Corey
Robin

Have you ever tried to steal a homophobic sign from an anti-gay protester? Would you try to do that to an armed NRA/Tea-Partier gang protesting in a parking lot against a gun safety coffee klatch in a restaurant? You think “direct confrontation” will cure society of its reactionary tendencies finding their expression in speech? Do you really think that freedom of speech is something that people really should put their lives in jeopardy for?

People will die for the right to vote. I am less convinced that they will die for the ability to keep their eyes from hitting images/seeing signs that offend them. I also think you seriously misapprehend the commitment that homophobes/racists/misogynists have to their own views such that you can assert that “direct confrontation” can have any hope of dissipating such views from the public sphere and from American values altogether. I would caution against trying it; you could be in for an extremely unpleasant surprise. To stop reactionary expression, you are asking people to walk into a buzz saw, and you have no exit strategy when “sh*t jumps off”. The reactionaries’ views will just “dissipate”, you say. Because “we” won’t tolerate them, you claim. Good luck with that. And your “emotional trauma” argument is vague and reads more like speculation mixed with special pleading, than an actual clinical condition, one whose therapeutic response is in the shutting down of the noise from reactionaries. Your insinuation in that same passage that anti-abortion rallies somehow “feed into” rape just don’t wash. You don’t say how (what does “feed into” even mean?!) and you don’t offer any examples. How many rapists have been reported to been motivated by the anti-women/anti-abortion shrieks one hears at such rallies? The FBI would like to have those statistics. When you start talking like that, people will just stop listening to you.

I actually sympathize with your hostility to reactionary speech. The problem is one of a category error in which you appear to conflate action with “only words”, after the fashion of MacKinnon who suggests that the murder of a person who reads pornography could be seen as something that the pornography “said”. I have always found that example of magical thinking truly arresting. It is also very helpful to allow those of us who protect the “free speech” rights of people whose views we hate to clarify our own position. If this confusion is the might and main of progressive “sign grabbers” who claim that a nasty sign is an inhibition to persons’ personal liberty (instead of, say, “stop and frisk”, or “voter ID laws”, or race segregation laws, or the closing of abortion clinics, or “rape insurance” policies) then I am afraid that a progressive agenda has no hope. Rowdy protesters with hateful ideas have to obey the same public safety laws — from trespassing to stalking to the issuing of death threats — as the rest of us. If they block my path to the voting booth, they will be sorry. If they threaten me — well, I don’t think I will finish that sentence. Blocking my path, issuing threats, burning a cross on my lawn — freedom of speech don’t protect these ACTS.

I don’t FEAR right-wing speech; I PROTEST right-wing POWER. And yes, I know, that in the age of corporate campaigns to promote this or that reactionary agenda which is also an age of political inequality between persons and corporations which is also an age of vast and growing wealth inequality — it ain’t so easy to disentangle SPEECH from ACTS such that any progressive response does not invite the very outcome that we claim to reject and can come back to bite us on the butt. “Citizens United” only made our work harder, which is the point. The progressive activists that made the United States a more humane society did not go after reactionary speech — they went after reactionary POWER. That is the reason that I, a Black male, can enter a voting booth without being arrested or shot.

The ONLY way to beat back reactionary speech is to beat back reactionary politics. Justice must pervade all areas of our lives such that reactionary ideas/ideals lose/cannot grab a foothold. Screaming back at screaming wingnuts will just piss them off. That alone would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that reactionaries also believe in the coercive use of political violence as part of the overall conservative political continuum — and are perfectly willing to use violence to confront us. You can’t scream with a mouth full of bullets.

And speaking of violence, your invocation of violence as an inexorable outcome of reaction beliefs, and thus the suppression of such beliefs thereby equals the suppression of violence, exemplifies the misdirected program you outline (“direct confrontation”). It also betrays an ignorance of the social etiology of political violence. But to the point, besides needlessly putting people at risk, you say absolutely zero about the promotion of social justice. You appear to believe that we can do an end-run around the grunt work of struggling for justice by, instead, imposing a forced silence on the enemies of justice — reactionaries. It is inequality and injustice that both feeds and invites — and are thus very simply the source of — the reactionary capacity for political violence, and not their ability to open their big mouths. A women’s safety on the street, on her way to an abortion clinic, does not derive from the silence of wingnuts, it derives from the vigorous institutional protection of both her physical person and her Constitutional rights. Have you not considered that a women’s loss of access to abortion is a function of a long campaign to force restrictions on women’s medical prerogatives and not a function of crazies in front of an abortion clinic? Exactly WHY do killers think they can shoot doctors who provide abortion services? Where does their sense of safety — even after conviction — come from? Could it have something to do the forty year long push by the religious right and their Republican enablers — and Democratic cowards — to put barrier after barrier between women and their control over their bodies? The right’s speech — and the character it takes — derives from their POWER, a power activated in reaction to the political successes of the progressive movements of the late 1950’s, the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and not the other way around.

Millions of dollars have been spent, billions of pages in right wing think tank written, the “southernization” of American politics grinds on, and on and on. Anti-abortion protesters are only the TV friendly face of right wing politics. What brought us to the place of un-safety for women and their rights is the work of a long campaign funded by the rich (who don’t carry signs). THEIR silence does not equal (nor does it evidence) OUR safety. Trying to shut up the crazies only feeds into the crazies’ persecution complex (a natural condition of reactionaries, anyway) and does NOTHING to increase the safety of LGBTQ, persons of color, women, the poor. The crazies got the billionaires, they got guns and they got FOX. And they got the corporations and the majority of our elected officials. Grabbing a sign out of a wingnut’s grimy grip will get you a bullet in the head and a reality show for the shooter on FOX. THEY. GOT. POWER.

There are other ways to defeat these people, ways that work. And yes, these ways have and will cost us, and will continue to do so. But these days undertaking such ways have become a lot less deadly for all than they used to be, and grabbing a winger’s sign out of his hand did not have anything to do with that in any way, shape or form. And the ways I have in mind don’t involve narrowing speech. They involve spreading justice.

This is not a discussion of what to do about people who have bad beliefs, although you clearly see it that way. Rather, people with bad beliefs who feel compelled to express them will find it harder to do so in a society that moves toward justice. That is because the spread of justice and equality writes its own argument against their opposites: it becomes increasing difficult for reactionaries to try to argue that social unfairness is a good deal for all. Quoting Burke: “You cannot argue a man into slavery!” So they cloak their reactionary arguments in arguments that have a superficial yet strategic resemblance to progressive arguments. Prof. Robin gives some great examples of this in “The Reactionary Mind”. But back to the point: the spread of justice is the REAL reason that homophobes have been losing ground — and that is the work of a long progressive campaign to expand the rights of LGBTQ’s. Confrontation is nice, but it must be carefully thought out: ACT-UP comes to mind. ACT-UP was confrontational, but they were not suicidal. Plus, they had a behind-the-scenes political strategy. And they were not alone. ACT-UP and many, many others helped make America less homophobic. They were part of a larger pro-justice movement. I take pride in having a very, very tiny part in that movement in my youth.

Let me close by my screed with this observation. I am a little confused as to why you feel it necessary to cast aspersions upon others whose views you feel you understand adequately, such that upon disagreeing with them you feel it appropriate to impugn them and their motives. You accuse Prof. Robin of hiding within or behind his white male force field and that his ability to do so renders him incapable of empathy with the historic victims of reactionary politics. It is clear that you have never read his blog, nor his books (I have), nor his essays (I have). I don’t know your life and thus I don’t know where your MacKinnon-esque rage [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1994/mar/03/pornography-an-exchange/] is coming from. And I say this as someone whose own position on the writings of Ms. MacKinnon’s sometime co-author, Andrea Dworkin, has come to be more sympathetic, if not necessarily less critical. What I can say, bluntly, is that such rage has no justification for its expression here — unless you know something about Prof. Robin that the rest of us don’t know.

I await the “carpet bombing.”

Except in practice the left has been far more censorious than the right; case in point, Canada and hate speech laws.