Free Speech in a Nation Conceived in Liberty

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a Massachusetts law requiring a 35-foot buffer between abortion protesters and those entering an abortion clinic violated the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. Time Magazine reported:

The court objected to the notion of buffer zones in part because such broad perimeters “burden more speech than necessary” by excluding “petitioners” (“not just protesters”) from public sidewalks, streets, and other public thoroughfares, “places that have traditionally been open for speech ac­tivities and that the Court has accordingly labeled ‘traditional public fora.’”
Buffers zones deprive petitioners “of their two primary methods of com­municating with arriving patients: close, personal conversations and distribution of literature. Those forms of expression have historically been closely associated with the transmission of ideas,” the court wrote.

But the nation which enjoys a formal right of freedom of speech was also "conceived in liberty," and liberty means freedom from coercion if it means anything at all.

The Court slighted the unalienable right of those seeking a particular form of lawful medical care to do so without harassment. Dahlia Lithwick:

Right now, the commentary is pretty predictably split between those who believe that the rights of “peaceful sidewalk counselors” were vindicated, and those who believe those counselors are actually pro-life bullies. The court opts for the gentle counseling characterization, without acknowledging that it was the extreme conduct of the latter group that led to passage of the law, and that, realistically, in the absence of the buffer zone, both types of protesters will be greatly emboldened. I guess from here on in, you won’t know whether you are being intimidated or “gently counseled” until after it’s happened. (Emphasis added)

I have another objection to the way the Court thinks on this issue. Freedom of speech is the right to get the message out. To publish it. It does not include the right to make somebody listen. There's a guy who stands on a corner downtown proclaiming that the city police are communists. I avoid him. It's a free country.

Speech works by the substantiveness of its evidence and the cogency of its argument. Liberty works by the right to be left alone unless one is breaking the law. As On Liberty argues (about page 3), liberty is not only political freedom, it is freedom from "social tyranny.": 

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

Those who oppose abortion have gotten their message out in every conceivable way and made every argument available to their case over the decades since abortion ceased to be illegal.

It is appalling that the Court thinks they also have the right to get up in the face of people who already bear the burden of a painful decision.

Reparations: Ta-Nehisi Coates' "White Guilt" vs Liberalism and the Unencumbered Self

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

In the video of his reparations debate with Jeffrey Goldberg, Coates at one point says, "You're responsible for the heritage." Continuing to harp on blame, his discussion of the case for reparations alleges "white guilt":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates "logic." If membership in a constructed group is ascribed to a person, that person is responsible for what that group did in the past. Another example:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people . . . (Emphasis added)

It is true that scripture (in some places) supports this "reckless dispensation of guilt"*, which blames descendants for a situation which they had no part in bringing about:

Exodus 34:6-7 - And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, [7] Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, ... that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.  (Emphasis added)

But as has been said earlier in these articles, this sort of illiberal thinking belongs to a reactionary interpretation** of religion (Instead, says Ezekiel below, I will judge you ... every one according to his ways), not to public or political reform.

The first post in this weblog asserted that America was founded on liberal principles. According to Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy, one of the meanings of "liberty," and a principle of liberalism, is "the unencumbered self.":

I REJECT the notion of racial kinship. I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels "the unencumbered self." The unencumbered self is free and independent, "unencumbered by aims and attachments it does not choose for itself," Sandel writes. "Freed from the sanctions of custom and tradition and inherited status, unbound by moral ties antecedent to choice . . ." (Emphasis added)

Sandel, arguing for collectivism instead of autonomy, continues: The unencumbered self reflects a deracinated liberalism that "cannot account for certain moral and political obligations that we commonly recognize, even prize" — "obligations of solidarity, religious duties, and other moral ties that may claim us for reasons unrelated to a choice," which are "indispensable aspects of our moral and political experience."

For reasons unrelated to a choice. This is the antithesis of the free American spirit, with its characteristic lack of servility.

Kennedy argues that Sandel's theme (which essentially parallels Coates' theme) promotes "identity" at the expense of the liberty of the single person:

Sandel's objection to those who, like me, seek the unencumbered self is that they fail to appreciate loyalties and responsibilities that should be accorded moral force partly because they influence our identity, such that living by these attachments "is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are -- as members of this family or city or nation or people, as bearers of that history, as citizens of this republic." (Emphasis added)

Curiously, such particularist arguments for "identity" resemble Hegel's line of reasoning in support of German nationalism:

The self-consciousness of one particular Nation is the vehicle for the ... development of the collective spirit; ... in it, the Spirit of the Time invests its Will.  Against this Will, other national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World.

Lincoln, in his letter to Henry L. Pierce, noted the universal character of the Founders' principles:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. (Emphasis added)

Coates, by contrast, seems to believe that this is hypocrisy:

The Civil War—the most lethal conflict in American history—boiled down to the right to raise an empire based on slaveholding and white supremacy. What had not yet clicked for me was precisely how essential enslavement was to America, that its foundational nature explained the Civil War's body count. (Emphasis added)

The skidding logic of this passage is prime Coates-think. Somehow, what the South wanted in the 1860s (and the North sacrificed its sons to oppose) becomes what the Founders really intended (and Lincoln's disagreement is so trivial that it need not even be mentioned, much less refuted).

Jonathan Chait was likewise perplexed by this characteristic tendency to pick one extreme or another, denying the middle, where things usually lie: "I was clarifying that Obama (and Bill Cosby) see the culture of poverty as a part of the problem of poverty, as opposed to its entirety, as Ryan sees it, and also opposed to zero percent of the problem, as Coates sees it."


The Harsh Illiberalism of The Case for Reparations:

Fritz Stern explained the title of his The Failure of Illiberalism:

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

Coates, in his unsupported, sweeping, use of such terms as "responsibility," "crime," and "guilt," exemplifies the illiberal mindset, which is "not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others." Such bad writing, when making a case for reparations, was a fatal error.


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(*)Frederick C. Crews, Follies of the Wise, quoted in Tikkun, 1994

(**)Eze 18:25ff:

Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not fair. ... Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.
Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die. ... Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, saith the Lord God. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. ... Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?
For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.

Reparations: Americans Still Don't Recognize Attacks on Liberal Values Phrased as Left Ideology

Political articles in the United States are generally written from the perspective of the left, or of conservatism, or of liberalism. Left and conservative are belief systems or ideologies; that is, positions are often held because of values other than truth or correspondence-to-reality (such as conventional wisdom, orthodoxy, or political correctness). Liberalism, our earlier article The Liberal Founding posits, is an information system, somewhat in the model of its immediate predecessor, the scientific revolution of the latter half of the Seventeenth Century.

A defining characteristic of left thought is its groupy outlook. Politics is a matter of an oppressed group, seen as virtuous; and an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil. Thus what any given left attempts to do is to battle, punish, or eliminate an evil group. The Marxism-Leninism of the late Soviet Union, having complete control, exiled, imprisoned, or executed virtually the entire middle class in its territory within a few years of the revolution. Similarly, Maoist communism, in a bloodbath, eliminated the Chinese middle class.

This personalistic approach contrasts with the methodology of modern liberal societies, which seek to build good institutions, enact good laws, secure the civil liberties of the citizen, and discover policies which advance the public good.

From earlier post Liberal, Left:

1. The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
2. The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
3. The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
4. This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”*
5. “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
6. In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group. 
7. This can lead to the person so identified to be punished for a wrong committed by another person, which is manifestly unjust.
8. The plight of the oppressed is taken to be more important than the interests and needs of individual members of the oppressed group. “Workers of the World, Unite” calls for solidarity rather than moral reflection and principled action.
9. This is collectivism, which Karl Popper, in The Open Society, described as a politics where the group is everything and the individual is nothing.**
10. The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory.    

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations is in many ways a classic example of anti-liberal, anti middle class left argument. The preceding article describes the groupy quality (3) of Coates' thinking:

An earlier post concerning Coates' fallacies argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress." (Emphasis added)

There is also the simplistic thinking of (6) above, which attributes to everyone considered to be a member of the oppressor group the supposed characteristics of the group:

The crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.

Coates gives us an example of the left theme, "an oppressor group characterized as thoroughly evil":

Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it. ... What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. (Emphasis added)

Coates appears to be more interested in punishing the guilty (7) than in constructive reform:

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. [J. D. Vance]: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

In a 2008 autopsy of the last campaign for reparations (roughly fifteen years ago), Walter Olson wrote:

To the extent the reparations movement had used its brief time on stage to encourage national introspection, Americans had reached a different conclusion from the one that the activists had hoped for—a rough consensus, in fact, that whatever the right approach to the nation’s perennial problem of race relations might be, ventures into anger-mongering and random expropriation weren’t it. (Emphasis added)

The final problem with Coates' modeling his argument on left ideology is that it is in the nature of ideology to be misleading or flat-out wrong, because ideology inherently rejects feedback from reality. Daphne Patai once said, "The whole point of being an ideologue is that new information doesn't disturb your worldview." In Coates' "white supremacy"/reparations articles there is a characteristic mixture of ad hominem, false equivalency, fallacies of distribution, withholding of exculpatory evidence, and vagueness:

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable . . .

It appears that Coates' articles concerning "white supremacy" and reparations are meant to appear to be in the great tradition of American reform, like Martin Luther King's successful civil rights campaign. But as noted in these posts, Coates' language is strikingly different from that of MLK and other reformers. Liberal campaigns appeal to "the better angels of our nature." Coates, victim of the left theme of incorrigible evil groups, can't pull that off. "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination. The general modus operandi of the left is in practice inherently discriminatory."

(*)From Tikkun:

What makes Crews's account so compelling, however, is his brilliant writing combined with his quite accurate condemnation of the way psychoanalysis came eventually to be practiced, especially in the United States: "its deliberate coldness, its cultivation of emotional regression, its depredation of the patient's self-perceptions as inauthentic...its reckless dispensation of guilt."

(**)C. R. Hallpike (hallpike.com/EvolutionOfMoralUnderstanding.pdf‎):

What Sir Karl Popper has called the ‘closed society’: ‘the magical or tribal or collectivist society would be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions,the open society.’ . . . For Popper, the closed society can be justly compared to an organism, in which ‘slavery, class and class-rule are “natural” in the sense of being unquestionable.’. . .

So, therefore, in a closed society ‘the tribe is everything and the individual nothing’

What Will Ta-Nehisi Coates' Reparations Articles Accomplish?

The realities of Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations are beginning to sink in.

J. D. Vance: "Coates cherry-picks data to score emotional points instead of carefully building an argument for reparations."

Coates' intent is apparently to fix the blame rather than fix the problem. Vance again: "There’s no talk, however, of what to do now, how reparations would help, or why we ought to focus on settling an old score instead of charting a new course. ... But it must be said: breaking hearts is far easier than healing them."

Where one would expect specifics, Coates presents generalities. W. James Antle III:

But when it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

Coates waves away as irrelevant the most obvious questions: “Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?” Many of us suspect these questions are ultimately unanswerable and would take an inquiry into reparations spearheaded by someone with Conyers’ politics as seriously as Coates would take a tea party investigation into Benghazi.

Coates repeatedly fails to make the argument for reparations. Vance:

After considering the victims of predatory lending (people who, by the way, later won a lawsuit), Coates notes that of all the recently vacant houses in Baltimore, 71 percent are in majority-black neighborhoods. The implication here is that banks unfairly targeted black people for foreclosure. Baltimore is 63 percent black, though. So this is largely demographics, not racism, at work. Coates again scores an emotional point. But if his goal is to show America owes reparations, then barely disproportionate vacancy statistics and a successful multimillion-dollar lawsuit by black homeowners don’t support his argument.

Coates fails to clarify what reparations would accomplish, or show how a reparations policy would be workable. Antle again:

When it comes to what reparations would look like or how they would work, Coates has little to say beyond “we should support” John Conyers’ bill to study reparations. And while he insists the failure of this proposal to advance “suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential,” he doesn’t give us any reason to think he is talking about a workable policy that would tangibly improve people’s lives.

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The people of a country ought to fight to defend their laws as they would fight for their city's walls. - Heraclitus

There is another, more fundamental problem. Two types of Europeans came to America and settled there: The idealists and the adventurers. A previous post, The Liberal Founding, argues that the idealists were the ones who “transformed the world.” Coates doesn't seem to understand either the idealists or their principles. In Black Pathology Crowdsourced, he quotes a passage from Yoni Applebaum to the effect that the principles and values of a street subculture are equivalent to the principles and values of the American idea:

Culture of Poverty is a label attached to a wide array of behaviors. There are behaviors—physical assertiveness—well-suited to that environment that may tend to inhibit success elsewhere.

The problem is that such a culture is dysfunctional, not that civil society frowns on it. Where "physical assertiveness" prevails, the young and strong push everybody else around. Women, children, the elderly and the disabled are marginalized. Because social capital requires an atmosphere of cooperation and trust—so that people can work together—social capital itself never develops. "Physical assertiveness" is a major cause of poverty, but Coates clearly appears not to understand this. He thinks that when his fellow citizens celebrate the American Revolution on the Fourth of July, it is about national chauvinism (or as he sometimes calls it, "white supremacy"). Thus, in The Case for Reparations, Coates asserts: 

What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Martin Luther King appealed to the principles of American ideals when he said, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'" Coates dismisses the principles and rejects the idea that his fellow citizens might be deeply moved by the thought of liberty and equality and justice. To Coates this is just hypocritical, "denying the facts of our heritage." 

An earlier post argued that Coates does not see a society of equal, rights-bearing citizens, 

"caught in an inescapable network of mutuality," but a polity irrevocably divided between oppressed race and oppressor race. "Once that fact is acknowledged," Kevin D. Williamson suggests "then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress."

If the mind behind "The Case for Reparations" is one which cannot be moved by ideals which have inspired the rest of the world, that may be a cause, more for pity, than exasperation.