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.”

    Here’s another quote Chait shares from different woman discussing her experiences expressing controversial opinions in a certain online forum:

    “The level of belittling, derailing, crappy jokes, and all around insensitivity here is astounding and also makes me feel very unsafe in this [forum]”

    Pop Quiz: Which of these people is a victim of PC gone amok, and which of them needs to get a thicker skin and get used to the fact that not everybody in an open forum is going to agree with you?

    Hint: Jonathan Chait prefers the politics of the first woman to those of the second.

  40. 41
    closetpuritan says:

    These are arguably nitpicks, since they don’t contradict your basic argument, Christopher, but…
    Or, for example, it mocks Hanna Rosin’s story because oh my god, she’s afraid of a hashtag. I wonder if that same standard applies to, oh, say, Felicia Day and #gamergate?

    As far as I know (and if Chait knows otherwise, it would have made his argument stronger to say so), Hanna Rosin received no death threats or rape threats on #RIPPatriarchy, and was not doxxed. The same cannot be said for those who’ve been targeted by gamergate, including Day.

    Yup, that Hanna Rosin:

    In the epilogue to her book The End of Men, Hanna Rosin—an editor at Slate—argued that harassment of women online could be seen as a cause for celebration. It shows just how far we’ve come. Many women on the Internet “are in positions of influence, widely published and widely read; if they sniff out misogyny, I have no doubt they will gleefully skewer the responsible sexist in one of many available online outlets, and get results.”

    Also:

    Counterpoints: In the opening anecdote, a guy wrote a relatively mild, not funny at all anti-feminist satire for the more conservative college paper in which he laughed about majoring in womyn’s studies (LOL), laughed about trigger warnings, and laughed about intersectionality. As if that’s a thing, right!? In response, some college kids egged his door, and the other more left-leaning paper he also wrote for told him they didn’t need his submissions any longer.

    I don’t read that as “quit your whining”, I read that as “one incident of a college kid’s door getting egged, and a school paper no longer accepting his submissions, is far from a philosophical danger to free speech”. (With some bonus mockery of the column he wrote.) IOW, it’s a small group behaving badly. Also, it’s misleading to say “lost his job”–I’m pretty sure, as a writer for college papers, he would have been unpaid. (I don’t agree that they should have made a blanket ban on his submissions, though.)

  41. 42
    closetpuritan says:

    In my experience people who argue against political correctness are making the same damn argument as people arguing for it.

    Look at how many responses to Chait’s article involve telling him and the people he writes about to get thicker skins.

    You’re basically right. It’s an argument over what is reasonable to ask people to stop doing, in the name of civility, compassion, etc., and what is just a silly or unreasonable demand. Things like ripping up signs, sending death threats, etc.–both sides are mostly agreed on that. The remaining argument is generally about which things are Things You Should Do, and which are Things That Are Just Silly. But, in Chait’s case specifically, he argues that the Things That Are Just Silly are an existential threat to free speech and/or left-of-center politics, and he simply does not make a good case for that.

  42. 43
    closetpuritan says:

    I’ve now read all of the blog links at the bottom of the post.

    Thinking about Michelle Goldberg’s piece… There is a genuine internet/social media driven phenomenon of pile-ons that is more or less a new phenomenon. It is certainly not limited to social justice, and there is also the semi-benevolent version where particular stories or causes (the woman bullied on the bus, the 21-mile-walking-commute man, the Ice Bucket Challenge) get large amounts of attention and money, more money in proportion to other causes than would be ideal. (But would the money go to other causes?) It is not fair to shirtstorm guy, for example, that he became so famous over what was the feminism equivalent of a parking ticket. But most of the individuals talking about him weren’t doing anything wrong; it was the fact that so very many people were talking about him that made the consequences disproportionate. I don’t see a good answer to this, honestly.

  43. 44
    pocketjacks says:

    Technically they ARE simply “deterrents.” But they are deterrents whose communicative/discourse value is vastly outweighed by their attack/anti-discourse costs. Moreover, those costs can be wholly avoided by saying whatever it is you actually mean without using the disputed words.

    When a strategy has low social value, high costs, and easy alternatives, then society would be better off it it wasn’t used. That is why I think we should argue against the strategy.

    Why IS it so popular, then? Because the individual experience is different from the social one: from the perspective of the speaker it has high value (it helps them win their argument) low cost (it’s a simple accusation, inaccuracies are rarely challenged by valued peers, and has minimal consequences;) and complex alternatives (it is much harder to explain things than to just break out a label.)

    The desire to use a first strike weapon is tempting, and effective, but wrong nonetheless.

    All of this seems more true of “vigilante bullying” than “use of the r-, s-, or h-words” to me. Coordinated campaigns of technically-not-illegal actions to harass and make lives difficult to holders of wrong opinions to serve as a warning to others may be… well, technically not illegal, but they are deterrents whose communicative/discourse value are vastly outweighed by their (the rest of what you said).

    They are also just plain wrong in an ethical sense.

    On the other hand, if people stopped using the h-word and started using a euphemism instead, a few years down the line the exact same people would be complaining that use of the new euphemism is as stifling and tyrannical as the h-word used to be. That’s how euphemisms evolve, from water closet to toilet to bathroom/washroom to restroom. Ultimately, people’s problems aren’t with the words, but with the concepts, and that’s much harder to accommodate.

    @RonF,

    Protesting that someone should not be hired to speak by an institution supported by your money seems a legitimate exercise of free speech to me. Disrupting said speech once said institution puts on the event anyway is not.

    Colleges and universities have both a socially and morally bestowed charge to present a diverse intellectual marketplace and to allow students to form their own opinions and choose the ideas they want to fight for. In the case of commencement speakers, I can kind of get the argument for commencement speakers if I squint and tilt my head enough, because they do sort of have a captive audience and their speaking fees are very high. (Though ultimately I lose it, if the commencement speaker is not even going to discuss their opinions on topics that made them controversial in the first place, as is overwhelmingly likely to be the case, and they are otherwise a generally accepted American thinker, public figure, or celebrity of the type that always tend to be commencement speakers anyway, save for that controversial opinion. If Bill Maher did inexplicably go on an anti-Islam tirade in a commencement speech and students protested, that I would see as a perfectly legitimate free speech reaction.)

    However, if students belonging to a Club Advocating for Unpopular Opinion X decide to hire a speaker to speak at an event that they’re hosting, and no one is being forced to come, trying to block that because part of the speaker’s fee is coming out of a general university fund earmarked for such uses, because that comes out of “your money”, is some weak sauce. Not when such payments are standard and go through 95% of the time, including for invited anti-X speakers. This would be anti-free speech, plain and simple. Even the “your money” standard can be stretched to the point of abuse.

    Ultimately, what genuine free speech requires is not merely the absence of certain actions on a proscribed list, but the presence of respect for humanistic discourse, diverse opinions, and the humility to realize that you have something to learn from those with very different ideals than you. Failing that, no amount of goalposts erected along technical distinctions (such as “your money” vs. not) is going to work; people will just find end runs or loopholes to achieve the same objective of intimidation, and when they can’t, they’ll just completely ignore the rules and dare anyone to protest if they have the power.

  44. 45
    mythago says:

    closetpuritan said at @41 and @42 what I wanted to say, only more eloquently, and I don’t think they’re nitpicks at all.

    On Rosin specifically, let’s reiterate that Chait doesn’t claim she received vile gendered slurs, harassment or death threats. He doesn’t say that #RIPpatriarchy was used as a vehicle to attack her family or to encourage others to doxx her, a la Gamergate. Instead, he says that she was “assailed by feminist critics”, and that the hashtag “became a label for critics to lampoon her thesis.”

    And that, in a nutshell, is the kind of nonsense that forms the core of Chait’s argument. Somebody who, in his view, is a proper, card-carrying member of the chattering classes exercised their right to publish an opinion, and other people who owe that person either loyalty or deference disagreed with that opinion harshly and made fun of their arguments. And that is particularly intolerable when ‘somebody’ is Jonathan Chait.

  45. 46
    Christopher says:

    On Rosin specifically, let’s reiterate that Chait doesn’t claim she received vile gendered slurs, harassment or death threats. He doesn’t say that #RIPpatriarchy was used as a vehicle to attack her family or to encourage others to doxx her, a la Gamergate. Instead, he says that she was “assailed by feminist critics”, and that the hashtag “became a label for critics to lampoon her thesis.”

    Agreed, because Chait’s article is terrible and I don’t think it even has a coherent point.

    But I’m not defending Chait; I’m arguing that a lot of anti-Chait arguments have the same glaring flaws that Chait’s article does.

    Because sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; just as Chait never asserts that Rosin received anything other than, basically, criticism and light mockery, Belle Waring at Crooked Timber isn’t making the argument you’re making, which is that The specific hashtag aimed at Rosin was basically benign.

    Right? Sometimes twitter mobs can be deeply frightening, and legitimately hugely harmful, but Chait provides no evidence that this one was. That’s an extremely good argument. But I don’t think that’s what Waring said.

    Waring, as I read it, actually argues that being afraid of or intimidated by hashtag activism is inherently silly. Here’s what Waring wrote:

    “Then, something unbelievably horrible happened, that will make everyone take this PC threat a little more seriously, I hope: someone created a hashtag to make fun of her. Yes. A hashtag. Now, as a result, an intellectually battered Rosin is more careful about what she says on twitter. I will be holding a vigil later in which I hand out candles in dixie cups if anyone wishes to join in.”

    After a pretty big shitstorm in which twitter activism was and is used to harass women in a really frightening way, Waring seems to be making fun of the very idea that a woman would be frightened of twitter activism.

    I find that gross.

    Waring and Chait are begging the same question, inviting us to make assumptions about Rosin’s experiences based not on evidence, but on how much we like Rosin’s politics. If we’re on Rosin’s side, then obviously she was assailed by a howling mob of terrible hectoring monsters who would cause even the stoutest of mortals to quail and fold under their constant barrage of hate speech. If we’re not on Rosin’s side, then obviously our side fired off a number of extremely cogent criticisms leavened with some harmless humor and the thin-skinned Rosin folded under the least little criticism.

    Which of those is closer to the truth?

    I have no idea. Because neither Chait nor Waring provide any evidence for us to work off of except Rosin’s politics. We’re supposed to just make an assumption about what she faced based on whether we like the kinds of books she writes.

    I don’t care for that mode of arguing.

  46. 47
    closetpuritan says:

    In my previous comment, I messed up the source link for a Hanna Rosin quote. Here it is.

    Christopher, I guess we’re just reading Waring differently. Maybe Waring should have considered that Chait could be misrepresenting Rosin and she did not merely fear “banishment” or a large volume of mockery. I haven’t seen any quotes from Rosin that she did fear that it would go past mockery, but maybe she was afraid it would lead to death threats, etc. And who knows, maybe Waring would have mocked such fears if Chait had mentioned them. The way I see it, though, she has mocked “a hashtag to make fun of her” [and yes, although the text does not make it crystal clear which interpretation is right, I read it as mocking this, rather than the idea that any hashtag could cause serious harm] based on a description of Rosin’s reaction that talked only of her feelings of isolation.

  47. 48
    mythago says:

    Christian: I also don’t care for that mode of arguing. But like closetpuritan, I don’t see it in Waring’s piece because I am taking Chait at his word.

    That is, Chait is trying to prove his case by offering specific examples, and I am assuming that his description of those examples is accurate and true – giving him all the benefit of the doubt. So when he says that political correctness has run amok because X and Y happened, I am not speculating that he is lying, exaggerating or that they happened differently, absent some evidence to the contrary (like his plainly wrong claims about the Andrew Jackson play). When he talks about Rosin, he doesn’t claim that she experienced harassment or threats or that, for example, her job or family were threatened. He says that 1) she was harshly criticized by some feminists, and 2) people made up a hashtag on Twitter to collate making fun of her opinions. Note that Chait does not even claim that the hashtag was mocking Rosin herself, but that it was used to “lampoon her thesis.”

    And this is what Waring mocked. Waring did not pooh-pooh the potential nastiness that can get collected under “hashtag activism”, or suggest that Rosin should have out on her big-girl pants in the face of death threats, or say that the Preferred First Speaker doctrine applies to Rosin’s political opponents only. Waring pointed out that as Chait sorrowfully describes it, Rosin was feeling like maybe she ought to not talk so much because people criticized her writing, and sometimes did so by “lampooning” it on Twitter.

    So could it be that Chait is leaving out the death threats? Possibly, but Waring is reacting to what he said, not what he might have said or what possibly could have been left out.

  48. 49
    RonF says:

    More on university campuses becoming unsafe spaces for free speech.

    An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4 to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object.

    Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm-trooper tactics.

    Here is an original source, with videos, of a report on the above incident.