That "Open Debate" Letter

Remember Milo Yiannopolous? You might not because deplatforming works. But, this isn’t a post about that. This is a post about the recent affair in Harper’s, occasioned by the signing of an open letter which defended open values, the necessity of debate, and free speech. 

But first: Milo. Milo, before he was the poster boy for the Alt Right—a name for trollish White nationalism that has become fashionable in the last half decade but in truth mostly just works to describe conservatism in a way that helps plenty of people disassociate that movement from White nationalism, which is not doing the nation any favors—wrote online about things that some young White men tend to be really passionate about: namely, video games, using slurs for no good reason, playing with irony as a way to defend yourself against charges that you are a piece of shit, and making people that break from the masculine norm of treating other people like garbage feel bad for having ethics. He talked about other things, of course, like how it made you anti-racist if you had sex with Black guys. Real John Brown-type, Milo.

Anyway, Milo became a bit of a thing, and he would post offensive shit on Twitter, write offensive things in Breitbart, and go to college campuses and say offensive things. His primary goal was to get people mad, keep them mad, and perform in such a way that their outrage served to validate his position: free speech was absolutely a sacred value, it was to be understood as absolute, and if people saying ribald and hurtful things offended you, you were unfit for the robust, Hobbesian world we inhabit, and you needed to either toughen up or the world would trample you for the rest of your life.

We’re better off now that Milo is gone, and that’s partially because Milo, while not the first to seize upon it, was quite adept at taking advantage in one of the key glitches in the liberal democratic matrix: that political liberalism, by virtue of its abstract commitments to individual freedom, facilitates an easy asymmetrical disarmament of the not-assholes in any battle with…what’s the technical terminology? Oh, that’s right, assholes. Liberalism celebrates personhood and so proclaims: everyone gets to have a say. Of course, having a say doesn’t mean that society validates you. That’s (supposedly) the democratic side of the equation: you say stuff, that stuff plays around in public with other ideas, and eventually your idea either comes back to you as it was, modified by virtue of its interaction with others, or as a steaming, burned out husk of a notion.

We know, of course, that this is far too ideal a model. In practice, those whose ideas comport with the ideas of those who sit in positions of power tend to get a lot more rope to trip themselves up in public, and they often get reinvited to the public party even after having a few too many drinks and throwing a lampshade on their head that has some slur scrawled on it in Sharpie. How do they get invited back? Simple. They keep pressing the “free speech” button. And a combination of people, some who really can’t understand that abstract ideals find particular forms in specific moments, others who consider themselves iconoclastic warriors for exiles, and still others who, more or less, are just trolls and/or like to watch things burn and people be hurt, gather together to affirm that, while they might not approve of the content, it’s a fact of life that you have to let people say some bad stuff.

You know the gag where a person grabs another person’s hand, and then slaps the owner of the hand in the face with it, and keeps saying “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”? That was Milo’s bit, over and over. He would just say screwed up stuff over and over, taunting the world: “Are you intolerant yet, you tolerant liberals? Are you intolerant yet, you tolerant liberals? Oh my god what hypocrites, you claim to like egalitarianism but you’re making me unequal by judging my speech.” And here’s the thing: Milo was right. Liberalism has no abstract rule or principle to stop someone from troll bombing public reason. Instead, what stops these kinds of interventions are responses, acts, and criticism from other people. You know, like people calling him a racist troll, and eventually getting him banned from major social media sites. And telling people who thought his schtick was funny that, actually, it wasn’t funny, it was offensive, it provided no added value to our already-horribly degraded-probably-was-never-functional-only-really-served-white-guys-and-sometimes-white-women public sphere, and that if you thought that the value of open discourse extended to defending the content of what he said—content which mostly added up to negating the personhood of trans-people, feminists, Black folks, and a whole host of people who, despite what you might have read at Newsmax, are nowhere near owning the levers of power in this or most any other Western nation—you were probably on the side of something that, if it ceased to be drenched in irony and performative histrionics, was pretty indefensible.

I say this only because that Harper’s open letter was nothing more than a respectable Milo-style troll job. A statement about the importance of open principles, attached to no content in particular, just an empty, abstract, universal affirmation that everyone should get to have an opinion. But that’s vacuous. Anyone worth their salt understands that everyone gets to have an opinion. The rubber really hits the road when we figure out whose opinion is more likely to be validated and held by those who gatekeep various institutions and power centers. Empty proclamations that all ideas are welcome have long served to legitimate institutions that are built on histories of violence, accumulation, and denigration. Iris Marion Young, a political theorist, observed this years ago with her discussion of the difference between the activist and the deliberative democrat: the former has to press their point because their life depends on it, the latter can point to the infinite possibilities of discourse and just run out the clock while people starve, work themselves to the bone, and die of a deadly disease because there is little substantive recognition of their personhood among the power holders—that’s composed of discourses and people, by the way—in a given system.

Some sharp people signed that statement. They got played. Statements of value are articulated to specific cases. Cops are running around tear gassing and arresting people and they don’t give a shit about some open letter in Harper’s. And the people who signed that statement are affirming a filibuster on any idea which the Milo Yiannopolouses and Jesse Singals of the world choose to bring up under the faint guise of “just asking questions.”