When you need a reminder of why the First Amendment is so vital, consider what the world is like without this sort of constitutional protection.
A person within the Czech Republic has been charged with collaborating in an anti-government rally wearing a shirt and a backpack decorated with a forbidden symbol: the letter “Z.” Why “Z”, since the letter is known as an indication of support for Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine and the symbol of the Wagner Group, Russian mercenaries who run this criminal enterprise on the behest of Vladimir Putin.
This sort of advocacy is morally grotesque and reprehensible – which is why the “Z” became for the conflict in Ukraine, similar to the swastika for the Nazis.
Still, each the Z and the swastika can be protected by free speech here in the US, where we have now a Bill of Rights that protects morally grotesque and reprehensible language as a part of our nation’s greater commitment to defending political speech.
The Czech Republic isn’t some authoritarian backwater – it is a solid liberal democracy.
Much more so in Germany, where the federal government bans political parties that promote verboten ideas, starting from anti-Semitism to extreme nationalism to Soviet-style communism.
So in Austria, where you’ll be able to go to jail for selling a banned political book.
Without the constitutional framework we enjoy in the US – and with no national commitment to free speech that makes the First Amendment greater than a parchment barrier to censorship – even the liberal democracies of Europe find yourself with narrow limits on the expression of opinion.
The result’s systems rather more like semi-autocratic systems, similar to Turkey or India, where the leader of the opposition party, Rahul Gandhi, has he was sentenced to two years in prison and expelled from parliament for making fun of the name of the increasingly dictatorial Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
That is prohibited by the law under which this Czech protester was convicted expressions denying or approving of genocide.
Like many similar laws across Europe, it’s rooted in post-Holocaust reforms based on the German idea ofstreet democraciesor “Militant Democracy”, which holds that liberal democracies have the proper to behave in illiberal and anti-democratic ways so as to suppress those that reject the foundations of free and democratic societies.
The Indian law under which Gandhi was convicted is comparable, making it a criminal offense to defame a community or caste as an entire. (“Modi” is a surname indicating belonging to a selected community.)
As these cases show, it is vitally easy to bend such good intentions for political convenience: within the Czech Republic, a protester was actually convicted of the crime of disagreeing together with his government’s foreign policy, albeit in a nasty and silly way; in India, the leader of the opposition was convicted for being the leader of the opposition.
Without approving the censorship, one can understand how this policy persevered in Germany, Austria and other places that suffered under the Nazi boot.
It’s harder to understand how this sort of pondering caught on at Stanford Law School or Yale.
But Europe’s worst mental blights have all the time entered the American political bloodstream through the open wound of campus culture.
And so we discover Stanford students – and administrators – citing some type of illiterate “street democraciesjustification for shouting at Kyle Duncan, a federal judge who was invited to speak on the law school.
Protesters accused the judge of attacking the “basic rights of marginalized communities”, while the dean of the college alleged that allowing the judge to speak was itself a “harm”.
Similar episodes have played out on campuses since Yale Down Berkleywhere speakers with unpopular and unconventional ideas were driven off campus (sometimes violently) or were simply forbidden to appear and speak.
A few of these speakers were indeed controversial, similar to Ann Coulter, but Yale students also tried to shut down a free speech seminar.
Company employees from Google Down burrito shops were fired for expressing unpopular views.
Amazon has been intimidated banning books that criticize transgender ideology by activists who claim that such books promote “trans genocide“.
What happens on campus soon happens in all places else. And so the identical arguments are utilized in the service of radically illiberal and anti-democratic proposals: taking Fox News and other conservative media off the air, designating the Republican Party as a terrorist organization, using national security measures against himand even banning the party itself similarly, the German government bans neo-Nazi parties.
Cable news networks, radio and the Republican Party could have real problems, but giving Washington the facility to censor the media or ban political parties would hardly make the country free or more democratic: it could simply codify the worst illiberal and anti-democratic instincts in our politics and create vast latest legal powers, which will be abused by Democrats or Republicans – no matter which party is in power.
This is not some distant, dystopian possibility – that is where the pondering we see at Stanford today comes to its logical conclusion.
There’s much to admire in regards to the European model of politics and government, but the dearth of free speech principles and free speech culture isn’t one among them.
And progressives who experience the potential of suppressing the news – if not the Republican Party – remember: Republicans control the House today and should soon take control of the Senate; Donald Trump has been president of the US before and possibly again; if not Trump, possibly Ron DeSantis.
But neither can they, which is why the arguments you make today – and the liberty of speech you so aggressively value – could easily be used against you tomorrow.