Harvard students have been petitioning to strip degrees from alumni who were involved with the Trump administration. When Pete Hegseth of Fox News brought up the alumni’s First Amendment right to free speech, one student noted that the First Amendment only provides protection against the government throttling speech.
That’s true. But free speech is about much more than the First Amendment. Free speech is ultimately a cultural phenomenon.
Free speech protection exists in the First Amendment because the colonies were so lightly governed before the early 1770s that people got used to speaking their minds, even about government, without fear. Over time, speaking freely became a part of the culture, what their children learned by observing their parents and other adults. We have a First Amendment because the colonists didn’t want that condition to change. Free speech was not some Utopian ideal to be worked into the Constitution. It was already a reality. It was our free speech culture that gave us the First Amendment, not the other way around.
The colonists did not think they could speak their minds about anything in any context without consequences, though. No adult expects to say whatever he or she wants without bearing a cost. In all societies, words carry a cost in the form of social disapproval or worse. Free speech does not mean consequence-free speech. So free speech is not absolute, nor would we want it to be. But the greater the range of topics over which such costs are very low, the more fully a society enjoys a condition of free speech.
In some societies, children are raised to presume that as long as they speak in good faith, they are free to speak as they please with only the rarest of exceptions. They don’t fear government reprisal and, every bit as important, they believe that if the other person was a friend at the beginning of the conversation, he or she will still be a friend at the end.
In enlightened societies, you can expect nearly everyone to be against you if you try to cow the speech of others through boycotts, handing out failing grades, threatening job loss, or calling for criminal prosecution. And in the most enlightened societies of all, people of goodwill know that any effort to cow their speech will draw vocal allies even from a room of strangers.
Societies that tolerate the use of these tools of cancel culture are not free speech societies. Cancel culture overtly seeks to cow others through the imposition of costs against free expression, so it is incompatible with free speech. Bullies say that if you speak your mind, you will be put on a list. Sound familiar? Didn’t we go through this in the ’50s? For those in Hollywood, are your memories really so short? Speaking out about racial injustice or global warming in 2021 doesn’t take courage.
With each passing day, cancel culture gains momentum, and our free speech culture dies before our eyes. The solution is to have the courage to start imposing costs on the bullies who have been threatening people who did no more than to dare to disagree. What we need is more than a McCarthy-era “have you no shred of decency” moment. What we need is 100 million such moments right now.
The first lesson about bullies is that they run over everyone else because everyone else believes their hype. They have no courage. They win by a bluff. So a little courage on our part will go a long way. We need to start calling out speech bullying for what it is. We need to say that such behavior is disgraceful and un-American, not to our friends later, but to the bullies themselves now. We need to call on those around us to back us. If they don’t, they are no better than the bullies of our youth.
We need to fight, and the fight needs to begin today. Better to fight back now than later when the stakes are even higher.
David C. Rose is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of Why Culture Matters Most from Oxford University Press and has been member of the Missouri Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights since 2016.
