Conservative Liberalism and "Freedom of Speech": Some Thoughts

One may plausibly regard the history of the "freedom of speech" as the history of argument over what precisely it means to have "freedom of speech"--the nature and proper limits of that freedom. In the twenty-first century West, and certainly the United States, the "culture war" and the broader backlash against "political correctness"; an atmosphere of "forever war" and all it has wrought; and elites' successful channeling a critical portion of popular discontents into ever more blatant xenophobia that their mainstream media have normalized rather than stood fast against; have greatly undermined the earlier, post-colonial and post-civil rights movement, societal consensus rejecting racist and sexist attitudes, views, speech, action and public policy as unacceptable in the societal mainstream, and in public life.

In the resulting situation the far right has presented its defiance of the old consensus and those who stand by it as an heroic defense of the freedom of speech. However if the right has defended the right to make racist and sexist statement, it has also attacked those who criticize such statements as inhibiting to "free speech" as represented by statements of the former kind--and so held, implicitly and explicitly, that out of respect for the freedom of speech the anti-racist and anti-sexist ought to shut up. Given that, as Emmanuel Todd explained, freedom of speech could only mean that the right of both the bigot and the anti-bigot be absolute, this has meant the right in the name of free speech practicing a double standard in which racist or sexist statement is an entirely legitimate exercise of the freedom of speech, challenge to such statement the opposite, censorious, and meriting suppression in the name of freedom itself.

Of course, looking at the double standard in which the far right stands up for the racist's freedom of speech as they attack the critic of racism's freedom of speech, many see this as a matter of hypocrisy (supporting the freedom of speech, but only when it suits them), or cynical pursuit of advantage (wielding "free speech" as a club against their enemies). And certainly hypocrisy and cynicism are never a rarity in politics. Nevertheless, it would seem a mistake to reduce the matter to just hypocrisy and cynicism, with the particular form of the liberalism prevailing in the Western world generally and the United States particularly today less inconsistent with such double standards than may appear the case to those wedded to a textbook conception of what "liberalism" means. What one may call the "actually existing liberalism" of the Western world, and especially the U.S., may be termed "conservative liberalism," a conservative usage of liberal institutions which fashions those institutions according to conservative principles, preferences and priorities so as to serve conservative ends. Thus one gets the rights-based polity with a limited, representative, rule-of-law-bound government that liberal theory prescribes. However, that rights-based polity with its limited, representative, rule-of-law-bound government is organized by elites to uphold an unequal, property-based, elite-privileging and elite-dominated social order. Reflecting not the classical liberal's rationalism, egalitarianism and emancipatory intent but the conservative's rejection of all these in favor of a stress on human irrationality, human inequality, and the desire to preserve the social hierarchy that exists in the name of the dangers of change, so that it insulates the foundations of elite privilege (property and its prerogatives) from government power; makes the implementation of change in policy and law such as would be threatening to those foundations exceedingly difficult (as seen in an emphasis on "checks and balances" and "constitution-worship"); and formally or informally excludes those groups which may have an interest in change from access to political power (be it in formal exclusion of them from the franchise, or less formal disadvantaging of them through, for example, laws in such areas as campaign finance permitting the rich and powerful to translate their private advantage into public power).

Accordingly, under conservative liberalism liberal freedoms, of which free speech is one of the most basic, are subordinate to the maintenance of the existing social order (put bluntly, the structure of privilege); their legitimate and protected exercise is identified with their exercise in defense of, or at least in a manner inoffensive to, the maintenance of that order; and the limits of their allowable exercise with the limits of that exercise's compatibility with the maintenance of that order. Thus to speak in defense of the institution of property is a legitimate exercise of such speech; but to speak against property as such to run up against its limits under this logic. Of course, this is rarely spelled out explicitly, especially in a political society which has historically been strongly averse to explicit discussion of ideology--with such aversion, indeed, itself a fundamental aspect of conservative thought. However, it is not wholly unknown, with an excellent example of the laying bare of the logic the case that the security services of the conservative liberal Federal Republic of Germany has made against socialist activists. Their argument has run that because the German constitution's provisions uphold the right of private property a socialism that challenges private property is "unconstitutional," permitting those services' otherwise unconstitutional subjection of them to surveillance from which other political groups have the right to be exempt--the right of property here coming in ahead of the right of free speech in an especially blatant manner.

If one is less likely to see the position stated so baldly in the United States, the same thinking has nevertheless been implicit in the long history of the infringement of the exercise of free speech by socialists and others that have challenged the property system and elite prerogative more broadly in the U.S.. One may also argue for the principle's applying within the country's arguments over race and sex. If they are less central from the standpoint of societal order than the matter of property, society's traditional hierarchies of race and gender have likewise been relevant to that order from the conservative standpoint (indeed, the current climate seeing conservatives become less and less inhibited about saying so in so many words). Accordingly, just as in their view "legitimate" free speech defends the rights of property rather than challenges them, "legitimate" free speech from the conservative standpoint defends "traditionalism" (i.e. traditional hierarchies) in race and sex, while that speech which criticizes "traditionalism" in these respects is at best less legitimate and less sacrosanct--with conservatives' commitment to this position no less forceful for their so rarely spelling it out.