E-Pluribus | February 20, 2024
Yes Labels; sending Mr. Right to Washington; and "Disinformation!" as a weapon against free speech.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jonah Goldberg: Truth in Labeling
Most people seem to believe that slapping political labels on everything and everyone is unhelpful. However, The Dispatch’s Jonah Goldberg argues in his recent G-File that labels aren’t necessarily bad—bad labels are bad. And often no label is bad, too. For the same reason that freedom of speech is not equivalent to freedom from speech, Goldberg claims that specific labels serve an important purpose, as precise words often do.
In [Hyrum and Vernon Lewis’s book The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America,] they criticize me for holding a “private definition” of conservatism. My response to that is that what they call a “private definition,” I call “defining my terms.” I think defining your terms is hugely important for several reasons, starting with simple intellectual and writerly clarity. If you’re going to call something fascist, racist, socialist, etc. you should be prepared to explain what you mean by such labels. And if you’re going to write a book about such things, you should spell out what you mean by such terms.
This gets to the heart of my complaints about left-wing and liberal historiography alluded to above, but also about liberal media bias. The left, I’ve written countless times, thinks it has a monopoly on political virtue and therefore starts from the presumption that anything they consider bad to be definitionally “right-wing,” or “racist,” “fascist” etc. Orwell got at this when he described the lazy tendency of political writers to use “fascism” as placeholder for anything not desirable. Again, you can fairly criticize the right for a similar tendency, but right-wingers don’t control higher education, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and other command posts in narrative formation.
But there’s another reason to define your terms. When you rely on the broad, dualistic, categories of left and right, without any further specificity, you’re going to sweep all manner of people, ideas, and institutions into a single bucket. And that’s a profound disservice.
[. . .]
[T]he problem isn’t using labels, the problem is not using more labels.
This is how language works. If I just say something is “hot,” I could mean everything from spicy, to sexy, to scalding, to popular. You need to use more words to communicate which meaning of hot you have in mind.
Think of it this way. A lot of people have tried to apply the equally flawed binary of “white” vs. “person of color” framework to Israel. Israel is cited by a lot of ridiculous people as a “white” or “European” “settler colonial” state. Among the myriad problems with this, Israel is not a particularly “white” or “European” country. Roughly half of Israelis are from the Middle East, North Africa, etc. The white/non-white binary erases Ethiopian, Moroccan, and other Jews. Such binaries make bad arguments easier for people who don’t want to do the work of making complicated arguments.
These days, sadly, “conservative” doesn’t convey very much information. Anti-Trump conservative conveys more information. “Classically liberal conservative” or “Reaganite conservative” conveys even more. Such qualifiers also convey different information than, say, “post-liberal conservative” or “nationalist conservative.” “American conservative” means something different than “French conservative” or “Bolivian conservative.” You get the point.
[. . .]
I understand why the eyes of normal people often glaze over when hearing about such squabbles. It often sounds like rivalries between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. But such granular labeling was useful because it helped illuminate important distinctions, not just of different principles but of different contests for power. Reducing everything to left versus right erases these distinctions intellectually and politically.
[. . .]
A lot of people think that labels get in the way of progress. That was the argument behind “No Labels” when it first launched. Its credo back then was “Put the Labels Aside. Do What’s Best for America.” But, as I wrote about at length in my underrated second book, labels are vital to intelligent thought and basic survival. That’s because labels are another word for “words.” And without words, we’re back in the trees. Go into your kitchen and remove all the labels from your cleaning supplies and canned goods and see how much progress you make.
Read it all here.
Karlyn Bowman: Turning Mr. Right Into Mr. President
With 330 million-plus people in the United States, you’d think finding Mr. or Ms. Right for president would be easy. Anyone following the 2024 race would strongly disagree. But what are we looking for in a president? Karlyn Bowman examines Americans’ thought process (and related polling data) for Discourse Magazine.
As we do every four years, Americans are looking again for the best man to lead the nation.
[. . .]
To understand possible resistance to certain kinds of candidates and candidate behaviors, pollsters now ask about not only respondents’ personal preference, but also what they think their neighbors or fellow citizens would do. Many Americans give what they believe is the socially correct response when asked about their own views, while their “neighbors’” response may reveal more accurate sentiments.
But what about a candidate’s past or present behavior or morality?
[. . .]
An American Enterprise Institute colleague once compared running for president to hiring a plumber. People don’t want to hear about the plumber’s problems with his wife or his kids, he said; they just want the plumbing problem fixed. So, too, with Americans’ responses to many questions about a presidential candidate’s personal life. The personal does not appear to be as political as feminists told us in the 1970s. Many Americans also appear ready to give a candidate a pass for some youthful behaviors. All of us make foolish mistakes, and we appear willing to forgive.
But this doesn’t apply across the board. Americans in 1996 were less likely to give more serious infractions a pass. Thus, most Americans said that being a member of a white supremacist group, failing to pay income taxes, having friends who were close to organized crime and using illegal drugs in the past few years were too serious to be overlooked. Two-thirds said they would not vote for a candidate who lied about what his policies would be if elected.
[. . .]
In recent weeks, pollsters have begun to explore attitudes about a possible Trump conviction. The questions are hypothetical, but the different approaches the pollsters are using may give us some indication of how people see this issue. Sixty-five percent of voters in the Iowa Republican caucuses said they would consider Donald Trump fit for office even if he were convicted. Fifty-four percent of those who voted in the New Hampshire primary gave this response. But self-declared independents there didn’t agree.
In Gallup’s new poll, two-thirds said they would not vote for a person charged with a felony, and, separately, 70% said that about a person convicted by a jury. The January Harvard/Harris poll found that registered voters would still vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden if Trump were convicted of a crime related to his handling of classified documents (53% to 47%), and separately, if he were convicted of a crime relating to the Georgia case (51% to 49%). But Biden topped Trump barely (51% to 49%) if Trump were convicted of a crime related to January 6. The new late January-early February NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds Biden and Trump closely matched among registered voters. But Biden opens up a six-point lead if Trump is convicted of a crime. Of course, attitudes may change as trials ensue and we get closer to November. Still, these new findings should make the Trump campaign nervous as well.
Read it all.
Steven Greenhut: Progressives Are Ditching Free Speech To Fight 'Disinformation'
Steven Greenhut of Reason says progressives are increasingly anxious to undermine free speech in the name of stamping out disinformation. However, there’s a long history of governments trying to gain and maintain power by controlling what citizens say and hear, and it’s a big reason we have the First Amendment. Greenhut points out recent examples to show why free speech should remain as free as possible.
Traditionally, Americans of all political stripes have accepted that—except for a few strictly limited circumstances—people can say whatever they choose. The nation's libel laws impose civil penalties on those who have engaged in defamatory speech, but those laws are narrowly tailored so the threat of lawsuits doesn't halt legitimate speech. This emanates from the First Amendment, which said Congress shall make "no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
Such protections were applied to all governments, of course. The courts wrestle with gray areas (commercial and corporate speech, pornography, political advertising), but our nation thankfully has tilted heavily in the direction of upholding the broadest speech rights. This legal framework has been bolstered by a broad consensus among the citizenry that speech rights are sacrosanct. There always have been those people who want to police speech, but they have largely been outliers.
[. . .]
Concerns about internet conspiracies are not unwarranted, but efforts to address those problems—especially ones that rely on government—pose dangers to our rights as Americans. It's one thing to target a concerted online disinformation campaign from the Chinese Communist Party, but quite another to clamp down on "misinformation"—ideas and facts that one might find to be inaccurate or based on shoddy and biased reasoning.
In a 2021 Harvard Gazette article, Harvard Law School professor Martha Minow argued that the Federal Communications Commission should "withhold licenses, remove them, terminate them, for companies that are misleading people." In other words, federal bureaucrats would be tasked with determining what amounts to "misleading people" and then yank the licenses of broadcast news outlets that failed to conform to that standard.
Think about how that would play out. Many public health officials have railed against COVID-19 misinformation, and yet we later learned that the officials' solutions turned out to be wrong and that critics raised important points. That's how life works in a free society. Different people make different claims and then evidence unfolds, albeit in a messy and imprecise manner. How often have we found that official sources get things terribly wrong?
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Here are some excerpts from a thread from the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression on what’s at stake when governments make even well-meaning efforts to restrict speech:
From The Free Beacon, with a comment by Wesley Yang, the dangerous mix of science and cultural sensitivity:
And finally, celebrating Presidents’ Day by focusing on…presidential flaws? Well, no, not focusing on them, but acknowledging they exist. If our leaders weren’t flawed, they wouldn’t be human. (Click for video.)