This article in WaPo suggests that the tenets of liberal democracies still stand a chance in the academia of the United States, or at least at UPenn, where a safe space for having discussions is being provided:
A White, male student said that some of the country’s resources should be reserved for Americans. A Latina student named Alejandra felt like he was accusing undocumented people of taking resources. She said that assumption was flawed: Undocumented immigrants faced numerous barriers when they arrived, she explained. They often couldn’t access resources at all. Her own parents had come to the United States undocumented from El Salvador, she said, and it had taken them years to build their lives up from nothing.
Others in the breakout room agreed with her, but the male student pushed back. He said every country had borders and a right to enforce them. America could try to be humane, but it had to restrict people. That was reality.
Alejandra and her opponent went back-and-forth. At one point Alejandra grew so emotional that she turned off her camera to compose herself. The facilitator for the group shifted the conversation in a different direction, and she turned her camera back on. Everybody moved on, amiably enough.
Just before the session ended, the White student spoke up. He apologized to Alejandra. “I hope I haven’t offended you,” he said. “If I did, I’m sorry.” …
Since Gen Z began entering college in 2015, a growing number of academic institutions have started to look critically at their own campus culture. They’re asking how, amid intense national polarization, divergent student voices can speak and be heard. The answer has taken shape as a civil dialogue movement — a collection of courses, orientation programs, workshops and events — that help students communicate across differences.
In other words, discussion as a way to grow, rather than a chance to scream Politics!, followed up by Bigot!
But I think it helps to revisit the purpose of certain rights that come under the rubric of liberal democracy. The right to free speech comes to mind, and its misuse – not abuse, but misuse – is important. There’ve been a few incidents of late, such as the loud shutdown of Professor Shapiro at Hastings College, and the attempt to disrupt a panel on civil liberties at Yale Law School. On the latter, here’s the Washington Free Beacon:
More than 100 students at Yale Law School attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, intimidating attendees and causing so much chaos that police were eventually called to escort panelists out of the building.
The March 10 panel, which was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative nonprofit that promotes religious liberty. Both groups had taken the same side in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations. The purpose of the panel, a member of the Federalist Society said, was to illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues. …
When a professor at the law school, Kate Stith, began to introduce Waggoner, the protesters, who outnumbered the audience members, rose in unison, holding signs that attacked ADF. The nonprofit has argued—and won—several Supreme Court cases establishing religious exemptions from civil rights laws, most famously Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in 2018. …
With the fracas intensifying, Stith reminded the students of Yale’s free speech policies, which bar any protest that “interferes with speakers’ ability to be heard and of community members to listen.” When the protesters heckled her in response—several with their middle fingers raised—she told them to “grow up,” according to video of the event obtained by the Free Beacon.
And, oddly enough, the key lies in Professor Stith’s remark of “grow up.”
Her remark suggests, or reminds us, that there’s a purpose to ‘free speech’ in the context of liberal democracy. Liberal democracies are not autocracies, are not theocracies, are not monarchies. They are, by both nature and definition, dedicated to the notion that by working together, we can govern ourselves far better than the primitive and brazen ‘strongman’ approach of the autocracy, or the more covert, but still ‘strongman’ approach of monarchies, and the imagined notions of a Divine entity which refuses to provide proof of its existence, much less an objective message concerning its desires, that underlies theocracies.
The liberal democracy requires tough-minded people who recognize the failure of the strongman and the theocrat when it comes to the immensely difficult task of governance.
And I don’t toss in difficult task of governance as a rhetorical flourish; instead, that oft-ignored reality is key to understanding Professor Stith’s remark.
Look: In order to solve large, difficult problems, we can try throwing a single person at it, aka the strongman, but, as noted, they have a terrible record. Looking at all the strongmen, they are overwhelmingly remembered with fondness neither by those who survived their depredations, nor historians. The best of them might have been Napoleon Bonaparte, who draws wide admiration for his improvements in civil administration, but his military ambitions took France into disaster not once, but twice. After him, there’s a big drop off, and even those with “great” reputations are definitely questionable individuals once the rose colored glasses are taken off.
Or we, the citizens of a country, can work on them as a team. Teams, when well-led, bring to the fore everyone’s best ideas, their careful investigation and judgment, their ideas as to how to deal with an uncertainty, and join it all together into a solution. Thus, we have a Constitution which can be modified, surely a marvel all on its own, as it dispels the hubris which surrounds so many human endeavours. Indeed, it is the principle upon which many have rejected Kendi’s proposed Constitutional Amendment, and while its harshness might be excused on the idea that his is a first draft, a better first draft would include the concept and strategies of dealing with inherent uncertainties.
And what is the grease that enables the cumbersome machinery of teams?
COMMUNICATIONS.
Whether it’s letters or voice or telecom, our primary tool for working on the great project of governance is speaking. We use it, at its best, to present rational discourse on difficult topics; in its lesser forms, we use communications to cajole, badger, and, worst of all, mislead and endanger.
The reason we call it ‘free speech’ isn’t because we can make any noise we wish at any volume. Try that at two in the morning with a bullhorn in the middle of a suburban street, and the cops will haul your ass to jail and let you cool for a few hours, and any lawyer will tell you that, no, you don’t have an infringement of your free speech rights over which you can sue.
No, ‘free speech’ means discussing any public topic, and if my reader can point at certain political topics and claim they cannot be discussed, welcome to a country that aspires to be a liberal democracy, but hasn’t achieved it.
So, when a group of students shouts someone down, there is understandable and valid outrage. That shouting is not communications but of the crudest kind, and its function as a weapon actually supersedes it. Denial of access to the intellectual public square, in which matters of import are debated and decided, is violence to the body politic akin to that of the old battle cry, No taxation without representation!
Rather than using it to communicate reason, they seek to dominate their opponent(s) on the stage. Rather than defeat them in serious and frank discussion, in which they might lose, they turn to intellectual violence, the kind that violates the tenets of liberal democracy.
I mentioned the Professor scolding the students with the hoary old grow up, and I’d like to add that it reminds me of one other thing: these are, after all, students. This is a part of the process of maturing in knowledge, and suggests where their lessons should go next. While smacking them on the muzzle and yelling Bad student! may be frowned upon in polite society – that is, those who are paying the tuition and believe education is a transactional process – the various colleges do need to perform this exercise, analogously of course, with these students. A reminder that violence, intellectual or otherwise, is not a salient feature of liberal democracies. It is not forbidden, but should only be used as a last resort.
