By James J. Devine
While the grotesque abuse of concentrated money —allowed by the disastrous Citizens United decision—has polluted America’s political system, and deservedly needs to be corrected, there is a peculiar and profound American cowardice that flees not from tyranny, but from the simple, unsettling act of listening.
Across the nation’s vaunted college campuses, once intended as engines of inquiry, a generation weaned on the very liberties it now spurns has decided that the right to speak is contingent on the listener’s approval.
The latest survey revealing that over a third of students see violence as a legitimate response to a disagreeable speech is not an anomaly; it is the culmination of a philosophy that mistakes comfort for truth and conflates safety with intellectual surrender.
This is a betrayal not merely of academic tradition, but of the very dialectic that forged the republic.
One must look back to the infancy of the nation, to the shameful passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, to find a comparable official hostility to public debate. Yet even that heavy-handed attempt to criminalize criticism of the government was met with the fierce and ultimately victorious resistance of a citizenry that understood a foundational principle: the power to silence is the power to enslave.
It was in the furnace of subsequent struggles that our greatest legal minds forged a sturdier defense.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his dissent in Abrams v. United States, gifted us the timeless metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
This is not a passive process; it is a messy, often offensive, and fundamentally robust faith in the collective reason of a people.
His colleague Justice Louis Brandeis, in Whitney v. California, provided the complementary and perhaps more profound insight, arguing that the remedy for false and pernicious speech is not enforced silence, but “more speech.”
The path to justice, he argued, is found through public discussion, for “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people.” And it is this very inertia, this pathetic intellectual lethargy masquerading as righteous activism, that now constitutes the menace.
The students who shout down a speaker, who block doors, or who entertain the fantasy that their fists are a valid form of rebuttal are not the heirs of the civil rights activists or the suffragists they claim to admire; they are the antithesis.
One is reminded of the apocryphal but enduring pledge attributed to Voltaire, who is said to have declared, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This was not a sentimental platitude but a hard-won intellectual conviction, born of a life spent battling the censors and dogmatists of his age.
The modern campus activist, by contrast, offers a far more pathetic and revealing credo: “I disapprove of what you say, and therefore your right to say it is nullified by my discomfort.”
This inversion of fundamental American principles represents a catastrophic retreat from the responsibilities of citizenship in a free society, trading the arduous defense of a universal liberty for the cheap and fleeting thrill of a local victory in silencing a foe.
They have replaced Voltaire’s defiant courage with the petulance of a child who covers its ears and screams to drown out a disagreeable truth.
True revolutionaries fought with staggering courage to enter the public square and make their voices heard, not to padlock the gates behind them.
The current temper is one of profound illiberalism, a coddled and arrogant conviction that one’s own certitude is so impeccable that no challenge to it deserves oxygen.
In the 1960s, students fought for the right to protest, their free speech a defiant roar against the Vietnam War. Today, on those same campuses, many of the loudest student voices demand protection from speech itself, treating opposing views as a form of violence. How did the torchbearers of free expression become its censors?
To understand this profound shift, we must examine our history and our values.
Clark Kerr, who shaped the modern University of California, declared that the university’s mission is not “to make ideas safe for students, but to make students safe for ideas.”
This is the essential, difficult work of education: to trust students with the perilous freedom of judgment, believing that exposure to competing truths, not insulation from them, is what ultimately fortifies both a mind and a democracy.
Today’s college students have failed to learn or forgotten that freedom of speech is indivisible; the power to silence your opponent today is the precedent that allows them to silence you tomorrow.
They are, in effect, sawing at the branch upon which they themselves sit, all while preening with the moral vanity of those who believe history will thank them for their intolerance.
It is a sorry spectacle, this retreat from the difficult demands of liberty into the swaddling clothes of dogma, and it suggests a nation forgetting that its strength was never in its unanimity, but in its unflinching, chaotic, and ultimately triumphant capacity to argue.