The Gaza war could help set speech free again
It’s always seemed a bit self-sabotaging: The leftist ideology rippling out from American college campuses this century has on the one hand favoured restricting speech, yet on the other posited that the implacable forces of capitalism and white privilege entrench right-wing power. Whose speech did these ideologues imagine would wind up getting suppressed?
This tension has not surfaced often on college campuses, at least not at the most exclusive schools. There, the forces of capitalism and white privilege—if not of tolerance and curiosity—were mostly routed. A dwindling minority of faculty members, as few as a tenth, identify as conservative. Administrators, whose ranks have ballooned and who oversee the “bias-response teams” that police speech, are even more likely to identify with the left.
Yet off campus, the forces of reaction began responding with strikingly symmetrical concerns about speech: conservative governors and legislatures across America have embraced the theory that certain ideas are too dangerous for all minds and certain views are too hurtful for particular ears. Bills proposed in states such as Texas seek to protect children from material that might cause “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex”. But rather than aiming to safeguard the feelings of people from historically marginalised groups, such bills are meant to protect white children from the very ideas the left wants to promulgate.
2023-11-02 09:17:57
Post from www.economist.com
rnrn