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Last week, I was meant to deliver a talk at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center. That talk, along with the entire speaking series to which it belonged, was canceled back in October after the Y abruptly scrapped an event with the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed an open letter condemning Israel’s war on Gaza. (I signed the same letter.) The 92NY debacle, which resulted in the resignation of the Poetry Center’s entire staff, was part of a much broader stifling of dissent within our liberal cultural institutions, where a decidedly pro-Israel consensus holds strong among donors and executives. Since Israel began its brutal bombing campaign in Gaza, where the death toll has reached 20,000, we have seen waves of suppression roll across the culture: the editor-in-chief of Artforum has been fired; an award-winning writer has been pushed out of The New York Times Magazine; the actress Melissa Barrera was dropped from the upcoming horror movie Scream 7. The situation has become especially dire on college campuses, where pro-Palestine students groups are facing doxing and disbandment — even as Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, in a contentious House committee hearing, rebuked several university presidents for failing to discipline students for chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea.” (Penn president Liz Magill has since resigned over this supposed failure.)
We should call this what it is: a one-sided, McCarthyist crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. But it is not an ironic new phase of cancel culture, as a score of commentators have already claimed. “Far from being a culture-war canard, cancellation turns out to be a weapon that many people on both the left and the right are willing to wield to silence anyone who violates their orthodoxies,” wrote the pundit Yascha Mounk for the Atlantic last month. In this view, it is the left which has created a climate of censoriousness by recklessly pursuing the firing and deplatforming of those whose views it deems ideologically unacceptable; now those same tactics are being employed against the pro-Palestine left, which yearns too late for the guard rails it helped remove. It is as if the worst fears of the infamous Harper’s letter from a few years ago, in which a number of very serious people admonished the left for abandoning liberal norms of open debate and good-faith disagreement, have come true. To the liberal mind, the only solution to this crisis is for both sides of the aisle to recommit to, as Mounk put it, a “principled defense of free speech” regardless of political content.
Now it’s true: A left that supports the deplatforming of transphobes but opposes the deplatforming of anti-Zionists cannot justify itself by appealing to free speech — nor should it. For the liberal, freedom of speech is a deliberately empty principle. It allows a liberal institution to mediate peacefully between differing political views without any (apparent) reference to the content of those views — all while quietly promoting its own views under the banner of neutrality. The left can do better. In fact, the current political moment provides the left with an opportunity to clarify its often poorly articulated position in the so-called culture wars: namely, that the freedom of speech is a crucial public utility in a democratic society but it is not the soul of justice; and that to install it as such eclipses and ultimately degrades the left’s substantive values.
It is worth remembering the vast majority of what we call free-speech issues have little basis in the First Amendment, which only forbids the abridgment of speech by the government, not private organizations like magazines, cultural centers, or Hollywood production companies. In most states, for instance, it is perfectly legal for employers to fire workers for speech, as a Westchester synagogue did last year after a teacher wrote an anti-Zionist blog post. So when advocates talk of freedom of speech, they are usually referring neither to the Constitution nor to statutory law but to a set of civil norms imagined to promote the health of the republic but which cannot be directly enforced by the government. Had the House committee hauled in the chancellor of Florida’s state schools for his attempts to shut down pro-Palestine campus groups, then it might have found a genuine First Amendment issue — but only because the government cannot set aside its constitutional duties when it steps into the role of educator. By contrast, when a private university promises to safeguard free speech, it does so in excess of its legal obligations. Indeed, when Magill testified at the House hearing that Penn’s speech policy “is guided by the United States Constitution,” she was in fact describing a kind of institutional courtesy.
I stress this to show you that the very idea of free speech, especially when deployed outside of its narrow constitutional sense, tends to obfuscate the material stakes of a situation. (P. E. Moskowitz details many instances of this in their book The Case Against Free Speech.) Consider again the 92nd Street Y. In truth, Viet Thanh Nguyen had no more right to speak at the Y, a prestigious community center on the Upper East Side, than he has to be cast as Melissa Barrera’s replacement in Scream 7; all he had, legally speaking, was the right to criticize Israel without fear of being fined or arrested by the state. And how can one disagree? If I were running an arts organization, I would have no problem refusing to partner with, say, Cynthia Ozick, a mainstay of the Y who once described Palestinian culture as an “orgiastic deluge of fanaticism and death.” The Y, too, has every right to bring its programming in line with its values, which its actions have simply clarified: It is the sort of place that will disinvite the son of Vietnamese refugees for speaking out against a U.S.-sponsored war, even as it welcomed the late Henry Kissinger, who presided over hundreds of thousands of deaths in Southeast Asia, no fewer than ten times before his death.
This is perfectly rational behavior; one can oppose it, but one cannot argue with it. The same must be said of the suppression of speech in our universities, whose status as bastions of intellectual freedom has always been somewhat dubious. While it is true that left-wing ideas have flourished in the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences — the result of the retreat of post-1968 social movements into the academy — the big private universities remain in the business of business, their endowments tied up in fossil fuels, big tech, and the prison-industrial complex and their purses fattened by wealthy donors who expect influence in return. After a letter was released at Harvard that blamed “all unfolding violence” on the Israeli government, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, apparently speaking for his fellow CEOs, demanded that the school publish the rosters of the student groups who had signed the letter “so as to insure [sic] that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” The implicit understanding here was that elite private universities funnel their graduates into the nation’s highest positions of power and influence — including Congress itself — and that this pipeline must not be polluted by ideas that its previous beneficiaries find morally despicable or politically disadvantageous. The House hearing itself came chillingly close to a direct attempt by the federal government to materially intervene in the composition of the incipient professional class through, as more than one Republican suggested, the expulsion of student protesters.
So the left may cherish intellectual freedom — I do! — without having any illusions about the institutions that promise to keep us safe. Liberal norms like freedom of speech are subject to a kind of planned obsolescence that all but guarantees they will be set aside when an institution’s actual values — or the values of its backers — are shunted into relief by a crisis. Of course, moral and political values come into conflict all the time — something that liberal norms are designed to reframe as the heated but ultimately harmless exchange of equally valid viewpoints within the marketplace of ideas. We have become accustomed in this country, for who knows how many decades, to the idea that we are living through the “culture wars.” Yet most of what we call culture war is just culture, in the sense that culture always contains conflicting ideas and tendencies. The most inflammatory debates over representation in the arts, over the effects of social media, over whether we are too “woke” — wherever one falls in these debates, one cannot deny that, far from tearing American culture apart, they have practically defined it. In fact, it has been impossible to participate in culture, as an artist or audience member, without engaging in them.
What we are experiencing now, I think, is an actual culture war: that is, an open conflict over how our cultural institutions themselves should be structured. An implicit antagonism has become an explicit one. After all, Zionism is a peculiar case, a conservative position — it concerns the sovereign rights of an internationally recognized occupying power — that nonetheless enjoys an unusually high appeal on the center-left (and even the left proper). As a result, the gracious liberal consensus that has generally held strong among magazine staffs and Hollywood insiders, however bland its assurances and empty its promises, is now fracturing to a degree that we have not seen in some time. This is taking the form of, as it were, door-to-door fighting on the terrain of culture: firings and resignations, clashes in editorial meetings, the withdrawal of arts sponsors, the boycotting of nonprofits, letters, letters, letters. In a very real sense, we are talking not about some “clash of ideas” but about a sustained and highly fractious workplace dispute at the heart of the American culture industry.
Now, I do not expect to lose my job for writing this piece, though my peers have lost theirs for less. This is because an actual culture war like ours turns on that elusive but crucial moment when speech not only suggests an action but actually produces one. Even liberal jurisprudence supposes that such transformations do occur. During the first Red Scare, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. introduced the “clear and present danger” test, according to which the state may restrict speech it believes will bring on “substantive evils,” including incitements to violence. Yet this doctrine rested on a difference of degree, not of kind, as Holmes would later admit in his 1925 dissent in Gitlow v. New York, in which the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a socialist journalist for advocating the overthrow of the government. “Every idea is an incitement,” Holmes wrote. “It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker’s enthusiasm for the result.”
The real question is how — and by whom — this difference between broad and narrow incitement is to be determined. During the campus hearings, Harvard president Claudine Gay repeatedly told the House committee that “when speech crosses into conduct, we take action,” and this was consistent with Harvard’s official anti-bullying policy. But Stefanik accepted this framework in principle; she was simply arguing over what kind of speech counts as conduct. She theatrically asserted, first, that certain anti-Zionist slogans were tantamount to calling for genocide, and second, that calling for genocide was so few steps from actual genocide as to warrant serious punishment. It was clearly preposterous to claim that every teenager in Cambridge who chants “From the river to the sea” is essentially pointing a rocket at Tel Aviv; if student protests are inciting violence, in the narrow constitutional sense, we are talking about vandalism, not another Holocaust. But the intuition that students, writers, and artists really are doing something when they chant slogans and write letters, and that our opponents are simply doing something back — this is perfectly correct.
What everyone knows on some level, I think, is that speech has the power to incite action because speech itself is already a material act. Yes, anti-Zionism is an idea, not a rock; but if it were only an idea, without any practical potential, then there would be no point in throwing it. The difference right now is that, given the tremendous political and ideological instability introduced by the war, a number of powerful people in America currently believe that talking about freeing Palestine could actually end up freeing Palestine, and it is this cascade of actions that they are ultimately trying to suppress. This tells us something very important: They are afraid. The question is not whether intifada, which means “uprising” in Arabic and invokes both civil disobedience and violent resistance, is a threatening term; if it were not threatening, the House would never have convened an entire hearing about it. The only question is whether threatened parties — the Israeli apartheid regime, American foreign-policy hawks, all the board members and lobbyists and donors and hedge-fund managers — deserve to be threatened.
They do. For as often as pro-Palestine speech is described as an existential menace to Jews in Israel and across America, our major newspapers are saturated with equally plausible incitements to violence — for that, my friends, is what it means to support a war. The difference is that when the New York Times editorial board defends the bombardment of Gaza or urges lawmakers to send Israel more Hellfire missiles, this may not look like incitement because the violence in question is endorsed by the White House, funded by Congress, and normalized by the media. There is no denying that this is an American war, even if there are no American boots on the ground. The House recently approved a resolution declaring that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This was truly disturbing on First Amendment grounds: It suggested that the government really might try to abridge the freedom of speech on grounds of sedition, as wartime governments have been known to do — including Israel, whose occupying military forces have restricted the free-speech rights of Palestinians in the name of “public order” for decades.
Now it so happens that the remarks which the 92nd Street Y originally commissioned me to deliver last week would have concerned the freedom of the press. I would have directed the Y’s patrons to a short essay published in 1784 by the philosopher Immanuel Kant called “What Is Enlightenment?” I believe it is one of the most important things ever written about freedom of speech. In the essay, Kant argues that the citizens of an enlightened society have an obligation to fulfill the duties of their civil posts (soldier, priest, tax man); yet as moral beings, they must also be free to engage in the “public use of reason,” above all by publishing their criticisms of that society. Accordingly, an enlightened despot will understand that “there is no danger to his legislation in allowing his subjects to use reason publicly and to set before the world their thoughts concerning better formulations of his laws.” For the enlightened citizen, Kant provides a curious slogan: “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!”
There is a very simple, very potent idea here: Freedom of speech, when elevated to the status of a moral good, is just another name for thoughtful obedience. Under such a rule, the right of everyone to disagree is protected as long as the state’s authority to limit action is respected. This way, the state may ensure that conflicts of value never turn into contests of value; it blesses us with the freedom to argue about morality on the condition that we never decide who is right. Kant’s foremost goal, after all, was to minimize the possibility of what he called the “worst, most punishable crime in a community” — namely, revolution. This was his diagnosis of the French Revolution, which in his estimation had proceeded all too quickly from intellectual freedom to bloody action.
I am not advocating violence, though I understand why others on the pro-Palestine left might. What I am advocating is continued hostility. One cannot escape the irony that when the liberal begs us to stop shouting each other down and tolerate a diversity of viewpoints, he is essentially calling for a cease-fire in the culture war. This is as far as free speech gets us: It asks us to have greater moral concern for the sanctity of ideas than for the lives of the Palestinian people. Bomb a hospital, and you are making a calculated strike on a military target; but try to kill an idea, and you are betraying democracy. This is why seeking “higher ground,” as the champions of free speech urge us to do, will only perpetuate the illusion that we are in yet another empty argument that can be safely contained by liberal norms; we will become so preoccupied with the integrity of the forest that we forget about the actual trees.
So let the left say that freedom of speech is a public good, like a health-care system: an essential element of a just society that is also regularly subject to abuse, fraud, corruption, and the private interests of the wealthy. When this abuse happens, as it is happening now, we oppose it because we believe that freedom of speech without justice is like a planet without air. We do not protest the war on Gaza because we have an abstract right to do so; we protest it because it is one of the great moral atrocities of our lifetimes and because the widespread refusal to admit this in America is an atrocity in its own right. We are not just speaking; we are fighting with words. And we are fighting to win.
