E-Pluribus | May 21, 2024

Free trade, liberal style; campus free speech and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the left wants its speech issue back.

A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Marc-William Palen: Can the Left reclaim free trade?

According to Marc-William Palen writing at UnHerd, free trade is not the exclusive purview of the right. Palen argues that there’s a long history of free trade advocacy on the other side of the ideological aisle. With some conservatives leaning into protectionist policies, there’s an opportunity for the left to strike back.

For the past half century, the Right has been the self-appointed guardian of the free market. In one of her first acts as Conservative leader in 1975, Margaret Thatcher strode into a meeting and banged a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on the table. “This,” she declared, “is what we believe.” In 1991, Republican President George H.W. Bush, amid his push for the North American Free Trade Agreement, awarded the 92-year-old Hayek a Presidential Medal of Freedom. “How magnificent it must be,” he said, “[for Hayek] to witness his ideas validated before the eyes of the world.”

[. . .]

At a time like this, it’s worth remembering that the free market wasn’t always betrothed to the Right. In the early days, its advocates could instead be found on the internationalist Left, particularly among the leaders of the transatlantic anti-imperial and peace movements. In 1846, Britain’s Left-wing free traders set a precedent by overturning the protectionist Corn Laws. Overnight, Britain became the first modern free-trade nation.

For Left-leaning intellectuals in the 19th century, global free trade was a moral necessity that augured millenarian visions of a world without want or war. It meant cheap food and a world at peace. Richard Cobden, Britain’s foremost free-trade prophet, believed that free trade would work by “drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace”. He predicted that: “The desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies… will die away… when man becomes one family and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.”

[. . .]

Left-wing free traders — a motley international crew of liberal radicals, feminists, Christians and socialists — redoubled their efforts. And in 1879, the liberal radical US political philosopher Henry George published Progress and Poverty, which quickly became an international bestseller. George called for a “single tax” on the estimated value of land that would provide all the revenue that a government required and thereby eliminate all other forms of taxation, including tariffs. As a bonus, the single tax also promised to break up land monopolies the world over. Absolute free trade, prosperity and peace would surely follow.

[. . .]

With the dawn of the 20th century, socialist internationalists increasingly worked alongside their liberal radical capitalist comrades to overturn the protectionist imperial order. Political parties including the Labour Party in Britain, the Socialist Party of America and Germany’s Social Democratic Party explicitly endorsed free trade. And influential German Marxist theorists such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky found themselves in agreement with socialist internationalists such as Japan’s Toyohiko Kagawa, Britain’s Bertrand Russell and Crystal Eastman in the USA.

Read the whole thing.

Laurie Kellman and Jocelyn Gecker: The Israel-Hamas war is testing whether campuses are sacrosanct places for speech and protest

In an article with a dateline of Berkley, California, often seen as ground zero for student activism in the 1960s, Laurie Kellman and Jocelyn Gecker at the Associated Press question whether or not campuses are still open to radical free speech.

Historically, universities are supposed to govern — and police — themselves in exchange for their status as “something of a secular sacred ground,” said John Thelin, University of Kentucky College of Education professor emeritus and a historian of higher education.

“One has to think of an American college or university as a ‘city-state’ in which its legal protections and walls include the campus — grounds, buildings, structures facilities — as legally protected, along with a university’s rights to confer degrees,” he added in an email. Calling in the police, as administrators did at Columbia, Dartmouth, UCLA and other schools, represents the “break down of both rights and responsibilities within the campus as a chartered academic institution and community,” he said.

The crackdowns are reviving memories of student-led protests during the American civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Student activism in the 1960s led campus officials to call law enforcement. And on May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on unarmed students, killing four at Kent State University. Four million students went on strike, temporarily closing 900 colleges and universities. It was a defining moment for a nation sharply divided over the Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 Americans were killed.

A half-century later, the Israel-Hamas conflict has lit another fuse, with claims that “outside agitators” have infiltrated the protests to inflame tensions.

“The scale, fierceness, the short time frame since the Hamas attacks, the irreconcilable demands of current competing protestors, and their occasional violence, has tested university leaders on how to respond,” said John A. Douglass, a senior research fellow and professor of public policy and higher education at the University of California, Berkeley.

Most major colleges and universities have their own police departments, “but inviting and soliciting help from local community police departments in riot gear, and not only called on to disperse encampments but protect rival protestors from each other, is a relatively new phenomenon,” he said.

Read it all here.

Eric Levitz: Make “free speech” a progressive rallying cry again

Today’s ePluribus round-up has had something of a left-leaning theme. So in that spirit, our third selection is from none other than Vox. In a long essay, Eric Levitz joins some others on the left in exhorting his fellow travelers to stop ceding free speech ground to the right in the name of social justice.

Social justice advocates spent much of the past decade fighting to constrict the bounds of permissible debate on college campuses.

Such activists saw an inescapable tension between the ideal of free expression and the well-being of marginalized groups, both on campus and off. By platforming regressive ideas, universities endangered minority populations in American society while rendering their classrooms less welcoming to students from those groups.

Keeping campuses safe and inclusive for all therefore required narrowing the range of acceptable speech. Sometimes, this meant blocking explicitly bigoted, far-right demagogy. But at some schools, the definition of exclusionary speech grew broad enough to encompass ideas that are not inherently hateful and are held by many people for non-prejudicial reasons. One didn’t need to directly endorse the subjugation of a minority group to disqualify oneself from speaking on campus. On some campuses, merely adopting a stance that would have adverse implications for that group — at least, in the estimation of some of its most vocal members — was sufficient.

Attempts to sanction academics for speech increased dramatically over the past 10 years, according to a 2023 report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Conservative activists were responsible for 41 percent of these campaigns, but a majority came from the left. In national discourse during this period, meanwhile, conservatives often espoused a support for free speech, while some progressives forthrightly defended restricting free expression on college campuses.

In recent months, however, social justice advocates have been forced to contest the very ideas about speech and inclusion that they had once popularized.

Since the onset of the Israel-Hamas war and the resulting surge of pro-Palestinian activism at American colleges, the campus free speech debate has inverted. Now, it is Republican politicians who insist that college administrators must discern the bigotry implicit in non-hateful speech (such as the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) and then silence that speech to protect a historically oppressed minority group on campus.

And they have enjoyed some success. In recent months, several colleges have disciplined pro-Palestinian activists for ordinary speech acts and mobilized force against their acts of civil disobedience. Congress, meanwhile, is on the verge of enacting a law that would empower the federal government to suppress anti-Zionist advocacy on college campuses.

Progressives have lamented such attempts to regulate campus speech as authoritarian attacks on academic freedom. In their estimation, the aggressive policing of free expression at US colleges since October 7 has not served the interests of the marginalized, but rather it has abetted the mass murder of a disempowered people.

All of which raises a question: In light of these developments, should students concerned with social justice rethink their previous skepticism of free speech norms, for the sake of better protecting radical dissent?

I think the answer is yes.

Read it all.

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Via Steve McGuire, will wonders never cease? The editorial board of the Washington Post comes out against DEI statements:

Hopefully this does not mean that 36% of Americans DO trust the government to make fair decisions about acceptable speech. But in any case, the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression shares three principles for content moderation:

And finally, at this point, perhaps it’d be better to just take it all the way down. Permanently.