Free Speech Revisited

The infamous Antifa--bane of the existence of New York Times opinion writers everywhere (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Last year, I published a post on free speech that I recently reread. Not surprisingly, I found that certain parts of it seem less convincing to me than they did back then, because over the course of the last year or so my thinking about freedom of speech has honestly shifted a lot. In my post last year, I took a pretty strong stance in favor of freedom of speech, and made a lot of arguments that are pretty typical in terms of what you'll hear from people who oppose restrictions on speech--some of them I still think hold up, some not so much. So I wanted to reexamine the issue here and talk about how my thinking has changed, and how it hasn't.

Let's start with how it's changed. In my original post I wrote the following:

There is...a moral question to address: is responding to words with force really justified? The rhyme we always use on children, "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me," is an oversimplification, of course, but it isn't without a great deal of truth. Fining or imprisoning a person damages them in a tangible way; words do not. Again, I am fully aware of the emotional distress words can cause, but trying to create a world in which no one is ever upset by anything anyone else says is neither practical nor desirable.

This is definitely one of the points I was least impressed with when I recently reread the post. Being exposed to hate speech does, indeed, lead to harms as tangible as any. In fact, earlier in the same piece I even quoted this from an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times:

Racist hate speech has been linked to cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and requires complex coping strategies. Exposure to racial slurs also diminishes academic performance. Women subjected to sexualized speech may develop a phenomenon of “self-objectification,” which is associated with eating disorders. 

These negative physical and mental health outcomes — which embody the historical roots of race and gender oppression — mean that hate speech is not “just speech.” Hate speech is doing something. It results in tangible harms that are serious in and of themselves and that collectively amount to the harm of subordination. The harm of perpetuating discrimination. The harm of creating inequality.

The idea that hate speech causes no "tangible harm" is absurd and I was obviously trying to overlook evidence that contradicted what I wanted to believe, relying on the dumb and weak argument that because being exposed to hateful speech doesn't leave a bruise or reduce the amount of money in your bank account, that means the harm it causes doesn't really count. Even though I made an attempt to be sensitive, I ultimately ended up reducing the real negative effects on mental and even physical health that hate speech has to "hurt feelings," which is particularly indefensible. It's the same argument that far-right shitheads like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos make, fundamentally.

It also overlooks the very real role of propaganda in helping extremely destructive movements gain political power. Certainly the right to freedom of speech--and the closely related right to freedom of assembly--are important for fascist and other far-right parties and organizations to build support and work their way up to the highest levels of government. These political factions can end up killing large numbers of people when they attain power, and the role of propaganda, rallies, marches etc. in that rise to power is far from negligible. Even if the connection between cause and effect isn't as readily obvious or immediate as, say, the connection between someone punching another person in the face and the second person getting a black eye, it's still very real. So, like a lot of stuff we tell kids, "sticks and stones..." is just another nugget of bullshit that should be disregarded by anyone over the age of sixteen or so.

The next paragraph has not held up much better in my view:

Facing offensive speech head-on offers a clarity that censorship cannot: it allows us to figure out why these utterances are so repulsive to us, rather than simply attacking those who make them. Further, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, "Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example." If the government punishes people for their speech, does it not encourage intolerance and force over rational debate?

Nobody needs to hear racial slurs or Nazi propaganda to know they're opposed to it and understand why they're opposed to it, and the idea that banning genuine hate speech would push us toward some point where we're unable to have a discussion that doesn't break out into a fistfight is beyond stupid--not to mention disproven by the countries that actually have hate speech laws and still manage to have intelligent discussions free of violence or irrational intolerance.

In general, a lot of my argument in favor of free speech is premised on the idea that Saner Heads Will Prevail--that the most intelligent and rational arguments will win out when all perspectives are given a fair hearing. History has shown over and over again that this is not how things work, and it's delusional to cling to that idea when Donald Trump managed to get elected president. And rational arguments do nothing to alleviate the real damage done to people who are exposed to hate speech.

As the first paragraph I quoted indicates, I also clung to the idea that people have a moral right to say what they want--that it is inherently Wrong and Bad to try to shut down any speech, regardless of how reprehensible it is. I no longer stand by this at all. Speech that is designed to dehumanize other people is in no way deserving of tolerance of any sort, and political propaganda that furthers the goals of destructive movements isn't either. We are not morally obligated to allow people to utter or publish speech that falls into these categories, and there's nothing inherently immoral, in my opinion, in preventing them from doing so or punishing them for doing so (depending on how these things are done, of course).

I also fell into the trap of seeing free speech as a good in and of itself--an approach that's pushed heavily in the United States. We are told that it is taking the moral high ground to let Nazis march in a Jewish neighborhood and allow the Klan to hold rallies (and even provide police protection for such assemblies, lest anyone try to disrupt them with violence). That's how I used to think, for sure, but not anymore. The idea that giving fascists and racists the right to spread their propaganda and organize to further their cause is somehow noble or good is widely held, but I can't see any reason we should continue to believe it. Are we supposed to think that we're not entitled to express our own views unless we give that same right to people whose goal is to terrorize racial and ethnic minorities? I'm pretty comfortable with the principle that people who want to commit genocides, and hope to use speech to further that cause, are no longer entitled to freedom of speech.

So, that's how my opinion has changed: I no longer believe that we have any moral imperative to respect others' right to free speech, when those others are racists, Nazis, Klansmen, etc., who are using that right to further their evil causes or insult and dehumanize vulnerable groups--and I no longer think that allowing these voices to be heard is in and of itself a valuable thing. No--when bigots are prevented from making their bigotry heard, that is a good thing, in my opinion. And, to the extent that hate speech laws actually discourage real hate speech (i.e. speech designed to dehumanize and attack vulnerable groups) and political propaganda for destructive ideologies such as Nazism and racism, hate speech laws are good. Obviously, these views are a radical departure from the ones I expressed in July of last year, which is the result of a lot of contemplation and internal debate on my part.

So, how have my views stayed the same? Well, obviously on a moral and theoretical level they have changed completely--but when it comes to the practical arguments my old blog post makes, I think they largely hold up. For instance:

If nothing else, pure self-interest should be a motivating factor for the support of freedom of speech...Some leftists may be thrilled with France's anti-hate speech laws, but they may be less thrilled with France's crackdown on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement under the pretense that it is hate speech. Not surprisingly, giving those in power permission to censor certain viewpoints means they are likely to use that power to censor the viewpoints they dislike...As a leftist, I have to note that it is stunningly shortsighted of my fellow leftists to support giving the government the power of censorship while expecting it not to be used against us.

This I still wholeheartedly believe. Indeed, any leftist wanting to give the US government greater power to punish speech it doesn't like must be insane, if not downright suicidal. The example I cited about BDS in France is just one illustration of how hate speech laws are likely to backfire against the left. And, as I noted earlier in the post, "in point of fact, hate speech restrictions do not seem to have been especially effective at squelching out fascism and racism, given the rise of far-right parties across Europe." For this reason, hate speech laws still strike me as a bad idea--while they surely have some positive effects, the potential for abuse is high, and ultimately they don't seem to be all that effective in actually eliminating hate. Or even keeping it from becoming a major political force, for that matter. The cons seem to outweigh the pros, in my opinion, particularly in a country like the US where the government has a long history of attacking left-wing movements. None of the rebuttals to this argument that I've heard or seen have come close to being convincing.

It also still strikes me as generally a bad idea to try to chase objectionable speakers off of college campuses or prevent them from speaking. It always seems to fuel the anti-PC hysteria and result in more tedious articles from Jonathan Chait and Bari Weiss about the dangers of the illiberal left--and, given the media attention it draws, it's hardly effective in actually denying the speaker themselves a platform. Of course, there are considerations that should come into account when deciding whether someone should be allowed to speak on campus--if they're likely to use their platform to make students less safe, for instance by targeting and harassing a transgender students like Milo Yiannopoulos did; or if they're likely attract dangerous and violent people to the campus and the area around it, like Richard Spencer did. But when it comes to a more "academically" racist old coot like Charles Murray, or some idiot troll like Christina Hoff Sommers, it's probably best to just ignore them, or to show up and protest but keep it "civil." It's not that they deserve it, it's just a matter of optics.

So, what about antifa, and black bloc-style tactics against far-right marches and rallies? I spoke out against them in my previous post. I guess you could say my feelings are pretty mixed. I absolutely value antifa, and I don't think it's fair to reduce their movement to just punching Nazis. It's important to show up and confront racists and fascists--and given that their ideologies are based on violence, it's important to be ready to respond in kind if violence breaks out. And I think that being an active Nazi, or a white nationalist, or whatever, absolutely means you deserve to get beaten up. But, yeah, black-masked anarchists crashing through police barricades and beating people with clubs or whatever probably is not great optics for the left. And while it might make those on the far right less likely to hold assemblies (a good thing), I'm not sure how much it does to actually defeat the far right politically given that we live in the age of the Internet--which makes it pretty easy to spread ideas with no marches or rallies necessary--and that the people who faithfully vote Republican in every election are frankly a much bigger threat to the world than the dorks who show up for alt-right rallies. But I've already changed my mind on a lot of things, and maybe my mind will change about this too.

So I guess from a practical standpoint, my thinking on free speech hasn't changed much. As distasteful as it is to me, even the ACLU's practice of defending Nazis' right to free speech may be valuable in that it helps discourage and prevent any attempts by the government to restrict speech--and it's no secret that if the government got free rein to crack down on speech they don't like, they'd be using that power against the left and not just the far right. But a lot of the more theoretical or moral arguments in favor of free speech ring completely hollow to me--including the ones I made just last year. It was a lot easier, to be frank, when I could wholeheartedly embrace the cause of free speech--and it would probably be easier now if I could believe that hate speech laws and beating up Nazis were completely productive approaches. But I can at least know that my beliefs now are the result of a more honest examination than the ones I held when I wrote my blog post last year, and for that reason I wanted to put them out there.

Dear Liberals: Republicans Aren't Your Friends

By the time I've published this, Brett Kavanaugh will probably have been confirmed to the Supreme Court. This is bad news for many women, labor unions and a lot of other people, but pretty good news for Clarence Thomas, who's now only the second-biggest sex creep out of the nine justices. The final vote hasn't happened yet as of my writing these words, but every Republican senator except Lisa Murkowski has come out in support of Bart O'Kavanaugh, and all of them (again except Murkowksi) voted to proceed with his nomination. This is after Jeff Flake and Susan Collins both made a big show out of being undecided and supporting an FBI investigation. Once the FBI had completed an extremely half-assed investigation, they both decided that was good enough and they could now support the Kav without shattering their image as independent-minded, post-partisan American Heroes.

Which leads me to the main thrust of this blog post. I want to address a misconception that I see among a lot of liberals. In particular, older liberals seem to cling to it. So to any liberals who are reading this, let me say something extremely simple, but equally important, which is this: Republicans are not your friends. I don't mean that you shouldn't be friends with regular people who happen to be registered Republicans, I mean the Republicans in Congress and in the media. They are not your friends. They are your enemies, and the enemies of any positive future for the country and the world.

Sen. Jeff Flake (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Now--if you're a liberal--this might seem obvious. You're probably thinking of guys like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and other such walking piles of trash. That's not who I'm talking about. Of course, everything I said above applies to them, but they're not the ones I'm writing this post about. I'm talking about the assholes like to pretend they're Very Upset about Trump's lack of decor when he tweets something stupid but then turn around and help him actively screw over millions of people. These are people like Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, the late John McCain (as previously discussed) and of course the aptly named Jeff Flake.

Let us keep in mind, for starters, that every Republican senator except Lisa Murkowski supports Brett Kavanaugh even after multiple women have very credibly accused him of sexual assault. And while, yes, Murkowksi deserves a very small amount of credit for coming out against the Kavster, let's not forget she voted to put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, and that his vote was crucial in the Janus decision (which said public sector employees can't be required to contribute to the unions that represent their interests), the decision to uphold Trump's travel ban, and doubtless will also be a deciding vote for many other horrible decisions that make life worse for large numbers of people.

Yes, some of the "moderate" Republicans have defected from the party line at crucial moments, such as during the attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but they don't deserve brownie points for doing the right thing every once in a while when the rest of the time they do things that make life harder and more miserable for vast numbers of people. If they really wanted to act as a check against Trump, they could become independents, or Democrats, or at least stop supporting the worst and most destructive things he does.

The point of this, by the way, isn't about how they are as people--whether they're doing what they think is right, and mean well, and are sincere. There's a strong case to be made that Jeff Flake and Susan Collins are grandstanding frauds who want to be lauded by the media and by Democrats while quietly enabling Trump's agenda, but that's not the point. Even if they and the other Trump-critical Republicans are completely sincere and well-intentioned, it only shows their view of the world is dangerous and delusional in the extreme and that they are in no way useful allies.

While we're at it, all of this also applies to #Resistance heroes like David Frum and Bill Kristol, who have won plaudits by reinventing themselves as anti-Trump Republicans. These guys, granted, might be more genuinely anti-Trump than Flake et al., but their ideas are still absolutely awful. Both Kristol and Frum continue to defend the Iraq War, the worst war crime of the twenty-first century so far and an atrocity that killed an estimated several hundred thousand people. Even Trump has said the Iraq War was a terrible idea.

You might be tempted to respond at this point by quoting Frederick Douglass: "I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong." Or to point out that Hitler was able to rise to power partially because of how divided the opposition was. To which I say: yeah, if any of these jerks actually offer some useful form of resistance to Trump, support them in that particular instance. If they're actually doing something that might make the world a better place, join them in that particular endeavor. But supporting them when they actually do something good doesn't mean you have to heap praise on them for their courageous opposition to Trump, and their condemnations of Trump are cheap and useless. No one cares when Jeff Flake whines about Trump saying a mean thing or David Frum writes a piece saying that he's just like Fredo Corleone. These things change exactly zero people's minds and effect no change whatsoever. Neither deserves praise when their authors are so completely awful in every other respect.

So, please: stop praising these people. Stop treating them as some kind of antidote to Trump. Their ideology helped lead to Trump and they have absolutely nothing to offer. They are not useful as allies. One of the problems Hillary Clinton experienced in 2016 was a major decline in minority turnout. Is allying with "moderate" Republicans the key to bringing black and Hispanic voters back to the polls? Will it help turn out young voters, do you think? These people are clinging to some pre-Trump conservatism that has been soundly defeated in their own party--Republicans overwhelmingly approve of Trump's performance as president. There is no actual base for their ideas.

On the other hand, there is a real surge that we're seeing on the left, with incumbent Democrats being unseated by upstart progressive challengers, widespread support for Medicare-for-All, and a surge in membership for the Democratic Socialists of America. These are the people to pay attention to if you care about bringing down Trump. Maybe you don't agree with all the ideas that some of the more left-leaning segments of the population hold, but you have no excuse for refusing to ally with them if you've been drooling over every Republican that coughs up some lame criticism of Trump.

On McCain's Legacy

John McCain is dead. The fawning commentary--that he was a war hero, a patriot, a statesman--has already begun as I start to write this post, on the day of his death. I have no desire to dance on the man's grave, but when many obituaries will be falling over themselves to praise him, or at least portray him on his own terms, I think it's important to try to take a more sober look at his legacy, which is what I intend to do here. And while I'm in no mood to celebrate McCain's ugly death from aggressive brain cancer, that doesn't change the fact that he leaves behind a legacy that's, on the whole, nothing to laud.

John McCain (photo credit Dan Raustadt)

Let's start with his time in the military, which has gotten him almost unanimously praised as a hero. McCain volunteered to take part in that Vietnam War, an enormously destructive conflict that was waged to prop up US-backed regimes in South Vietnam and keep the country from unifying under a Communist government, as many people on both sides of the border wanted (and as ultimately happened). He served as a bomber pilot and took part in Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombardment campaign against North Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of civilians, aiming, among other things, to "[impair] North Vietnam’s capacity to continue as an industrially viable state." Accordingly, when he was shot down McCain was on his way to bomb a power plant in "a heavily populated part of Hanoi," to use his own words. McCain also notes that he had been disenchanted that his civilian commanders were so restrictive about what targets they would allow him and his fellow pilots to bomb.

After being shot down, McCain was held captive for years and tortured, going through suffering that no human being should have to endure. At one point he understandably broke and made a forced confession, which the North Vietnamese used in a propaganda broadcast, but he often refused to cooperate with his captors. I suppose perhaps if you view the Vietnam War as some noble struggle on behalf of the freedom of the Vietnamese people, all of this is heroic enough. I personally don't, and McCain's decision to fight in the Vietnam War and enthusiasm for bombing North Vietnam seem lamentable, not heroic, to me. Noam Chomsky addressed the point in 2008, when McCain was running for president:

Let’s imagine that, say, in Russia now someone is running for office who was a pilot in the invasion of Afghanistan and was shot down while he was bombing heavily populated urban areas in Kabul, civilian areas, and was then tortured by Reagan’s freedom fighters. We should sympathize with him for his fate at the hands of the people who tortured him. But would we call him a war hero and a specialist on national security? How does that make you a hero and a specialist on national security? On the other hand, that’s exactly what’s being done with McCain. His expertise in national security is precisely that. But you can’t raise that matter here, because the jingoism and the commitment to the nobility of our military efforts is so high across the spectrum that you can’t bring it up.

Decades after his imprisonment, as he ran for president in 2000, McCain said of his captors that "I hate the gooks," using an anti-Asian ethnic slur that's long been popular in the military as a way to dehumanize the natives of countries that are being targeted. When challenged on it he stated that "I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people" before backing down and apologizing in the face of strong, and warranted, criticism.

It is worth noting that McCain refused early release during his time as POW because he didn't want to be allowed to go home before the other POWs who had been there longer had the same opportunity
(and because he didn't want to give the North Vietnamese a PR coup). Noble, and certainly the strongest argument for McCain to be considered a hero. Would I do the same? Would you? I don't know. These are fair questions. But for me and many others, the reality of McCain's military career and the war he chose to be part of are far too complex for the words "war hero" to accurately convey.

While it hasn't earned him the same acclamation as his time in the military, McCain's political career has also been widely praised, even by those who disagree with him--he was a maverick, they say, a man who stood for principles over party. That's how he presented himself for sure--he was willing to speak when many other members of his party stayed silent or even openly disagreed with what he said. But as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words, and unfortunately McCain's actions often fell short of his high-flung rhetoric.

Let's take the issue of torture. Unlike many other Republicans, McCain decried waterboarding as torture and called for an end to its use. Admirable enough. But when push came to shove, he abandoned what he'd said and backed down from doing anything that would actually stop the CIA's use of torture, ultimately only supporting an amendment that said the military couldn't use interrogation techniques that weren't in the Army Field Manual. When a later bill was put forward that would have applied the same rules to the CIA, McCain voted against it and called on Bush to veto it. Further, he helped pass legislation that protected torturers from prosecution, despite his pronouncement that waterboarding was illegal. Years later he would urge the Senate to reject Gina Haspel for the position of CIA director given her involvement in the use of torture, but as Vox correctly notes, by then it was too little, too late.

This behavior is a pattern for him. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair note a similar example in a 1999 article for Counterpunch:

McCain drew enthusiastic plaudits...when he rose in the Senate chamber to denounce the[ ]insertion of $200 million worth of pork in the military construction portion of the defense authorisation bill. Eloquently, he spoke of the 11,200 service families on food stamps, the lack of modern weapons supplied to the military, the declining levels of readiness in the armed forces. Bravely, he laid the blame at the doors of his colleagues: “I could find only one commonality to these projects, and that is that 90 percent of them happened to be in the state or districts of members of the Appropriations Committees.” Sternly, in tones befitting a Cato or a Cicero, the senator urged his colleagues to ponder their sacred duty to uphold the defense of the Republic rather than frittering away the public purse on such frivolous expenditure: “We live in a[ ]very dangerous world. We will have some serious foreign policy crises. I am not sure we have the military that is capable of meeting some of these foreseeable threats, but I know that what we are doing with this $200 million will not do a single thing to improve our ability to meet that threat.” 

In the gallery, partisans of pork-free spending silently cheered while those who hoped to profit from portions of the $200 million gnashed their teeth in chagrin. Yet, such emotions were misplaced on either side. This was vintage McCain. Had he wished to follow words with deeds, he could have called for a roll-call on the items he had just denounced so fervently. That way the looters and gougers would have had to place their infamy on the record. But, no, McCain simply sat down and allowed the offending expenditure to be authorised in the anonymous babble of a voice vote (“All those in favor say Aye”). Had McCain really had the courage of his alleged convictions he could have filibustered the entire $250 billion authorisation bill, but, inevitably, no such bravery was in evidence. Instead, when the $250 billion finally came to a vote, he...voted for it.

And, despite his reputation for being independent-minded, McCain played the role of an accomplice in the Republican Party's shift toward barely disguised fascism. His choice of Sarah Palin helped pave the way for Donald Trump's presidency, and his campaign cranked out dishonest attacks on Obama--that he had been closely associated with "terrorist" Bill Ayers--that helped set a tone for the deranged cries of "socialism!" and "communism!" from Tea Party chuds in the years to follow. Even the milquetoast centrist "fact-checker" organization PolitiFact denounced the McCain campaign's allegation that Obama and Ayers "ran a radical education foundation together:"

This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism.

And lest we forget--it was over two years ago, which might as well be two hundred years given how politics has been recently--McCain endorsed Trump for president in May of 2016, after Trump had called Mexicans rapists, proposed banning Muslims from entering the US, said we should kill the entire families of terrorists, and, of course, made derogatory comments about John McCain himself. He only revoked his endorsement after the Access Hollywood tape came to light--once again, too little, too late.

Accordingly, despite (as always) having plenty to say in criticism of Donald Trump, McCain has done little to actually oppose him. He voted with him over 80% of the time, supporting his awful nominees such as Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and Kirstjen Nielsen. He also voted to support the Senate version of the disastrous tax "reform" passed last year (he ultimately missed the vote on the final version of the bill due to his illness). Of Trump's early cabinet selections McCain remarked "I couldn't have picked a better team.

And I would be remiss not to mention McCain's role as one of the Senate's biggest warmongers, from joking about "that old Beach Boys song, 'Bomb Iran'" on the campaign trail during his 2008 run for president, to his call last year to send more troops to Afghanistan after over a decade and a half of war, to his years-long advocacy of major intervention in Syria, it's largely accurate to say he never met a war he didn't like. His admission in a recently released memoir that the Iraq War was "a mistake" after steadfastly defending it for years is--yet again--too little, too late.

Such is the legacy of John McCain. He had his moments, one might say, if one was feeling particularly generous--his support for campaign finance reform, his vote against the "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act, his opposition to Gina Haspel's nomination. But on the whole he hardly showcased the degree of heroism and integrity he's been so widely credited with. After traveling with the McCain campaign in 2000, the writer David Foster Wallace remarked that "It feels impossible, in February 2000, to tell whether John McCain is a real leader or merely a very talented political salesman, an entrepreneur who’s seen a new market-niche and devised a way to fill it." Some eighteen and a half years later, the answer is somewhat less elusive.

The Brain Is Much More Important

They say the infamous gangster Al Capone had the mind of a seven-year-old child when he was paroled. Syphilis had eaten away his mental capacities to the point where he spent the last years obsessed with imagined menaces--Communists, as well as his old rival Bugs Moran, who he became convinced was trying to kill him--even though Moran was holed up in some Ohio prison by that point. Yes, the deterioration of the human mind can be a fascinating thing to behold. Instead of quietly burning out like a dying fire, it can spin out of control before one final, irreversible implosion. There is a reason that madness has fascinated playwrights, philosophers and other thinkers for many generations.

Mark Wilson/Zuma Press

So now we come to the president. Speculation about his mental state is certainly nothing new, and we have no need to try to figure out the causes. Dementia? Alzheimer's, like Reagan before him? Just stress from being the most powerful man on the planet? Leave it to the experts to try to figure that out, but the point is something is up with the man. He has always been a sickening boil on the American Dream, a man who represents everything twisted and evil in the national spirit. But now he's a bloated self-parody, so lacking in awareness of his own stupidity that he's more comical than diabolical. And it's only been getting worse and worse. At one of his rallies last month, he started talking about Elton John and got sidetracked, vomiting up this word salad:

I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical – the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.

Yes, the brain is much more important. It reads more like a passage from some long-lost James Joyce work than it does the product of a normal human mind. Even Trump's Neanderthal supporters must have been wondering if he was having a stroke onstage, right in front of their eyes.

Around the same time that that rally was held, we got a new report that was startling even by Trump standards: he'd wanted to invade Venezuela last year. He clung onto the idea even after his own advisors tried to dissuade him. He even mentioned it to other Latin American leaders. I don't know if even a dumb frat boy like George W. Bush would cling to such a Gen. Jack D. Ripper-esque notion so tenaciously. A full-on invasion of a major country in our own hemisphere, with no remotely justifiable cause--not even so much as a phony pretense about Weapons of Mass Destruction--just some deranged notion of taking out Our Enemies.

And we can't forget the Mueller investigation. So far, it's unearthed nothing too damaging for Trump--maybe it never will. And certainly his supporters won't care if he colluded with Russia. The congressional Republicans are sure to protect him against removal from office even if the wildest allegations turn out to be true. But that hasn't kept Trump from focusing on the investigation compulsively, barely ever going a week without tweeting about the "Witch Hunt" since the beginning of the year. Sometimes he's barely comprehensible. Take this from July 7: "The Rigged Witch Hunt, originally headed by FBI lover boy Peter S (for one year) & now, 13 Angry Democrats, should look into the missing DNC Server, Crooked Hillary’s illegally deleted Emails, the Pakistani Fraudster, Uranium One, Podesta & so much more. It’s a Democrat Con Job!" The output of a late-stage syphilitic brain if I've ever seen it.

And of course there was last month's press conference with Putin. We don't have to agree with the more hysterical accusations--that it constituted treason, that it shows he's Putin's puppet, etc.--to recognize it was a bizarre performance. He babbled about the Democrats, the investigation, and the DNC server, while seeming to put his trust in the Russian president. It's the sort of behavior that's hard to imagine even from Trump's nauseating predecessors--Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes. You could pull someone off the street and make them president for a day and anyone with half a brain would put on a better performance than that.

And now he's admitted on Twitter that Don Jr.'s meeting with Russians was intended to dig up dirt on Clinton--contradicting the earlier claim that it was about adoption laws, for no apparent reason. This comes after he attacked LeBron James for daring to utter mild criticisms of the Dealmaker-In-Chief. Even a fiend like Nixon had better self-control than this--and he really did have something to hide. We have yet to figure out if Trump does. It may be that Mueller is his Bugs Moran--someone his decaying brain has unshakably decided poses a threat and has it in for him.

Yes, it may be that on some level Trump believes his own talk of Witch Hunts. And maybe he's also deluded enough to believe there's a "red wave" coming this November, as he keeps insisting. One thing is clear: he is unstable and it is only getting worse, if anything. The idea of our billionaire president being deranged and stupid enough to start World War Three has become decidedly less hypothetical with the news about Venezuela. He is a literal madman with his Finger On The Button, and we can only hope that the depraved goons surrounding him have the marginal amount of sanity, and the power of persuasion, required to keep him from doing something catastrophic. We will be lucky to make it to the end of his tenure without things getting much worse than they already are.

In Defense of Socialism: A Response to Bret Stephens

It's no surprise that the media has been focused, for the past couple weeks, on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's exhilarating victory over Joe Crowley. The story of a political newcomer easily picking off a long-time incumbent who holds a leadership role in the Democratic Party is indeed a significant one, and one that we can hope means the beginning of a change of direction for the Democrats. Of course, as is generally the case, we've seen quite a lot of stupidity from the media in their coverage and commentary in their coverage of Ocasio-Cortez's victory, and today we'll be looking at a piece of it, from Bret Stephens at the New York Times, whose first column, just to give an introduction to what we're dealing with, was focused on trying to plant seeds of doubt in the reader's mind about the realities of climate change as agreed on by the scientific community.

Stephens' new column, entitled "Democratic Socialism is Dem Doom," begins:

A political novice who calls herself a “democratic socialist” wins an unexpected Democratic Party primary victory, and now political taxonomists are racing to explain just what the term means. Here’s my definition: political hemlock for the Democratic Party.

Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (photo credit: Scott Heins/Getty Images

)

Interesting claim. One of the most well-known democratic socialists in the country, Bernie Sanders, went on to become a widely popular figure after he dramatically outperformed most expectations in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. Polls have demonstrated that young voters particularly are open, and even friendly, to the idea of socialism. Stephens repeats his odd claim a few paragraphs later:

“Democratic socialism” is awful as a slogan and catastrophic as a policy. And “social democracy” — a term that better fits the belief of more ordinary liberals who want, say, Medicare for all — is a politically dying force. Democrats who aren’t yet sick of all their losing should feel free to embrace them both.

Social democracy is a politically dying force? Then why, one wonders, was the Medicare for All bill in 2017 cosponsored by relatively mainstream Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Tammy Baldwin? Why did a poll from earlier this year find almost six in ten Americans support Medicare for All? And again, why did Bernie Sanders do so unexpectedly well in the 2016 primaries, and why did he become one of the more popular figures in American politics? These are questions that, unsurprisingly, Stephens does not answer.

Start with democratic socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, believe in economies defined by state-owned enterprises and worker-owned cooperatives. Versions of this have been tried to varying degrees before: Israel in its first decades; post-independence India; Sweden in the 1960s and ’70s.

It always led to crisis: hyperinflation for Israel in 1980s; an I.M.F. bailout for India in 1991; a banking meltdown for Sweden in 1992. It’s usually a recipe for corruption: State-owned enterprises such as Pemex in Mexico or Eskom in South Africa are local bywords for graft and mismanagement. It frequently leads to dictatorship. Hugo Chávez was also a democratic socialist.

Someone should tell that to Bolivia, headed by president Evo Morales, who has implemented similar reforms and yet continues to preside over a healthy economy and has achieved laudable feats in poverty reduction. I think it would also be fair to ask Mr. Stephens to present some actual evidence that socialism in Israel, India, and Sweden inevitably led to the economic problems those countries faced. Of course, he presents none.

What about social democracy? Isn’t it the norm in Europe, and isn’t it working pretty well? You wouldn’t know it by the way Europeans are voting. France’s Socialists ran a left-wing candidate in last year’s presidential election, and crawled away with barely 6 percent of the vote. Germany’s Social Democrats had their worst electoral result since 1933. Italy’s center-left was trounced by a combination of populists and right-wingers in March.

This is extremely misleading. In the first round of voting in France's presidential election, the outspokenly leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon took almost 20% of the vote (to put that in perspective, the winner of the first round (who would also go on win the second round), Emmanuel Macron, received 24%). According to Ipsos France, he received 30% of the votes from votes 18 to 24, more than any other candidate.

As for Germany's Social Democratic Party, since 2013 they've been in a coalition with conservative austerity champion Angela Merkel--not exactly the mark of a bold, progressive agenda. Turning to Italy, as Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi (whose coalition lost the election earlier this year) had introduced 'labor reform' that "made it easier for large companies to fire people and offered fiscal incentives for companies that hired permanent workers on new, less-protected terms," according to Reuters, over the opposition of labor unions. That labor reform is now being challenged by the new governing coalition. So citing the failures of these parties as evidence of European discontent with the welfare state and social services provided by their government is more than a little dubious.

Stephens writes further,

You can argue that the major goals of social democracy — universal health care and other social provisions — were achieved long ago in Europe. But they aren’t so fully realized, and are thus potentially popular, in America, never mind our own robust welfare state. [!]

But that misses the deeper point. Today’s social democracy falls apart on the contradiction between advocating nearly unlimited government largess and nearly unlimited immigration. “Abolish ICE” is a proper rallying cry for hard-core libertarians and Davos globalists, not democratic socialists or social democrats. A federal job guarantee is an intriguing idea — assuming the jobs are for some defined “us” that doesn’t include every immigrant, asylum-seeker or undocumented worker.

ICE didn't exist at the turn of this century. Despite the lies peddled by Trump and the Republican party, abolishing ICE doesn't equate to open borders (regardless of one's opinion of open borders). And given that we're now being warned about a "labor shortage," Stephens' worries about finding enough jobs for everyone seems questionable.

Trump gets this, as does the far right in Europe, which is why they attract such powerful working-class support. Want to preserve the welfare state? Build a wall — or, in Europe’s case, reinstate border controls. Want more immigrants and amnesty? Lower the minimum wage and abolish the closed shop.

But please choose. It’s one or the other.

Again, where is the evidence for this? What economist has said that we either have to have a wall or abandon the welfare state?

It’s possible Democrats will surrender to the illusion that they can have both, puffing the sails of Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow travelers. But a Democratic Party seriously interested in defeating congressional Republicans in the fall and Trump in 2020 isn’t going to win by turning itself into a right-wing caricature of the left, complete with a smug embrace of whatever it conceives to be “socialism.”

Embracing socialism didn't seem to keep Ocasio-Cortez from beating Joe Crowley, nor will it keep her from getting elected in November, as is basically certain to happen.

If Trump is the new Nixon, the right way to oppose him isn’t to summon the ghost of George McGovern. Try some version of Bill Clinton (minus the grossness) for a change: working-class affect, middle-class politics, upper-class aspirations.

Really? The Democrats literally ran Clinton's wife as their presidential candidate in 2016 and lost. The current situation in the US is entirely different than it was in the early '90s, when Clinton got elected. Why on Earth would a renewed embrace of Clintonite centrism be more likely to succeed than an embrace of popular policies like Medicare for All and popular figures like Bernie Sanders?

Stephens wraps up,

I’ve written elsewhere that a chief danger to democracy is a politics in which the center bends toward the fringe instead of the fringe bending toward the center. It’s the way Trump became president. But the antidote to one extreme isn’t another, and Democrats will only win once they reclaim the vital center of American politics.

The center is Dayton and Denver, not Berkeley and Burlington. The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington. Democrats who want to win should know this.

Fitting that Stephens finishing by citing two long-dead politicians as representatives of centrism. But, realistically, Truman's New Deal liberalism is probably closer to Sanders-style progressivism than Clintonite deregulating, welfare-shredding corporate centrism. So, Stephens has once again gotten it wrong.

In some 800 words, he has failed to make a single good, or even thought-provoking point. This article is truly one of the most dull, uninspired pieces I've read in some time. It reads like the clarion call of a decrepit political and intellectual establishment that bases its worldview on the most wretched and insipid platitudes while turning a blind eye to observable reality. When we look at the facts, we can only conclude that Stephens is ignorant, dishonest, or both.

The Problem with Blaming Marx

May Fifth of this year marked the 200th birthday of Karl Marx, who needs no introduction. Accordingly, there were a number of pieces celebrating, or at least examining, his legacy. Rightly so; whatever one makes of his philosophy overall, history has vindicated a great deal of Marx's economic thought (even if his more dramatic prophesies of proletarian revolution have failed to materialize) and he remains one of the founding figures in the field of sociology. It makes perfect sense to "normalize" Marx, as Ryan Cooper of The Week argued; like any other thinker, we should be ready to examine his ideas critically, but with an open mind. One certainly doesn't have to be a Marxist to acknowledge that Marx's analysis of capitalism and society, while naturally imperfect and flawed, contains valuable insights.

Karl Marx (image from marxists.org image library)

Of course, there were also a number of less positive responses to Marx's birthday and the positive articles written about him. Ben Shapiro writes for the the National Review that "Marx’s philosophy would lead directly to the deaths of 100 million human beings over the course of a century, the imprisonment of tens of millions more in gulags and reeducation camps from Russia to China to Vietnam to Cambodia to North Korea, and the oppression of hundreds of millions more." Similarly, Dominic Sandbrook writes for the Daily Mail that "when I hear his defenders denying any link between Marx and his blood-soaked apostles, I wonder how supposedly clever people can be so stupid. For all their cynicism and corruption, the men who ran the communist bloc never doubted that they were good Marxists." This is, of course, a common refrain from critics of Marx: communist regimes killed tens of millions of people; clearly, this fact in and of itself exposes some inherent violence in his thinking.

It's an interesting principle. Marx, of course, didn't himself take part in any communist regime (and it's worth noting that his more orthodox followers denounced Lenin and the first communist regime, the USSR, from the very beginning) but because Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro et al. of course cited Marx as their inspiration and justification, he bears the blame for their crimes. Unless the people promoting this principle are complete hypocrites, they presumably mean it as a general principle, not just one that applies to Marx.

So, relying on this principle--that a thinker is responsible for the crimes of their followers--I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the crimes committed by the followers of someone even more influential in human history than Marx, someone literally worshiped by billions to this day--Jesus Christ. Naturally, if Marx is responsible for the atrocities committed by communist regimes by virtue of the fact that their perpetrators called themselves Marxists, it seems only reasonable to say that Jesus is responsible for the crimes of Christians (at least when they used Christianity as the justification for their crimes). So, then, Jesus is responsible for crimes including (but certainly not limited to) the following:

• The Spanish Inquisition, in which thousands of "heretics" were killed and those suspected of secretly practicing other religions were tortured;
• The Catholic Church's role in the brutal colonization of the Americas, which Pope Francis was recently forced to acknowledge and apologize for;
• The mass murder of political opponents by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and his Nationalist forces, who were supported by the Catholic Church;
• The atrocities committed by Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, infamous for using child soldiers and accused of sex slavery, murder, and abduction
• The innumerable lynchings and brutal terror inflicted for decades by the vehemently Christian Ku Klux Klan;
• The estimated 1.7 million people killed in the Crusades, launched by the Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslims;
• The tens of thousands of people killed as a result of "witch trials" in Europe;
• The long history of oppression and violence against gay and other LGBT people in majority-Christian countries, often explicitly justified on the grounds of Christianity;

...and much more.

It is certainly baffling to think that the man who shunned violence and famously urged its victims to "turn the other cheek" rather than even striking back could be responsible for all of this. But that is the only conclusion we can reach.

Unless, of course, we reject the idea that a thinker is necessarily responsible for the crimes their admirers commit; if we acknowledge that the crimes committed by Christians listed above--and that the crimes committed by communist regimes--are not necessarily the fault of Jesus or Marx, but are first and foremost the fault of those who actually participated in them. This would mean, rather than assuming that Marx is responsible for the suffering inflicted by communist regimes and going from there, we might actually attempt some kind of examination of the relevant facts to ask why communist countries have been so repressive; it would be relevant to note, for instance, that countries like Russia, China and Cuba had authoritarian governments before their respective communist revolutions; perhaps it's not surprising, given their history, that these countries' new Marxist rulers carried on their predecessors' traditions of ruling through force rather than democratically.

It's also worth recognizing that Lenin, who led the October revolution that established the USSR, was a major influence on the communist revolutionaries that came after him; Lenin was undoubtedly a dictator who "adapted" Marx's ideas in his own ways (for which he was harshly criticized by Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and Karl Kautsky, who rightly challenged his authoritarian interpretation of Marx). Marx himself would likely not be surprised that the communist revolutions of the 20th century produced grim results; they didn't happen in the highly industrialized capitalist countries that he'd predicted, but in countries like China and Russia that were largely agrarian and didn't have the material wealth of the advanced European countries Marx had had in mind.

If we're giving an honest assessment of Marx's legacy, it's also unfair to focus only on the negatives (just as it would be unfair to define Jesus' legacy by events like the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition while ignoring the work many Christians have done to help the poor and downtrodden throughout history). Marx didn't exclusively inspire dictators like Mao and Stalin; he also influenced people like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., antiwar activists such as Rosa Luxemburg and Eugene V. Debs, sociologists like C. Wright Mills, and many others.

Even the authoritarian communist countries that came about in the 20th century have achieved some impressive results: China enjoyed a major increase in life expectancy under Mao, and Cuba has managed to achieve results in healthcare, literacy and education that are stunning given its circumstances (being a poor island nation that's been the victim of economic warfare by the world's superpower, the United States, for several decades). The US National Security Council even had to admit that communism had a "proven ability to carry backward countries speedily through the crisis of modernization and industrialization." Nothing excuses the oppression and violence that these regimes have committed, which have been nothing short of horrific and are rightly reviled; but it makes no sense to focus exclusively on the crimes and failures of these regimes while completely ignoring their successes, any more that it makes to focus on the numerous evils in America's past and present (slavery, grotesque mistreatment of Native Americans, racism, sexism, imperialism) while ignoring its successes.

So, let's dispense with the talking point that because of the crimes and failures of communist regimes, Marx's ideas are discredited; certainly, there plenty of things he got wrong, and his ideas should be subjected to the same scrutiny to which
we would subject any other thinker's ideas. The oppressive nature of the communist regimes that sprung up in the years following his death certainly deserves to be discussed in relation to his legacy as well. But bringing it up every time someone makes a defense of Marx's ideas is lazy, and claiming with little or no evidence that he's responsible for crimes he didn't commit is absurd. And as I've shown here, applying the principle universally only shows how ridiculous it truly is.

The Centrism Fallacy

Centrism is one of those things that never quite seems to go out of vogue. One always seems to find people who will proudly declare themselves centrists, above the party politics that results in gridlock and polarization, and supporters of moderation and compromise. Not surprisingly, as the progressive movement that grew from the Sanders campaign attempts to push the Democrats (slightly) leftward while the Republican Party is fronted by a racist whose far-right sympathies are not exactly well-hidden, calls for centrism, moderation, and compromise are not hard to find.

The appeal of centrism (at least when it's not being cynically used by party insiders to beat back populist challengers) is not incomprehensible. Wanting an alternative to either of the two awful major parties we have is completely understandable, and it's certainly true that Congress has shown an inability to deal effectively with a lot of the major problems that face us. Plus, proclaiming yourself above loyalty to a specific party or ideology feels good; no one wants to be seen as just another drone mindlessly obeying orders and following the crowd.

That being said, the rationalizations that repeatedly crop up for centrism--that being 'extreme' is ipso facto bad, being moderate is rational, and compromise is how we solve the major problems we face--is both wrong and ahistorical. Worse, the people who promote it, whether sincerely or just in a transparent attempt to smear any populist movement that challenges the establishment of their favorite party, are doing harm, if anything.

It's first worth noting the irony that a lot of the same people who champion moderation engage in the standard veneration of the U.S.'s Founding Fathers, despite the fact that they made the decision to secede from English rule by war rather than tolerate what they perceived as the abuses of the king's government. Plainly enough, this wasn't a very centrist decision. It was obviously a radical solution, and while it's true that attempts were made to reconcile with the British government, the position that the colonists had the right to break away from British control and create their own government was obviously quite controversial, with an estimated 15 to 20 percent of white colonial men (as well as, understandably, many slaves) actively helping the British in their attempt to put down the rebellion. Many other colonists remained neutral, which, one supposes, is the "centrist" position in this case. So unless they're ready to denounce the radicalism of the Founding Fathers in deciding to overthrow British control (using violence, even), centrists have already begun to concede that there is nothing inherently wise or rational about moderation and compromise.

 Compromise, to be sure, would play an important role in shaping the policies of the new nation once the revolution succeeded--but in many cases, not in ways that are exactly favorably remembered. Those who paid attention in history class may recall the three-fifths compromise, which emerged at the constitutional convention and said that each slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person for apportionment of taxes and legislative representation. This both made a mockery of Jefferson's famous statement that "all men are created equal" and gave slave states disproportionate influence in Congress and the Electoral College.

A few decades later came the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30′ (except in Missouri), but allowed it to go on unimpeded south of this line, over the objections of many northerners. At the time, Thomas Jefferson warned that the compromise was "a reprieve only, not a final sentence" and presciently noted that "a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political...will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."

A few decades later, another major compromise was reached--the Compromise of 1850, which, among other things, admitted California as a free state but also implemented a new Fugitive Slave Act designed to make it easier for slave-owners to recover runaways. The Compromise also applied the idea of "popular sovereignty," allowing settlers in a territory to decide for themselves whether their state would permit or prohibit slavery, to Utah and New Mexico. The same principle was later disastrously applied by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which helped lead to the Civil War.

Both the Compromise of 1850 and Kansas-Nebraska Act were championed by Stephen A. Douglas, who "saw himself as the defender of the sane middle ground, where the Union might be saved from extremists." Indeed, when one considers the abolitionists on the one hand and proslavery advocates like George Fitzhugh, who argued that "the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child," it is hard to deny that Douglas occupied a relatively moderate position, neither pushing for nor against slavery but simply arguing that the (free) people in each territory should make the decision for themselves. 

In fairness, there is an argument to be made that, while repugnant on principle, some amount of compromise on the issue of slavery was ultimately for the better, as it allowed the North to industrialize and thus defeat the south when civil war finally did break out. However, slavery was ultimately abolished, as we know, through the rejection of compromise. Indeed, a compromise was put on the table that may have avoided civil war, from Senator John J. Crittenden. It would have made protected the permanent existence of slavery in the slave states and reestablished the Missouri Compromise line through constitutional amendment (the original Missouri Compromise having been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act). While president-elect Abraham Lincoln was no abolitionist, he rejected the compromise, accepting that doing so might make civil war inevitable, as it did.

While Lincoln did only occupy a moderately antislavery position at the time of the election, his uncompromising stance against its expansion helped lead to the Civil War, and of course he ultimately supported what the abolitionist radicals had wanted--a complete end to de jure slavery, by constitutional amendment. So, in the end, it was a complete rejection of compromise with proslavery forces that ended slavery, achieving a major step forward for the United States.

After the Civil War, there were some promising moves toward racial equality during Reconstruction, but, unfortunately, it was ended in 1877, as part of a compromise to win southern acceptance of the disputed election the year before. Even before the contentious election result, the Republican and ultimate victor, Rutherford B. Hayes, had indicated a willingness to back off from the Reconstruction policies of the radical wing of his party. The results of the compromise were, of course, decades of Jim Crow policies and other forms of vicious racial oppression. Once again, it seems, the 'moderate' position, and compromise, only allowed inequality and injustice to survive longer than it might have if more radical action had been taken. 

With this legacy, it's hardly a surprise that Martin Luther King would later admit "that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice." 

Despite the bizarre nostalgia expressed by Joe Biden for a time when "you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together" with segregationist members of Congress and work together, the crowning achievement of the Civil Rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was pushed through over the strenuous objections (and filibusters) of the Dixiecrats, and alienated many Southerners from the Democratic Party. Once again, it was the end of a compromise between sectional interests that helped move the country forward, and a decidedly uncompromising attitude--particularly on the part of the activists and leaders like King, Malcolm X, and others (whose radicalism, it's worth noting, went well beyond just the racial issues of their day).

I realize these examples might not be especially convincing. After all, it now seems so obvious to most of us that segregation and slavery were inhumane and unjust all along. It doesn't seem comparable to the issues that we face today, and, of course, people across the political spectrum now recognize that these policies were completely indefensible. But there's another example--not historical, but modern--where even many centrists, I believe, would agree that the "extreme" position is correct, and compromise is certainly undesirable. That issue is freedom of speech.

In the United States, freedom of speech applies to views and expressions that would be proscribed in even many other advanced countries. For instance, many countries in Europe have laws against hate speech and Holocaust denial--and a 2015 Pew survey across 38 countries found that Americans are exceptionally opposed to restrictions on speech, and ranked first on their Free Expression Index measuring public support  for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The average American's view of freedom of speech, then, is clearly toward the extreme end of the international spectrum. The idea that freedom of speech should apply even to Nazis and Holocaust deniers, while relatively uncontroversial in the US, is not at all an uncontroversial proposition internationally.

I assume that many self-identified centrists in the US would support freedom of speech in a relatively absolute sense, arguing that even heinous views and hateful speech should be protected by the First Amendment, that even neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan should enjoy the right to express their views openly and peacefully assemble (I happen to agree with this). But, internationally speaking, that's not a moderate position; on the contrary, even in advanced democracies like Germany and Italy, less than half of those surveyed supported applying freedom of speech to utterances that offend minority groups. A moderate position on the issue of freedom of speech, then, would grant certain restrictions on offensive speech, but on the issue of freedom of speech, and hate speech in particular, many centrists are anything but moderate (and rightly so, in my view).

The point of this post is not that holding moderate positions is inherently bad; on the contrary, there are issues where I see myself as being relatively moderate (gun control, for instance). But the idea that moderate positions are in and of themselves desirable and that "radical" positions should be shunned is simply ahistorical and ignorant. The same goes for any glorification of the idea of compromise; of course sometimes compromise is necessary, but there's no reason to celebrate it; it means, by definition, not getting everything you want, and it's senseless to glorify a willingness to appease your political opponents just to "make a deal." And, again, sometimes compromise is completely undesirable, as it was before the Civil War, when it would have avoided conflict at the expense of preserving slavery.

One can say the same for the the centrist fetishization of "rationality" and "practicality." Of course, being rational and practical by no means indicates that one's a centrist--one can certainly have a radical goal but a practical, rational idea for how to achieve it. But, furthermore, rationality and practicality are not enough to give us a view of the society we want. A CEO may be acting rationally when deciding to keep their workers' wages low, or pollute the atmosphere, or grossly overcharge customers. Owning slaves may have been practical for a plantation owner in the antebellum South. Practicality and rationality are, of course, important, but they're not enough to give us a positive idea of what we want to achieve.

As a corollary to all of this, it's also time to stop demonizing people for being "radical" or "extremist." To quote Malcolm X (who seemed to be borrowing from Barry Goldwater), "when...a human being is exercising extremism...in defense of liberty for human beings it's no vice, and when one is moderate in the pursuit of justice for human beings I say he is a sinner." Supporting racial egalitarianism a few hundred years ago would have been a very radical position, and supporting free speech for Nazis would likely be seen as radical by plenty of people today, depending on where you are in the world. Of course, radical positions aren't ipso facto good, but they should be appraised based on their actual merits, not dismissed on the grounds that they're radical. Moderate positions should be subjected to the same scrutiny. In fact, this is what genuinely rational discourse requires.