The War on Terror has been atrocious for civil liberties in America. Yet, as
(my former boss) Matt
Welch noted in the LA
Times on Wednesday, for all of our declining freedom post-9/11, compared
to France’s response to their recent terrorist tragedy “our document is far
less pliable and far more subject to robust judicial defense.” That is to say,
it could be — and could have been — worse.
But America’s principles should be why we hold the nation to such a high standard,
not give it a pass for good intentions and high-minded ideals. We say we’re
for free speech, so we should mean it. Unfortunately, as we bomb and invade,
so we sometimes violate free speech. For most of our history, we’ve managed
to at least be better than the rest of the world when it comes to allowing free
expression.
Some people are just itching to
remedy that. This includes presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald
Trump, among others.
This is not a new idea. Over at
the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald has a refresher course
on how common this attitude of “oh, THAT old thing” is when it comes to elected
officials and/or presidential candidates, pundits, and law professors speaking
about freedom of speech.
Greenwald argues that a decade
ago, however, this argument had much less mainstream acceptance in spite of
the George W. Bush administration’s civil liberties-smooshing path of destruction.
Since then, there are progressive burbles of hate for American free speech;
usually based on the basic idea that “Europe good, America bad. America be like
Europe” or for the dangerously nebulous “hate speech” concept and how America
should embrace it.
Now, however, we have a more hawk-friendly
argument for censorship, this one published in Bloomberg and Slate.
Professor Eric Posner is the one who brought
this back with a vengeance. And in my anecdotal experience, his December
15 Slate piece does not seem to have gotten much positive attention. Plenty
of negative responses rolled in, however, including the always dependable (on
speech matters) Ken
White at Popehat.com.