Posted on by Jordan

A Response to That Harper’s Letter

On July 7, 2020, Harper’s Magazine published a letter titled, “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” The letter bemoans the current state of public discourse and what the author sees as increasing suppression of free speech: “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” Given the current climate and the habit of certain far-right provocateurs to use “censorship” (in quotes because it hardly ever is) as a bugbear to paint themselves as the oppressed underdog and not the media arm of a fascist movement whose reach extends all the way to the White House, this letter was met with much eye-rolling resentment from the Very Online Left (and even some liberals).

The letter is signed by 152 writers, journalists, artists, academics, and political figures. The average age of the 121 signatories for whom I could find that information is 61 years old, which lends itself to a narrative that a bunch of baby boomers and Gen-Xers saw a letter saying “free speech good,” and uncritically added their names without knowing how online discourse would contextualize it. Slate writer Lili Loofbourow tweeted out an excellent summary of this take, and when I first read it right after spending 4 hours looking up everyone’s ages to support my own take along similar lines, it kind of took the wind out of my sails.

But I don’t think that analysis is sufficient. The narrative that this was just a generic defense of free speech (as several of the signatories characterized it in response to the backlash) that was inevitably misinterpreted by millennials caught up in the online discourse where “but free speech” is synonymous with “let me tell you why white people are scientifically the best” lets the actual text of the letter off the hook, and I think it deserves further scrutiny.

The text is aggressively non-specific, and anything can come across as innocuous if you make it vague enough to obscure any meaningful context. But the context is there if you look hard enough.

Before we dig into the meat of the argument, I want to quickly address some quotations from the preamble, as it were, just to establish a baseline for the author’s rhetorical credibility.

  • “Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.”

    “But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

    • Relative to the first statement, the second seems to be saying that we should tolerate the belief that cops should be able to murder people.

  • “As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.”

    • Notice how passive this author is. This is not someone who is actually involved in the activism and institutional changes they’re praising, but boy are they worried about them going too far.

  • “The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.”

    • For someone so into free speech, the author is being very diplomatic in their word choice here. I think what they meant to say is, “Things are getting really fashy everywhere, and our president is pretty fashy too.”

  • “But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion”

    • This is reading between the lines a bit, but it seems that they’re worried about “resistance” escalating from a vague, unguided, indirect general displeasure to an actual organized movement with concretely stated beliefs, goals, and actions. Going back to my note about the author’s passivity, one can arguably see this whole letter as arising from the author’s discomfort upon realizing that when people call for changes, that might actually mean something.

Now I’m going to skip a bit to where the author comes closest to making an actual argument. Following on from the passage I quoted at the beginning, the author gets to what they see as the real problem: “[I]t is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.” Instead of providing evidence for this claim, the author lists a series of vague examples that we’re supposed to just assume are true. So I tried to figure out if they actually are.

  •   “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces”

    • The best candidate I could find for what this might be referring to is the case of a recent New York Times op-ed. To summarize: Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) published an op-ed in the NYT which begins with the sentence, “This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s,” and gets worse from there, characterizing the riots as “carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements,” and claiming that police officers “bore the brunt of the violence” (for the record, police officers have in fact been responsible for the bulk of the violence, which is pretty obvious given that they have, you know, tanks). Oh, and calling for military intervention in largely peaceful protests that tend to only turn violent when agents of the state start doing violence.

      All of which is to say that to call this piece simply “controversial” is to abdicate responsibility for acknowledging inaccurate and dangerous rhetoric. The NYT responded to the justified backlash by reviewing and subsequently denouncing the piece for: factual inadequacies; a tone that “is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate” (the thing we’re supposedly concerned about); and lack of context. (Note that the piece is still up, almost like it’s not being censored.) The editorial page editor stepped down, which isn’t quite the same as being fired. It should also be noted that this wasn’t his first mistake (including hiring famous bedbug Bret Stephens).

    • Less notably, but still a possible candidate, was the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer resigning (again, technically different than being fired) after running a piece titled “Buildings Matter, Too” a fun, cutesy way of equating the value of property to the value of Black lives, which is a particularly loaded form of dehumanization what with all the slavery.

      The article itself, in case you’re wondering, is a typical bit of liberal hand-wringing (written by the paper’s architecture critic) that manages to dismiss the claim that “[p]eople’s lives are more important than property…and these protests would never have gained America’s undivided attention if they had stuck to the usual polite round of hey-hey chants,” without ever actually providing a counter argument, instead merely arguing that some of the destroyed property is in Black neighborhoods and is therefore a net loss for the movement (there’s also a bit about how Vans and Doc Martens are “the shoes of the working class” that’s just hilariously bad).

      Since the article falls short of calling for (further) state violence against innocent American citizens, I guess I’d be willing to categorize it as controversial, but again, the editor stepped down, seemingly due to internal criticisms from Black staff members, who felt this was just the latest example of a systemic problem at the paper, and was not fired because of some online mob or whatever.
    • Other than these I couldn’t find anything from 2020 that came close to fitting the description, so I’m gonna go ahead and say we’re 0 for 1 here.

  • “books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity”

    • I’m not going to go in-depth with this one because really the specifics don’t actually matter. If a book was withdrawn it means the publisher didn’t feel they could make a profit on it, simple as that. There’s no “considered reform” that can save an impending book release, so this just isn’t relevant. 0 for 2.

  • “journalists are barred from writing on certain topics”

    • Well, allegedly the Washington Examiner isn’t allowing its staff to write negative stories about Fox News, but that’s not really the kind of thing we’re talking about here, is it. I couldn’t find any relevant examples, but as they wouldn’t necessarily be publicized and the author of the letter may very well be privy to internal, unofficial policies of which the public at large is unaware, I’ll call this one inconclusive. The score holds at 0 for 2.

  • “professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class”

    • They mean white dudes saying the n-word. You may also note that this doesn’t even claim professors have been fired, just “investigated,” which, yeah, if a student complains about a professor using a racial epithet in class, there’s probably going to be an investigation. Investigations are what happen instead of “hasty and disproportionate punishments.” THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT. 0 for 3—no, you know what, -1 for 3.

  • “a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study”

  • “and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”

    • Forbes has a decent article covering notable resignations related to the recent protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder. Several of them were CEOs and board members stepping down voluntarily to make room for people of color, but of the ones that might be characterized as getting ousted they generally seem to be due to intentional comments, or internal pressure over their behavior and/or company culture, not anything that could really be characterized as a clumsy mistake.

      Notably this list includes the two editors we discussed before, and just to review, their “clumsy mistakes” (which, again, were not isolated incidents) were publishing: an article that lied about the police complicity in violence at protests and advocated for an escalated military response to American citizens exercising their freedom of speech (the thing we’re supposed to care about); and a headline that implied that property damage was as bad as murdering Black people.

    • Of course, as with the issue of books being withdrawn, the evidence here doesn’t really matter. These are profit-driven decisions, so if you think they’re too drastic or too rushed, take it up with capitalism. This kind of thing isn’t new, either (which is an implied condition in the letter’s argument); people have been getting kicked out of companies for clumsy mistakes for as long as there have been companies, because again, that’s how the system works. And most of the time, they just get hired by a different company—or go into politics.

So the final score is -1 for 5, making this argument Grade A bullcrap.

Following this list, the author begins the next sentence with, “Whatever the arguments around each particular incident—” and I’m going to stop them there, because this bit really bothers me. Because trends are made up of particular incidents, and if it turns out that none of these particular incidents (insofar as they actually exist) are due to the reasons you claim are causing the trend, then they don’t support your claim that there is a trend in the first place. The author has gone so far out of their way to avoid citing particular incidents lest we examine all of the arguments and come up with a sum total of 0 (or rather, -1) that support the claim being made about a systematic “narrow[ing of] the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.”

Of course, the funny thing is I actually agree that boundaries are being narrowed—it’s just that they were too damn wide in the first place. You know what narrowing the boundaries looks like? Let’s ask Republican strategist Lee Atwater:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”

Lee Atwater, 1981 interview

There was a time when people didn’t get in trouble for saying “n*****,” and now they do, and that’s a good thing. The problem is now they can say “All Lives Matter” and because it doesn’t have the same history and cultural recognition, it’s harder for those aware of the subtext to convince people that that subtext exists. The argument the interlocutor doesn’t want to have is hidden beneath a statement so reasonable on the face of it that it’s not even clear an argument is being made.

Which brings as back full circle to free speech being a right-wing talking point, and maybe the author of this letter doesn’t know that, and probably a lot of the signatories don’t know that, but what I’ve tried to show is that this letter is doing the same thing: hiding faulty arguments beneath a veneer of innocuousness.

In conclusion: freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences and cancel culture isn’t destroying anyone’s life, unlike the police (who also destroy buildings, if that’s a thing that bothers you.)

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