Alec Ward | The Donald’s amended reality

Fair Enough | Trump’s claim to promote free speech as fraudulent as his hair

By Alec Ward 02/16/16 11:02pm

At a rally on the eve of the New Hampshire Primary, 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump called Ted Cruz a pussy. More precisely, one of his supporters did, and he repeated it into the microphone. Not coincidentally, during a CNN interview the next morning, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson was asked whether she has ever regretted any of her candidate’s statements. Maybe so, she conceded, before dropping the bomb: “[but] Donald Trump has single-handedly brought back free speech.”

A strange claim indeed for a candidate who has vowed repeatedly to discriminate based on religion and to censor the internet.

Her basic claim is that violating social taboos against certain types of speech — such as those against, say, tarring entire ethnic groups as rapists or referring to political opponents with an obscene term for genitalia — makes one a champion of free speech. The implication is that transgressing such taboos is a positive good — that the quality of discourse is raised if all concerns for conventions of decency and propriety are disregarded. It follows as a corollary that supporting free speech means encouraging and cheering for the violation of such conventions: “Be rude! Be crass! Be racist! Free speech!”

This is, in the etymological sense, a true perversion of the American cultural value for which “free speech” serves as a shorthand. That cultural value is born out of a recognition that good ideas are as likely to be unpopular as bad ones, and that discourse, rather than dogma, is the proper method of distinguishing one from the other. Incidentally, it is the same logic which, when dressed up in academic regalia, gives us the institutional value we call “open expression” — another common categorical confusion. Calling an attempt to avoid a discourse which would certainly expose one’s ideas as half-baked “free speech” turns that value inside out.

That precise perversion is a fiction which has been willfully peddled by a sinister coalition. Nativist politicians like Donald Trump and Ben Carson seek to excuse their promotion of fringe views, while would-be cultural hegemons seek to paint free speech as an obstruction to their vision of social progress.

A proper view of free speech does not understand the shielding of taboo-breakers from punishment as a positive good per se. Rather, we view the non-punishment of speech as a necessary condition for the preservation of the of liberties required to protect robust and fruitful discourses in the social, political and academic spheres. If speech taboos are enforced by with the government’s coercive power, then, the thinking goes, the enforcers are handed unacceptable power to control the exchange of ideas.

Consider, as an analogy, the famous English jurist William Blackstone’s oft-repeated formulation of the criminal due process: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” Blackstone does not consider the acquittal of guilty persons a positive good, but a byproduct of necessary protections for the innocent.

Understood this way, Trump’s claim to be a champion of free speech is much like a jury-rigger’s claim to be a champion of due process. The fact that valued liberties create opportunities for people to defame and preach prejudice on the one hand, or to get away with crimes on the other, does not mean that justice is realized when they do.

The mistaken notion that to champion free speech is to applaud all taboo-breaking is particularly infuriating to me as a free speech advocate because it bolsters the idea that censorious measures like hate speech laws and campus speech codes are necessary preconditions to justice.

By offering “free speech” as a defense against charges of rudeness, wrongness, meanness or idiocy, the Trumps of the world only hand ammunition to those who would have us believe that free speech and equal opportunity are diametrically opposed.

In truth, the maintenance of strong social taboos, with social, rather than official, “punishments” for their violation, is an essential precondition for a decent and just society. The American liberal tradition does not, and never has insisted that the content of speech must be immune from judgement and harsh criticism. It insists only that we not be so sure in the correctness of such judgements that we back them with the heavy hand of the state’s coercion.

Free speech, that is to say, does not mean that Donald need not answer to the public for his choice to use a demeaning vulgarity at a rally. It does mean he need not answer to a court, and for that, we should all be thankful.

ALEC WARD is a College junior from Washington, D.C., studying history. His email address is alecward@sas.upenn.edu. Follow him on Twitter @TalkBackWard. “Fair Enough” appears every Wednesday.

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