Free speech, the far right and dog-whistle politics

I'm feeling increasingly frustrated at the way "free speech" has increasingly been co-opted as a dog whistle for far-right politics. I see people who should know better following these debates as if free speech is really the issue at stake, instead of the actual substantive things that people are *saying*. 

The classic case of this is the question of "states' rights" in the US. The balance of power between the federal government and the individual states is, of course, an important question and something that should be debated. But the way the topic has actually been *used* is as a code word for institutionalised racism:

"You start out in 1954 by saying, "N**r, n**r, n**r." By 1968, you can't say "n**r" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N**r, n**r.""

— Lee Atwater, Republican Party strategist

Simply saying “We want more racism” - i.e. defending the substantive policies that Southern states would actually promulgate if given more power - is no longer politically feasible. You make it an abstract, procedural question about how much power they should have. *Then* they can use that power to promulgate those policies without ever having to defend them.

By the same token, free speech is of course an important issue, and there are substantive debates to be had about when (if at all) the State should be allowed to use force to prevent particular kinds of speech. But the “alt right” have basically figured out the same strategy to promote their regressive ideas without ever having to explicitly defend them. Someone like Milo Yiannopoulos essentially made his entire career (hopefully now permanently foundered) on the premise that he was defending free speech by “saying the things he wasn’t supposed to say”. Never mind that what he actually has to say is obviously garbage. Jordan Peterson doesn’t stand up and say “I believe in highly traditional gender roles, and making life difficult for anyone who doesn’t comply with them”, because that doesn’t really fly any more. Instead he says “You can’t *make me* use people’s preferred pronouns”. This avoids the substantive question of whether refusing to using preferred pronouns is a shitty thing to do (it is) in favour of a more abstract question of whether we should try to coerce people into doing it (probably not). 

I guess what I’m saying is: don’t be fooled by this. If someone is expending all their energy arguing that they have the *right* to do something, rather than whether doing that thing is actually morally OK, they’re probably avoiding the question.