U.C. Berkeley just had an exciting week. The residents of Cal experienced, in order: news of an impending visit by a notoriously vile right wing provocateur, a peaceful student protest against said visit hijacked by a decidedly less peaceful crowd of molotov cocktail-wielding masked anarchists, the right making a tremendous song and dance about how their free speech rights were violated and finally, a threat by the president to cut off federal funding for the university. The end result, as usual, seems to have been the provocateur in question making absolute hay of the situation but also a lot of actually important examination of the idea of “free speech” and what it should mean.

My go to example of the kind of thing I keep hearing is an xkcd comic I’ve seen a few students sharing. A helpful stick figure defines what the right to free speech is — “The government can’t arrest you for what you say” — and what it isn’t — “If you’re yelled at, boycotted, have your show cancelled or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren’t being violated.”

This framing of free speech is pretty much in line with most conversations I’ve had on the subject with leftists, particularly when it’s in the context of some highly publicized instance of a right winger complaining that their free speech rights are being violated. A right to free speech is just a right to say whatever you want without fear of physical violence. If individuals or private entities attempt to inflict punitive consequences on you for something you say, then that’s fine so long as they’re not violent. Certainly, no one is obliged to facilitate or support your speech, so if I want to ban an alt-right troll from my lecture hall or fire him from my company or just call him names on the internet until he shuts up, then that’s fine. Any other view of a right to free speech would be absurd because it would imply an unfair duty on other people to facilitate that which goes against their principles. Also, it would violate their own free speech rights to criticize and to take action against that which they condemn because all of the above punitive actions are also a form of protected speech. So in this specific case, the anarchists were in the wrong, but any protesters or administrators who stopped short of physical violence to prevent the talk happening were in the clear.

Have you noticed that the above paragraph is super libertarian? Let me explain. A fundamental difference (in theory) between left- and right-wing political philosophy regarding rights is that libertarians typically believe in only negative rights, protections against physical violence or the seizure of that which you already have (e.g. property). The left, on the other hand, tends to believe in positive rights, that is, rights to access and benefit from something. Rights to health care, housing, contraceptives or a minimum income are positive rights. The left typically argues everyone is entitled to these things, and society should aspire to provide them; the right rejects this because it imposes duties on someone to do the providing.

The reason leftists typically scoff at libertarians is because they believe — correctly I think — that rights are only meaningful if you can get something out of them, and often it is only the already privileged who can take full advantage of their negative rights. It would be pretty meaningless to say Bill Gates and a homeless guy had an equal right to buy a Ferrari because only one of the two has any hope of using that right. How great negative property rights are for you probably depends largely on how much property you own. That’s not to say underprivileged people don’t need negative rights — after all, who in society is most likely to face violent persecution? It’s just that being able to protect that which you already have doesn’t do much if you don’t have much to begin with, so people need a right that entitles them to the resources they need.

So it’s really, really weird to see leftists scoffing at a positive view of free speech rights. First, because it’s such an obvious break from how they typically talk about literally everything else. Second, because it seems like an utterly suicidal way to frame talk of rights in Trump’s America, where Republicans control funding for universities and basically everything else and where employers are more likely to lean Republican than Democrat.

Notice that when conservatives argue for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, any welfare program or any left-leaning humanities department, they will often frame it as an objection to their taxes paying for something they don’t support or that they think is unconscionable. Notice that when religious business owners demand the right to fire or refuse service to gay couples, they protest that it’s only their own rights that are at stake because queer folks can’t have a right to financial security or service, because that might require compelling the business owners to do something they’d rather not do.

Notice that the consequence of that view appears to be that people who don’t fit into capitalist society go hungry, that academics, artists and activists constantly worry their platform will be defunded or shut down, that poor women are unable to afford the resources they need to control whether and when they have children and that LGBT folk have yet another reason to fear being out.

The view that rights, including free speech rights, are only negative, are only about protecting people from direct physical violence and that anything else goes or that no one has to lift a finger to help someone take advantage of their rights in ways you might consider unacceptable, is a view that threatens to burn away millions of Americans’ very ability to engage in politics, live life on their own terms and, in many cases, even survive.

So when you say that it is perfectly acceptable to boycott businesses owned by bigots or demand a university deviate from its usual policies to ensure visiting trolls don’t get a lecture hall to speak in or just start (non-violently) getting nasty and personal with someone on the internet in the hopes that they and their ilk will shut up next time, then you’re probably just adding fuel to your own funeral pyre. And if that’s fine by you, remember that there’s probably someone more vulnerable sitting right there next to you.

Writer’s note: There should be a bunch of links to the Frederick BeBour essays that inspired this piece, but his website is down.

 

Contact Nick Pether at npether ‘at’ stanford.edu.