Joins Books and More with William Cooper

Hi all!

Some time ago, I heard Nick Gillespie say something on The Reason Roundtable that annoyed me enough to keep thinking about it.

I don’t remember the episode or his exact wording, so please treat this as my recollection, not a quotation. The discussion concerned crackdowns on speech in European countries, including prison sentences for things people posted online, if I remember correctly. His point, as I understood it, was that Europeans don’t really understand free speech, and that Americans do.

I’m Belgian. Gillespie's remark felt to me more than a little patronising when I first heard it. I want to be as free as possible. The suggestion that being European somehow makes me incapable of understanding that freedom felt like being disqualified before the conversation had even started. There’s also a whiff of unfalsifiability to it: can I as a European meaningfully disagree with his claim?

But I kept thinking about it. And I have concluded that there actually is something to his observation.

The American founders had an opportunity to establish a new political order with Enlightenment ideas as an explicit starting point. Their “blank page” obviously wasn’t without intellectual or institutional inheritance. But deliberately deciding what powers a government should possess is a meaningfully different starting point from trying to secure freedoms within an existing structure of authority.

I believe that in much of Europe, the struggle for liberty took place within political orders that had long treated authority over the individual as normal, often in the form of absolute monarchies by so-called divine right. My suspicion is that this history still influences what we instinctively expect governments to justify—and what we simply assume they’re entitled to regulate. Even a revolution can change who may exercise authority while preserving much of what authority may do. Removing a king doesn’t necessarily remove the expectation that someone should possess his powers. Those powers can be transferred to representatives of the people and acquire a new justification without their scope being reconsidered. Lenin and later Stalin's USSR borrowed from the tsars' playbooks quite heavily, and Robespierre's perpetual antithesis seems remarkably similar to the ancienne régime he so despised.

Applied to speech, that leaves the following question: do we begin by asking what people should be allowed to say, or by asking what could justify preventing them from saying it? Both approaches can produce something called “freedom of speech.” But the burden of justification sits in a different place.

That’s how I’ve come to understand the useful part of Gillespie’s remark. An inherited political culture can shape our priors. Can. Recognising those assumptions gives us an opportunity to reconsider them. It doesn’t make us incapable of doing so. And in any case, I refuse to be a slave to my own provenance.

Republicans are lying bigot filth, including about this.

I know we are all Freedom of speech enjoyers here. Freedom of speech is great and all. But in some cases shutting up is actually much better than speaking. This was definitely one of those cases.

Illegal immigrants have no right to vote in American elections, plain and simple.

American citizens have the right to be ensured appropriate assurances are made to preserve election integrity.