{"id":21401,"date":"2016-03-23T04:15:28","date_gmt":"2016-03-23T11:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=21401"},"modified":"2016-03-23T08:39:19","modified_gmt":"2016-03-23T15:39:19","slug":"anti-trump-protests-and-the-free-speech-argument","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=21401","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Trump protests and the free speech argument"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trump-protester\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[This is a post by occasional “Alas” comment-writer Lirael, reprinted with permission from their excellent blog NowFaceNorth<\/a>. Thanks, Lirael! –Amp]<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of interesting arguments going around in the wake of the cancelled Donald Trump rally in Chicago. One of them is that the protesters violated Trump\u2019s First Amendment rights to free speech, or his supporters\u2019 First Amendment rights to free assembly. These arguments are wrong, and I want to take a look at why that goes beyond the refrain of \u201cfreedom of speech doesn\u2019t mean freedom from consequences\u201d (which is technically true, but I think it\u2019s a flippant and overused argument).<\/p>\n

The really obvious problem is that the First Amendment regulates the behavior of the state. The only First Amendment issues you could raise in this situation involve the actions of law enforcement, regarding their attacks on and arrests of protesters<\/a> and a reporter<\/a> outside \u2013 I would really, really like some of these defenders of free speech to show more concern about that<\/i> part of what went down in Chicago \u2013 or if you don\u2019t think they were legally justified in clearing the arena. The actions of private citizens have nothing to do with the First Amendment.<\/p>\n

What people are somtimes trying to get at when they make this argument is that a society that values freedom of speech enough to protect it from government coercion in the constitution, ought to value it enough to guard against or avoid other kinds of coecive behavior in relation to speech. This is what people mean, I think, when they talk about \u201ca culture of free speech.\u201d And while this argument has gotten a bad rap on much of the left these days because we\u2019re so used to it being taken to ridiculous extremes (\u201cHow dare you ban me from your website for racist comments? What about the culture of free speech?\u201d) or to claim that criticism of one\u2019s argument is anti-free-speech, it\u2019s an argument that\u2019s worth reckoning with. To understand why, I strongly, strongly recommend reading Chris Bertram, Corey Robin, and Alex Gourevitch\u2019s essay Let It Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace<\/a>, which takes libertarianism to task for its failure to \u201ccome to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace.\u201d I don\u2019t think the left in general, or the social-justice-oriented left in particular, should be jumping to fall into the libertarian failure mode, into the idea that state coercion is the only kind of coercion worth caring about or opposing. We should give some thought to free speech as a norm, if you will, and not just free speech as a freedom. This is why I don\u2019t much care for, say, campaigns to get rank-and-file workers fired for saying racist, sexist, or other oppressive crap in their private lives. It\u2019s not a violation of their First Amendment rights, but it\u2019s also not good.<\/p>\n

That said, not all kinds of exercises of power around speech are equal (I give some more examples in the next paragraph). State coercion actually is<\/i> different \u2013 you can be arrested, subject to invasive searches of your person, have property confiscated, have to appear in court repeatedly, be forced to pay a lot of money, be incarcerated. You can lose much of your liberty. And the First Amendment regulates that kind of coercion, and I\u2019m pretty fervent about the First Amendment. Once you get beyond that near-absolute, you have to make judgments about what kind of coercion, if any, is happening, and what kinds of effects it\u2019s likely to have. And since none of the parties involved is the state, you have to consider the competing rights of private citizens (e.g. giving a speech is a speech act, and so is petitioning to stop a speaker\u2019s appearance or heckling them), and the competing principles that many of us look to in governing human interaction (the idea that people should be able to express their views is a valuable one \u2013 so are anti-racism, feminism, affirming that marginalized people are welcome in your communities, and a lot more, and sometimes those come into conflict with people being able to express whatever views, wherever they want). You have to actually make some kind of evaluation about how far is too far for what principle and how to resolve competing needs. The Constitution won\u2019t help you. And free speech advocates aren\u2019t all going to draw all the lines in the same places \u2013 for instance, when it comes to speech and higher education, you have advocates like Angus Johnston<\/a> (who you should all be reading) and advocates like FIRE<\/a>, and they draw the lines in sufficiently different places that they\u2019ve had public debates about it. I sometimes change my mind about situations that are sufficiently close to my personal lines, and my personal lines sometimes move a little bit as I think situations over (the anti-Trump protest in Chicago did not cross my personal lines). I don\u2019t think you\u2019re a better civil libertarian for having your lines in a different place than someone else, because civil liberties are about the individual\u2019s relationship to the government.<\/p>\n

For an average person who has to make a living, the employer has very strong coercive power, possibly more than any other institution except the state, but this power is much less for, say, executives, who have more power in the workplace, usually more financial resources, and probably more ability to get a new job easily. Because Facebook and Twitter are such huge platforms, they have a lot of power to control what ideas get out there and how (by taking action, or for that matter, by not taking action, such that people get threatened and harassed until they abandon the platform in stress and fear). The book-publishing industry has a lot of power over authors, but will be using that power against a whole lot of speech by definition, because they don\u2019t publish every single author who submits something. The blogger who bans you from their comment section has almost no coercive power. The student who asks for trigger warnings both has little coercive power and is not stifling you in any meaningful way (oh no, you\u2019re being asked to say a couple of extra words \u2013 I don\u2019t buy that you can even call that an infringement on either speech OR the related but different norm of academic freedom, unless you think that profs being required to issue course syllabi at many schools is also an infringement). There\u2019s also the issue of what kind of platform someone has \u2013 Donald Trump gets news coverage if he sneezes, he has one of the largest platforms in the country, the idea that protesting a rally such that he decides to cancel it is stifling him is laughable.<\/p>\n

There are also ways in which the situation of Trump\u2019s rallies is unusual. There\u2019s the thing where Trump has encouraged his supporters to physically attack protesters<\/a>. Like, earlier that day he had said to his rally<\/a> in St Louis that that one guy getting sucker-punched is the kind of thing they need to see more of, not to mention his previous comments offering to pay the legal fees of people who hit protesters. He\u2019s creating violent spaces at his rallies, not in the \u201cframe everything as violence\u201d sense that you see in certain kinds of activist discourse, but in the literal, physical, interpersonal violence sense. Even if you think that people should not try to shut down other people\u2019s rallies as a matter of principle, \u201cspace where you\u2019re encouraged to beat people up who disagree with you\u201d is not usually what a rally is, and it doesn\u2019t strike me as unreasonable that people would want to shut down such a space in their community, especially when it involves racists having such a space at a majority-people-of-color university.<\/p>\n

A last bit of the argument that I want to address is the \u201cWell now right-wingers will disrupt Sanders and Clinton events and then you\u2019ll be sorry\u201d argument. My answer is, maybe they will. Protest\/counterprotest situations aren\u2019t exactly uncommon. Primarily as a street medic, I\u2019ve been in protest\/counterprotest settings that were nonviolent and quiet, nonviolent and loud, and (on at least part of one side) not nonviolent. The first big protests I ever went to were protest\/counterprotest situations around same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, when I was 18. Big loud crowds on both sides, people crossing the street to mess with each other, people milling around mixing, most peaceably if noisily, a few less so. I befriended a gay 13 year-old goth who rather hilariously photobombed some homophobes getting interviewed by TV news, and then got kicked in the leg while crossing the street. Also before I started street medicking, I was at a Planned Parenthood rally where the counterprotesters were mostly peaceful but a few of them were trying to tear down people\u2019s signs, shove them around, and rush the stage. I\u2019ve medicked some nontrivial number of Israel\/Palestine protests\/counterprotests that have covered the whole range of conditions that I listed above. I\u2019ve seen a couple of white supremacists counter the Ferguson protesters I was medicking for, I\u2019ve medicked LGBTQ and anti-fascist counterprotests of a Tea Party rally featuring vicious homophobe Scott Lively, I\u2019ve medicked a pro-Syrian-refugees-coalition vs militia protest\/counterprotest (that ended up being very mellow as the militia people decided to go march elsewhere). It\u2019s just not that novel, oppostion happens when you do politics<\/i>. Violence and threats, obviously, are different matter, but if right-wingers start loudly-but-nonviolently protesting Clinton or Sanders rallies, I\u2019m sure that everyone can manage<\/i> and it is not like anyone won\u2019t be able to access Clinton\u2019s or Sanders\u2019 opinion on the issues of the day if they want it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[This is a post by occasional “Alas” comment-writer Lirael, reprinted with permission from their excellent blog NowFaceNorth. Thanks, Lirael! –Amp] There\u2019s a lot of interesting arguments going around in the wake of the cancelled Donald Trump rally in Chicago. One … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21407,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21401\/revisions\/21407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}