Thomas Zimmer Profile picture
Mar 18, 2022 22 tweets 6 min read Read on X
The NYT editorial board thinks “America Has a Free Speech Problem” – and presents a purely mythical idea of what “free speech” is, an a-historical tale of the country’s past, and a narrative that is detached from the current reality of the political conflict.

Some thoughts: 1/ Image
First of all, the editorial perpetuates a misleading myth of what “free speech” is. They initially define it as the right of the people “to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” Such a right has never existed anywhere. 2/ Image
Deep into the piece, the editorial board acknowledges that this is actually not what “free speech” means, and that the Constitution defines it, in their words, as “freedom from government restrictions on expression.” 3/ Image
But the editorial board simply pivots away from that acknowledgment with a strikingly nonchalant “Yet…” – choosing to frame the issue along the lines of what they say is a “popular conception” of free speech: that anyone can say whatever they want and never face consequences. 4/
But this has obviously never been the case anywhere in the world. Public speech is always regulated, there are always boundaries to what is considered acceptable and what is not. And everyone agrees that certain transgressions should be met with shaming or shunning. 5/
The problem with the “cancel culture” discourse is that it ignores and obscures the fact that there are always norms of what is and what is not acceptable as public speech, and that it has traditionally been the prerogative of elite white men to determine those boundaries. 6/
And the “cancel culture” discourse deliberately obscures the fact that the amount of pushback as well as the level of sanctions one has to expect for deviating depends on who does the deviating – with the results always being worse for traditionally marginalized groups. 7/
The next problem with the editorial is that it’s completely a-historical. It presents a narrative of decline: “something has been lost,” it says – but when, exactly, was that golden age of free speech when all Americans were free to speak their minds at all times? 8/ Image
Unless we are talking about white Christian men only, it makes absolutely no sense to construct a version of U.S. history in which the past was characterized by free speech for all Americans, in which the very recent past has been marked by a loss of free speech. 9/
It is true that white elite men face a little more scrutiny today than in the past. This has caused quite a bit of anxiety, which is what is really animating much of the “cancel culture” moral panic. That seems to be the overriding perspective of the editorial board. 10/
Finally, the “free speech” crisis presented in this editorial is utterly detached from the reality of the current political conflict. This not only obscures the actual struggle, but privileges a reactionary political project that is all about restricting speech. 11/
In the concrete reality of American life, we are experiencing a struggle between two competing narratives about what the actual threat to civil rights and civic freedoms is: the rightwing assault on multiracial, pluralistic democracy - or illiberal leftwing cancel culture. 12/
These two narratives are not equally plausible. The evidence for a rightwing assault on democracy, an all-out campaign to roll back civil rights on the state level is overwhelming – it comes in the form of hundreds of Republican bills and actual legislation, day after day. 13/
What about leftwing “cancel culture” though? I implore you to watch this fantastic video by @RottenInDenmark, a thorough debunking of the idea of widespread “cancellations,” based on an actual assessment of the available empirical evidence: 14/
Crucially, the editorial itself is proof of this, uhm, imbalance of empirical evidence – it cites the state-level Republican assault and never comes up with anything from the “Left” that would be remotely equivalent. But that has no influence on how the problem is framed. 15/
In fact, the editorial actively obscures the threat from the Right, assuring us that, unlike in Russia, actual government censorship is “not the kind of threat to freedom of expression that Americans face.” Then what are all these state-level GOP education bills about? 16/ Image
The education sector does come up – in what is a really stunning inversion of the political reality. First, an elderly man from San Antonio is cited who is “alarmed by scenes of parents being silenced at school board meetings” – he means *conservative* parents. 17/ Image
Then, an elderly woman is given room to describe her dismay at “woke” college kids “doing us so much harm” on the campus. Ah yes, as Republicans are literally installing an authoritarian white nationalist education system, these are the voices that need to be elevated… 18/ Image
In the specific context of America’s current political and cultural conflict, emphasizing the “cancel culture” narrative in this way has a clear political valence and purpose: to delegitimize the claims of traditionally marginalized groups for equal rights and respect. 19/
So, why this editorial? As I outlined in the thread below, the “cancel culture” narrative not only benefits from the reactionary centrist ideological inclinations of white elites, but also from mainstream journalism’s eternal quest for “neutrality” and “balanced” coverage: 20/
Unfortunately, this editorial matters. People don’t shrug this off as “Just one editorial” – they read it as “the NYT says…” And with that, the idea that America is facing a free speech crisis, that cancel culture is real, and that *both sides* are at fault becomes dogma. /end
Addendum: I’ll be on @1a tomorrow at 10am to discuss my critique of the NYT editorial board’s idea that we’re experiencing a “free speech crisis” and why we need to pay attention to the reactionary political project that has co-opted the “cancel culture” discourse. @NPR

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More from @tzimmer_history

Nov 2
Weekend reading:

Combine the myth of American exceptionalism, (willful) historical ignorance, and a lack of political imagination and the result is a situation in which a lot of people refuse to take the Trumpist threat seriously.

This week’s piece:

thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/it-could-def…My latest “Democracy Americana” newsletter: “It Could Definitely Happen Here: Many Americans struggle to accept that democracy is young, fragile, and could actually collapse – a lack of imagination that dangerously blunts the response to the Trumpist Right.”
There is a pervasive idea that in a country like the United States, with a supposedly centuries-long tradition of stable, consolidated democracy, authoritarianism simply has no realistic chance to succeed, that “We” have never experienced authoritarianism.
But the political system that was stable for most of U.S. history was a white man’s democracy, or racial caste democracy. There is absolutely nothing old or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic democracy* in America. It only started less than 60 years ago.
Read 8 tweets
Nov 1
It Could Definitely Happen Here
 
Many Americans struggle to accept that democracy is young, fragile, and could actually collapse – a lack of imagination that dangerously blunts the response to the Trumpist Right.

Some thoughts from my new piece (link in bio):

🧵1/ My latest “Democracy Americana” newsletter: “It Could Definitely Happen Here: Many Americans struggle to accept that democracy is young, fragile, and could actually collapse – a lack of imagination that dangerously blunts the response to the Trumpist Right.”
I wrote about the mix of a deep-seated mythology of American exceptionalism, progress gospel, lack of political understanding, and (willful) historical ignorance that has created a situation in which a lot of people simple refuse to take the Trumpist threat seriously. 2/
There is a lot of evidence that this election may be decided by a sizable group of people who strongly dislike Trump and his plans, but simply cannot imagine he would actually dare / manage to implement any of his promises and therefore aren’t mobilizing to vote. 3/
Read 14 tweets
Oct 27
Eleven months ago, Robert Kagan published “A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable” in the Washington Post.

He has now resigned from the Post because it refuses to endorse Trump’s opponent.

I dove deep into why Kagan was essentially correct:

thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/donald-trump… x.com/davidfolkenfli…Image
This warning was not coming from the Left. Although he rejects the label, Kagan is probably best described as a neocon. He’s an influential Never Trump Ex-Republican. And he believed that unless we changed course, America was on a trajectory towards a Trump dictatorship.
Nothing is ever inevitable. But what Kagan got right is that every political analysis needs to start from the recognition that there’s an eminently plausible and fairly straightforward path from where we are to autocratic rule. That’s even more obvious now than it was a year ago.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 25
Crucial piece by @Mike_Podhorzer on how polls are obscuring the extremism of Trump’s plans.

A related thought: Since the mainstream discourse stipulates that extremism must be “fringe” in America, anything that has broad support is reflexively sanitized as *not* extremism.
This apologist sleight of hand is often deployed to provide cover for extreme forces within the GOP: If extremism is not defined by its ideological/political substance, but as “something fringe,” then the minute it becomes GOP mainstream, it ceases to be regarded as extremism.
Just like that, not only do extremist ideas and policies get automatically legitimized - by definition, the Republican Party, regardless of how substantively extreme, also gets treated as “normal” simply because it ain’t fringe, because it’s supported by almost half the country.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 16
Donald Trump, American Fascist
 
Trumpism is what a specifically American, twenty-first century version of fascism looks like. And in November, fascism is on the ballot.
 
Some thoughts from my new piece (link in bio):
 
🧵1/ My latest “Democracy Americana” newsletter: “Donald Trump, American Fascist: Trumpism is what a specifically American, twenty-first century version of fascism looks like. And in November, fascism is on the ballot.”
Donald Trump’s closing pitch to the American people is rage, intimidation, and vengeful violence. He is threatening – or promising, if you ask his supporters – fascism. No more plausible deniability for anyone who refuses to see the threat. 2/
Mere weeks before the election, I revisit the Fascism Debate and discuss where we stand after Trump has, even by his own standards, gone on a rampage recently. If anyone thought more evidence was needed before we could call it fascist, the Trumpists have certainly provided it. 3/
Read 12 tweets
Oct 8
The stakes in 2024: Democracy itself has become a partisan issue.

The fundamental reality of American politics right now: The conflict over whether or not the country should actually be a democracy maps onto the conflict between the two major parties. 1/
For all its - many, many - flaws, the Democratic Party is, as of right now, the country’s sole (small-d) democratic party, while the GOP is firmly in the hands of an ethno-nationalist movement that is determined to impose its vision by increasingly authoritarian measures.
This situation is so dangerous because it means that for the foreseeable future, the fate of democracy - not merely in a formalistic way, but with all the fundamental rights and respect for pluralism by which it should be defined - is on the ballot in every single election. 3/
Read 12 tweets

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