The Last Generation That Has a Say

I read this as an opinion piece. It doesn't seem to me to aspire to convey new information. I don't think it's self-consciously engaged in presenting an argument, in which there are steps from point to point in a chain of reasoning. I don't find any passages in which the objections that someone thinking differently might raise are acknowledged and addressed. I think the particular opinion at the center of the essay is that the democritization of technology that has led to a very great democritization of opinion—as the equalization of individuals and media entities has proceeded in the Net—has lowered the tone of public debate. This seems to you particularly evident in the rhetoric on one side (not your favored side) of the two-party contest for the Presidency now ramping up.

In the first place, I'm not sure the history bears you out. I wonder if you have ever had occasion to read the newspapers and campaign oratory of, for example, 1864. Barack Obama, much vilified as he is, is not more vilified than was Abraham Lincoln. Mr Trump's form of anti-immigrant rhetoric is grotesquely distasteful in this nation of immigrants, but if you think about the "Know Nothing" anti-immigrant politics of the 1850s---which Mr Lincoln, Salmon P. Chase and other ardent anti-slavery Whigs carefully danced with and around in order to co-opt Know Nothingism into an anti-slavery but not anti-immigrant Republican Party---I think you will find yourself heartened to discover that we have been through, and survived, this form of xenophobia more than once, without "the Internet."

Your discussion of hate speech regulation would suit better our work next term, in the "Computers, Privacy and the Constitution" course, but let me say here that I don't think you've captured the real dispute between the First Amendment and hate speech regulation. The issue isn't First Amendment absolutism. The issue is whether more speech or less speech is the correct response to upwellings of hate or sedition or other anti-social communication. European hate speech regulation comes from statist origins in regimes that always used censorship, from the adoption of printing onwards, to shape opinion. American attitudes in the direction of "more speech" as the remedy for bad speech begin from the absence of any precedent anti-liberal tradition in American culture, as Louis Hartz famously noted more than fifty years ago. Many ways of expressing the American view could be cited, but this one seems most important to me:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

which comes from Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address. If one adds from the same speech this:

[H]aving banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

one has, I think, conveniently located in one place the key propositions from which a response to your opinion might be fashioned, and from which, at any rate, you might take the creative tension necessary for another, richer, draft.

To chime in here, I think an issue to consider is whether the rise of a "personalized" Internet degrades the quality of the democratic forum. There is a lot of evidence out there that the manner in which most users acquire information online -- through social media sites, for example -- tends to reinforce rather than challenge existing belief systems. It can be viscerally satisfying to read news you like and agree with, so users who are not vigilant risk falling into partisan wormholes where they never confront opposing ideas.

I do agree with the above proposition that the best response to hate speech is to force it to stand side by side with reason and truth. The proper question then, in my view, is how do we ensure that hateful and erroneous belief systems are exposed to material that will defeat them.

-Shay

I think discussion of the solutions law can, or should, bring to the problems you identify. While Trump is a disgusting man, I think he is red herring for this essay. Not much at all of what he says in new in any meaningful way. Does it make sense to focus on the presidential candidates? Electoral politics are certainly interesting with regards to the modern news media, but there have long been hateful demagogues, as you note with reference to e.g. Hitler. In fact, your reference to "other holocausts" might undermine your pondering whether there is something unusual about this cycle in particular.

Re the final paragraph: what propaganda? Is this term to refer just generally to hateful things that candidates say? Would their victory ensure that those outrageous proposals come to being? How would "our generation" stop this from happening in terms of the law?

Textual edit: "have been limits put on free speech in our countries history." --> "countries" should be "country's."

- Gregg

I actually have to disagree with you on one point Gregg, because I do think there is something important to be said about Mr. Trump that may be brought out in a future draft. To me at least, Trump's whole appeal comes from the fact that he is a master of straddling the contours of hidden meaning in a political noosphere dominated by social media. Repeatedly, Trump says stupid and offensive things with a sarcastic wink and a nod, causing Twitter and Facebook to erupt in arguments over what he actually believes. Our side gets offended, while his supporters simply talk about how all the snooty liberals just "don't get it." Donald Trump, after all, is simply a man who says what he believes and is not afraid to talk about all the subjects the "left-wing PC police" would prefer we avoid. According to them, the fact is that politicians need to talk about how immigration is ruining America and how ISIS is scary; parsing words and calling people names merely serve to detract from those conversations.

The effect of this dynamic is that anyone who raises concerns about anything Trump says at the surface level is ostracized from the public forum, simply written off as butthurt and humorless. I find all of this interesting and functionally distinct from previous forms of demagoguery. Donald Trump's candidacy is, at its root, about silencing dissenting minorities (the "cultural establishment," as he would call them) by mocking and laughing at them. I don't really know what that means for free speech and democracy in the Internet Society, but I believe it is relevant and that a thoughtful discussion of Trump is vital to the essay.