The Enclosure of Free & Public Speech

 "A Speakers' Corner is an area where open-air public speaking, debate and discussion are allowed. The original and most noted is the northeast corner of Hyde Park in London, UK." Wikipedia.

I remember traveling to London as a teenager and learning about Speakers' Corner. It struck me as such a great thing, like the world is better for having this exist. Of course, free speech does not guarantee good speech, and when I visited Speakers' Corner, only a motley few stood on milk crates, proselytizing, spinning conspiracy theories to a non-existent audience. Still pretty cool though.

I went to college in Austin, Texas, a mecca for protest culture in the South. I walked with thousands to the state capital, while people with megaphones led the crowd in chanting:

"Show them what democracy looks like!"

"This is what democracy looks like!"

A group of young anarchists wearing thrift store pinstripe suits waved a gigantic red and black anarcho-communist flag. A contingent of young conservatives wearing preppy polos, khaki shorts, and boat shoes stood off to the side, counter-protesting. This could describe any of a dozen protests, and the scenes left a big impression on me.

By the time I left Austin, though, I questioned whether protest politics worked. So many passionate, well-spoken people had worked so hard to project their voices, but they had little to show for it. South Park perfectly captured the issue in its first episode of season seven, "I'm a Little Bit Country," in which Cartman goes back in time to meet our founding fathers. Just as we were in the midst of debating the Iraq war, the episode depicts an argument about the American Revolution:

"We cannot found a country based on war."

"We cannot found a country that is afraid to fight."

Then, Benjamin Franklin appears: "I believe that if we are to form a new country, we cannot be a country that appears war-hungry and violent to the rest of the world. However, we also cannot be a country that appears weak and unwilling to fight to the rest of the world. So what if we form a country that appears to want both?"

"Yes, of course, we go to war and protest going to war at the same time!"

"If the people of our new country are allowed to do whatever they wish, then some will support the war and some will protest it."

"And that means as a nation we could go to war with whomever we wished, but at the same time act like we didn't want to. If we allow the people to protest what the government does, then the country will be forever blameless."

"It's like having your cake and eating it too."

"Think of it: an entire country founded on saying one thing and doing another."

"And we will call that country the United States of America."

As long as radical speech does not threaten to cause real and meaningful change, then, institutions will tolerate and even promote it. It serves as a release valve, as I saw first-hand--protesters crashing on their couches after a long and difficult day (or days) of creating shirts and signs, petitions, marching, screaming, sweating, a job well done. Protest does not challenge the status quo, protest sustains it.

Fast forward a few years. I'm working in an office, and the closest thing to protesting for me is posting the occasional rant online. At a community meeting inside a nearby Kroger, my neighbors voiced outrage that a developer had misled us about a neighborhood project. We thought we were getting small shops and restaurants, a trendy new spot to hang out. Instead, we were getting a Sam's Club. The neighborhood association printed flyers, made banners, and took to the streets to get petition signatures. I went along. After all, I'm a protest veteran.

And then a funny thing happened. We reached a popular, crowded park near downtown,  our pens and clipboards ready, eager for people to sign. A police officer (or security guard?) walked over to us and told us that we could not assemble in the park.

"Why not? This is a public park and we are just exercising our right of association."

"This is not a public park. It is privately funded, and you can't be here."

I couldn't believe it. I looked around and thought about the people who come to this park every day, none of them aware that this space only appeared free. I wondered how many other parks and seemingly public places were like this. Are there any Speakers' Corners left?

We have become separated in the 21st Century, separated by devices, media, and culture. I told my brother that even though Pokémon Go runs poorly, he and his girlfriend should play it as a date activity just to get out of the house. When I suggested that they would enjoy this more than sitting on the living room couch at night consuming food, drink, video games, and TV marathons, he asked me how I "literally know exactly what we do all the time."

Some people blame TV, the internet, and smartphones. Certainly they play a part, but they do not intrinsically cause people to withdraw from community. To the contrary, the internet has spawned countless online communities, connecting distant, like-minded people who may otherwise have never found each other. Does the internet offer new forums for free and public speech? We can post under our names on Facebook, anonymously or not on other outlets like Twitter, Reddit, and so on. And short of blatantly illegal speech, everything seems permissible.

Even a decade ago, I had heard conservative rumblings about the liberal bias of universities, and the cultural censorship of the so-called regressive left. You can't voice conservative opinions these days, they said, or the left will shame you into confessing your privilege and becoming a social pariah. This seemed ridiculous to me. After all, I was in Austin--ground zero for campus radicalism--and these rumors just didn't ring true to me.

I took a class on Black Feminist Theory & Praxis. It was awesome. I found the classroom welcoming, not hostile. The professor engaged us with interesting reading and great discussions. Not only did I learn a lot, but also I had the opportunity to participate in meaningful discussions about difficult issues of discrimination and prejudice. From this class, among others, I came to appreciate the value and wisdom of lived experience, alternative traditions of knowledge and communication, and the bias of perspective.

So when I heard these conservative criticisms again more recently, I had some skepticism. Professors afraid to speak their minds? Safe spaces? Social Justice Warriors? This all sounded like fearmongering to me, an overreaction to a leftward cultural shift. Millennials and Gen Z more likely support gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and atheism. This scares cultural conservatives, and so they exaggerate stories of the radical left thought police coming for them. Or so I thought.

One after the other, I came across things that would raise my eyebrows. Someone claimed to have decided not to have children because their white children would further white privilege. Just today I read that one school will offer safe spaces for students traumatized by the GOP convention. Social media posts by radical leftists advocated violence against and silencing of people with privilege. Some claimed severe psychological trauma from exposure to so-called micro-aggressions, demanding retribution and remedy. Nor could the accused defend themselves. "You can't possibly understand, you're a white male. You have no right to speak, you need to listen."

I began to wonder, in the wake of failed protest politics, is censorship the new strategy? I discovered Milo Yiannopoulos and his "Dangerous Faggot Tour," speaking out against the radical left at colleges across the nation. It seemed he left a trail of tears, students traumatized by the mere prospect of his presence on campus. I watched Facebook censor his posts, Twitter ban him (now permanently), and university administrators attempt to suppress the campus conservative organizations who sponsored him. For what? Milo strikes me as a classic provocateur, offending people to elicit the very response that proves his point. I disagree with a lot of his substantive comments, but he has tapped into a kernel of truth on liberal censorship about which I had previously been in denial.

After one of Milo's campus events, one leftist professor actually resigned. She wrote:

Universities, like all institutions, are not neutral platforms. Universities are embodied institutions predicated upon social inequalities and dominant ideologies, privileging the participation and access of certain groups. In a time of crisis, universities have the responsibility to take a moral stand. To believe that universities are simply neutral platforms for "equal" exchange of ideas, the so-called free speech rooted in the market ideology, is delusional and that positional objectivity ends up reinforcing the exact inequalities and dominant ideologies upon which this institution is built.

Conservatives will quickly denounce this statement as lunacy, but it's an interesting argument. Because privileged people speak from a position of privilege, the marketplace of ideas is not really a level field, but rather stacks in favor of "dominant ideologies." I think there is some truth to that. So should we then forcibly censor those privileged voices in order to open up space for others to speak?

Without question we should work to empower and create space for those who have been denied the opportunities of the privileged by institutional discrimination. But censorship of privileged perspectives strikes me as a particularly bad mechanism for doing so. It's not just that two wrongs don't make a right. It's who does the censoring. Sure, the enlightened left may be the ones to call for censorship, but enforcement remains, as ever, in the hands of the very institutions that they criticize.

I do not know the radical left's response to this argument. I imagine something along the lines of, "by changing our toxic and oppressive culture at the root level, we will change and eventually take over institutions as well, and they will become instruments of peace, harmony, and love." Perhaps, but I doubt that will occur through censorship. If I learned anything from my Austin days, it's that power creates its own resistance. The more that we find ourselves engaged in self-censorship, watching what we're saying for fear of the speech police, the more that we grow to resent that censorship and indulge in the enjoyment of prohibited speech and thought.

As Milo is fond of saying, the alt-right is the new punk. Millennials and Gen Z rebels find themselves drawn to a rebranded libertarianism that emphasizes freedom of speech and criticism of institutions from the right instead of the left (although at the extremes, the arguments overlap). The alt-right fights for the freedom to express offensive ideas, and I think we have to take the good with the bad.

I used to believe that we should censor more, like Germany, which prohibits Holocaust denial. Now I think we just have to hash it out. Better that we protect the rights of all people to speak their minds and debate those ideas. The marketplace of ideas may not be a level playing field, but we can work to make the best with what we've got.

Where is today's Speakers' Corner? Not in my downtown park, apparently. Not on university campuses. Not on mainstream social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

Everyone complains about today's entrenched partisanship. Why doesn't the other side see how wrong they are? We all feel well-informed by reading our (obviously correct and unbiased) sources, and believe the other side crazy for relying on their (obviously fabricated and biased) sources. Whether through protest or censorship, the radical left shouts at the right, but utterly fails to engage them.

Whatever you are doing to advance your cause, is it working? Is it persuasive? Do you just antagonize those with opposing viewpoints? Do all your fans already think like you? When was the last time someone with an opposing view said, "you know what, you're right, I didn't think about it that way." When was the last time you said that to someone with whom you usually disagree? Consider the impossible--allow yourself to believe in the other side. Don't just glance, really delve into the other side's thinking, their culture. Read their blogs, comment (constructively) in their forums. What would it take for you to drink their Kool-Aid? Can you not sense some grain of truth in it? Can you not see yourself in another life being one of them? Are we not in some ways already two sides of the same coin?

This is not a demand. This is not an excuse or an apology. It's a request. Let's create some Speakers' Corners. Let's work to revive free and public speech. And that means free to everyone, whether they agree with you or not. Not simply so each side can have parity, so that each side can yell at each other for an allotted time, but so that we can get down to the dirty business of meaningfully addressing these fundamental issues that we all clearly care so much about. Maybe there will be no resolution, no winner. Maybe the conversations will be painful, traumatic. And maybe that's what radical democracy looks like.