E-Pluribus | July 18, 2024
America put to the test; the Supreme Court and government speech; and revisiting institutional neutrality.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Yascha Mounk: This Is a Test for America
Anyone familiar with the history of the United States pre- and post-Civil War must admit “things have never been this bad politically” would be a huge stretch for 2024. That does not mean it’s not a time of testing, however. At Persuasion, Yascha Mounk encourages all Americans, regardless of politics or ideology, to rise to the occasion as we have many times in the past.
Most Americans were saddened or outraged by the attempt on Trump’s life. This included his congressional allies and his millions of supporters, of course. Notably, it also included millions of Americans who deeply disdain him. Both Trump’s predecessor and his successor unequivocally condemned the attempt on his life; so did hundreds of elected officials, progressive organizations, and other political adversaries.
This may not seem like much: the willingness to accept that we mediate political differences at the ballot box rather than in violent clashes on the street is the minimum entrance ticket to a democratic society. But it is a minimum entrance ticket which many societies that, like the United States, are deeply polarized but, unlike the United States, are genuinely on the brink of civil war, refuse to pay.
[. . .]
Parts of the left have justified some forms of violence in the last years. Movements like Antifa explicitly glorify political violence, reserving for themselves both the right to take action against anyone they consider fascist, and the right to determine who should be included in that category. Even politicians and media outlets that didn’t go so far as to explicitly endorse Antifa made excuses for real forms of political violence in the summer of 2020, when mass protests against racism whose participants really were mostly peaceful persistently devolved into highly destructive orgies of violence fueled by a sizable fringe of activists who really were anything but. Some actively encouraged it, such as when NPR ran an article glorifying looting as a legitimate form of political protest.
All of this is shameful. It must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading. But it also shouldn’t be inflated to imply that the Democratic establishment or the mainstream media has in general started to glorify violence. None of it justifies the hyperbole and hysteria to which Taylor Greene succumbs when she tweets that “The Democrats are the party of pedophiles, murdering the innocent unborn, violence, and bloody, meaningless, endless wars. … The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump.” Nor does it justify the comparatively mild claim by J. D. Vance, whom Trump has today picked as his running mate, that it was Joe Biden’s rhetoric which “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Conversely, there is no doubt that parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement have glorified political violence in the last years. A succession of campaign ads showed high-profile candidates for office firing heavy-duty machine guns and promising, in the words of one early innovator in the art of gun-toting electioneering, to go “RINO hunting.” And, yes, Trump himself has persistently toyed with endorsements of political violence—whether it be in the form of joking that cops making arrests should not be afraid to bump the head of suspects when throwing them in the back of police cars back in 2017, or more recently by portraying those who took part in the violent assault on Congress on January 6, 2021 as patriots.
All of this is shameful, all the more so for coming from the most senior officials within the Republican Party. All of this must be called out and condemned without hedging or special pleading, something that the conservative media ecosystem have notably failed to do. But here too, a kernel of truth, even one that is worryingly large, is no excuse for overstating the extent to which the other side embraces political violence. And that is something that the most senior Democrats, from Joe Biden on down, have consistently done.
[. . .]
America is a resilient country. It has many strengths, cultural and institutional, that its own citizens, blind to the even greater extent of dysfunction in many other parts of the world, tend to overlook. It is unlikely that the country will experience a genuine civil war anytime soon, and it has been heartening to see that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump has not, so far, led to any immediate outpouring of retaliatory violence. Some of the most dire predictions made in the last 48 hours have so far failed to come true and may, with the benefit of hindsight, turn out to be overly bleak.
But if moments of tragedy and upheaval reveal the true state of a country, the first draft of America’s report card puts it in danger of failing. Most Americans continue to abhor violence. Our mutual hatred still knows limits. And yet the mix of institutional failure, conspiracist thinking, and partisan fear-mongering is very potent. The risk that it may yet set in motion dynamics which overwhelm the decent instincts of most ordinary Americans remains very real.
Read it all here.
Jon Guze: SCOTUS Sends Mixed Messages About Government Suppression of Speech
It hasn’t been all good news from the Supreme Court this term, and Jon Guze of the John Locke Foundation examines two cases in particular in which the outcomes appear to clash. The result as Guze sees it is that the justices have simply kicked the can down the road for a future term.
When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its opinion in NRA v. Vullo, I was delighted. Writing about it at the time, I praised “a unanimous opinion written by the court’s most left-leaning justice in a case in which the ACLU represented the NRA,” and added, “If it wasn’t clear before, it’s crystal clear now. The First Amendment forbids even indirect attacks on Americans’ expressive rights.”
Sadly, I spoke to soon. A few weeks after Vullo, the court handed down another opinion that significantly muddies the waters. The court’s opinion in Murthy v. Missouri doesn’t repudiate the fundamental principle it annunciated in Vullo—government may not use its influence over private parties as an indirect method for suppressing speech. Nevertheless, it’s going to make it rather hard for parties whose speech is suppressed in that way to get their day in court.
[. . .]
Some relevant facts are beyond dispute. Everybody knows that government officials encouraged social media companies to suppress unwanted speech throughout the period. Everybody knows that the social media companies suppressed that speech. Though not necessarily relevant, everybody also knows that much of the suppressed speech turned out to be more reliable than the preferred speech the government was promoting. The only substantive issue in the case, therefore, was whether the officials who wanted the speech suppressed crossed the line between permissible persuasion and impermissible coercion. For what it’s worth, every judge who has considered that question, including the dissenters in Murthy—Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch—has found that they probably did.
Unfortunately, the majority opinion written by Justice Barrett refused to reach the substantive issue. The plaintiffs had asked for an injunction ordering the government to stop suppressing their speech, but the majority found that they lacked standing to even make such a request. It held that they could do so only if they could show, not merely that the government had harmed them in the past by improperly using its influence to suppress their speech, but also that it was likely to harm them in the future by doing so again. According to the majority, the plaintiffs failed to make that showing.
Justice Alito and the other dissenters reached a different conclusion, and I found their arguments compelling. Other analysts disagree. One thing is clear, however. The Murthy opinion will encourage collusion between government agencies and corporate media to suppress unwanted speech of all kinds.
Read it all.
Peter Wood: The Illusion of Institutional Neutrality: A Mercifully Short Refresher
In April, Peter Wood wrote a long article for the National Association of Scholars (Wood is the president of the NAS) titled The Illusion of Institutional Neutrality. Just three months later, Wood has written a Readers Digest-like condensed version for Minding the Campus. Whatever the ostensible benefits of institutional neutrality, Wood argues it’s unrealistic to expect large institutions to not take positions on the issues of the day, and that fostering an environment of open, honest debate is a better path forward.
“[I]nstitutional neutrality” is the idea that colleges and universities should refrain from taking positions on controversial public issues. They should exercise this restraint so that students and faculty members will have maximal freedom to discuss and debate various sides of those issues. The principle of institutional neutrality can be extended as a call for colleges and universities to refrain from taking substantive positions on all matters, not just currently controversial ones, because who knows what will be controversial tomorrow?
[. . .]
Institutional neutrality does not mean turning a blind eye to bigotry—or can it? The problem with the three Columbia deans is that the Washington Free Beacon reported the texts and a congressional committee released them. Would Columbia have fired them if the matter had stayed within the narrow circle of Columbia administrators?
Institutional neutrality turns out to be a soothing phrase to cover a complicated reality. Sometimes the university says the doctrine doesn’t apply to matters that touch key issues to the college’s survival. The debate over taxing university endowments, for example, is not one on which Harvard will ever be neutral, regardless of whether some faculty members are pro-tax and want to debate.
Today, virtually every university stands foursquare for “diversity.” No institutional neutrality need apply, though millions of Americans and a considerable number of faculty members dissent from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” orthodoxies.
It doesn’t take long before the exceptions obviate the whole idea of “institutional neutrality.” Institutional neutrality turns out to be just a dishrag for cleaning up the occasional spill when the university really doesn’t want to take a side in a campus controversy but wants to pretend it has a principled reason for refraining.
[. . .]
American colleges and universities, embarrassed by students and faculty members who have behaved egregiously in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, are scrambling to find high moral ground. Institutional neutrality, however, isn’t it. What these colleges and universities really need to do is find the correct principles and stand on them. That’s not a formula. It’s a call for the hard work of determining when the university should forthrightly take a position—regardless of the cost—and when it should just as forthrightly say it welcomes open debate—irrespective of the costs.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
Via the MIT Free Speech Alliance, an MIT student and a Harvard student wrote about campus free speech for CNN:
Here’s part of a thread from Jason Bedrick on how the GOP is addressing (and embracing school choice) in its 2024 platform:
And finally, David Marcus with a caution about cancel culture hypocrisy: