The left *should* vigorously defend free speech and the free exchange of ideas. That’s not made any less true just because some insufferable people whine about it in a self-indulgent way, and fundamentally misidentify the primary source of the threats against it.
No-one except themselves really believes that the right to free expression of a bunch of liberal celebrities is seriously menaced by a load of Twitter users calling JK Rowling a TERF, or wherever they’ve decided to arbitrarily dig the trenches of the “free speech” war this week.
But there is undeniably an assault underway on some basic “liberal” and “bourgeois democratic” norms, primarily driven by hard-right, authoritarian nationalist movements, that the left can ill afford to be neutral or lackadaisical about.
Stuff like “cancel culture”, or censorious approaches to disagreement amplified by the discursive modes encouraged by social media, seem chickenshit in comparison to the societal-level threats to freedom of speech/free expression represented by a Xi Jinping, a Modi, or a Trump.
Nevertheless, if you’re gonna take a consistent stand in favour of those democratic norms - free speech, free expression, and opposition and critique rather than censorship - you have to oppose the chickenshit stuff too, even while acknowledging it’s not the major threat.
We - the left, aspiring to be “the tribune of the oppressed” - need freedom of speech, free expression, and the ability to thrash out ideas *much more* than our class enemies. They’ve already got the state, the media, and economic power. Their freedoms are largely secure.
Which means we can’t be stinting or inconsistent in our defence of those values, and we can’t let people who want to redefine “freedom of speech” to mean “freedom from criticism” claim ownership over the concept.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in its heroic period in the US spent as much, if not more, time on “free speech” agitation - the right to speak, and publish, freely, in particular against war - as it did on strikes and workplace activity. They had the right idea.
TL/DR: Liberals can’t be trusted to defend “liberal values”; the left has to rescue/reclaim the defence of “free speech” from the Free Speech Warriors.
