Free speech is under attack all over
From nutty defamation verdicts to federal warnings about “misinformation,” from French efforts to criminalize vaccine criticism to Germany’s political crackdown, democracies no longer want debate.
In 1941, as the United States neared war with Germany and Japan, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listed the “Four Freedoms” vital to life – and offered “freedom of speech” as the first freedom, even before “freedom from fear.”
Roosevelt’s stirring words were part of a centuries-long American tradition of protecting free speech – a tradition the United States spread globally. Free speech became a core value, a way for democracies to set themselves apart from dictatorships.
No more.
Democratic societies suddenly seem to have forgotten the value of speech and debate. Elites inside and outside government lash out against “misinformation” — a word they can rarely if ever define — and demand measures against it. Most stunningly, the media itself now regularly demands that speech be suppressed.
The reasons why are complex, but the heart of the crisis seems to be that the elite institutions have lost confidence in their ability not just to win arguments but to set the underlying rules forthem.
In the 1990s, a Michigan conservative thinker named Joseph Overton articulated the idea that political outcomes exist in an acceptable window of possibility.
A candidate who advocated a preemptive nuclear strike on China wouldn’t have a chance at winning. Neither would one who advocated demobilizing the American military.
In general, the arguments fall on a narrower spectrum – should the defense budget be held flat, or increased 10 percent? Should the United States expand its forces in space, or work to strengthen treaties to keep space free of weapons?
Like most good theories, this theory is intuitively obvious once it has been explained. After Overton died in a plane crash in 2003, it became known as the Overton window, giving him a prominence in death he had never enjoyed in life.
Big, quick shifts in Overton windows can and do happen – often either after an outside shock or with a lot of societal discomfort or both. (In other cases, such as the growing acceptance of legalized cannabis and other recreational drugs, the shift comes more slowly and quietly, the result of well-organized and -funded pressure campaigns.)
But for the most part, the elites set the boundaries of acceptable discourse – the edges of the Overton windows.
I myself ran have now seen firsthand what happens to anyone with a voice who dares to stand outside an elite-set policy measure too strongly. At first, if you are considered reasonable, friends encourage you to reconsider. Those appeals rapidly morph into full-on attacks. Then then, if you persist, the attacks turn into a kind of eyes-averted disgust, an unwillingness to engage at all. As someone wrote me recently:
I hope I did not seem cavalier when I mentioned that I first discovered you on Twitter and tried to figure out if you were a reliable source or a crazed right wing conspiracist in the early lockdown days.
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