Yes, 'progressives.' The First Amendment protects 'hate speech.'
As an American with some appreciation for the tradition of free speech, it's hard for me to understand how Canadians and Europeans can fail to get the point that no society in which the most absolutely despicable and vile viewpoint is not free to express itself can truly be said to have free speech. Those who claim to be "tolerant of everything but intolerance" miss the point that somebody has to define "tolerance," and that my definition would probably be somewhat different from that of the average social justice warrior. As a practical matter, then, if we accept the premise that all speech but intolerant speech should be free, whoever is in power decides whose speech gets to be free and whose does not.
If speech is not absolutely free (with due allowance, of course, for civil action in cases of slander, libel, or the circumstances long established in American constitutional law in which a clear and present danger of actual harm as a result of certain speech exists), then what speech is free and what speech is not will always be dictated by those in power. This is not a healthy state of affairs for freedom. It is a recipe for totalitarianism.
The threat of social harm from even the vilest of bigotted expression doesn't cut it as an excuse for curtailing free speech. As much as I despise the term "snowflake," thrown about freely and often inappropriately by the nuttier members of the right, it was originally intended to make the very valid point that, as the schoolyard proverb goes, "sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Hurt feelings, I fear, are the price we have to pay for the combination of freedom and the inevitable presence of jerks in our society. Political correctness, in the true sense (and not, as our current president is apt to use the term, as a synonym of "basic good manners and civilized behavior") treats people's sensitivities as fragile things and assumes that great harm is done if they are offended.
And in certain senses, it can be. People's lives are indeed affected by widely-held attitudes. Racism has done a great deal of damage to the lives of African-Americans over the years and still does. But it did so by limiting the opportunities and options available to black people, not by hurting their feelings. That sort of thing, people can survive. Each of us has skeletons in her family's closet, or is overweight, or has a big nose, or has endured teasing or ridicule over one thing or another. We deal with it. We become stronger. That doesn't make the ridicule or the hurt feelings that ensure anything other than bad. But somehow, all of us survive.
One cannot change attitudes by coercion. One can only drive them underground. Passing laws against "hate speech" accomplishes nothing. Firing people who, whether because of malignant attitudes or through simple accident, say or do something offensive strikes me as a solution far inferior to dialoguing with them and educating them. Common courtesy and good manners are things we all have the right to expect for one another, and social sanctions like disapprobation and even social isolation are perfectly serviceable measures for enforcing them. We don't need to fire people or ruin their lives. Nor, with apologies to my friends in Canada and the UK, do we need to jail them or fine them or deprive them of the right to be published.
The problem is that "hate speech" itself is a category which not only can be but is misapplied. Brendon Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, and Dan Cathy of Chik-fil-A never hated gay people. They merely held religious and ethical beliefs regarding homosexual behavior (not orientation) from which the social left dissented. They had practical reservations about marriage redefinition which could have been addressed or dialogued with. Instead, one was fired, and the other had a national boycott staged against his restaurant chain which even involved public officials violating their oaths of office by denying him the right to open restaurants in their jurisdictions, thus curtailing his freedom of speech.
Our American way of looking at ideas is Darwinian. We believe that if all ideas are allowed to be expressed and to compete on an equal basis, all things being equal the good ones will win out and the bad ones will lose. Pre-judging which ideas can be expressed and which cannot short-circuits the process. It gives bad ideas protection they don't deserve and penalizes what hypothetically might be good ones.
No one should be forced to use Firefox (since Eich's firing, I refuse to) or to eat Dan Cathy's chicken sandwiches. But it's frightening to see the social left attempting to defeat attitudes and ideas with which they disagree not with arguments or better ideas, but with coercion. That's the way dictatorships function. And when the power of the law is summoned not to protect people from actual harm but to intimidate them into intellectual conformity, one would think that alarms would be going off all in the minds of any American, or of anyone who loves freedom- or, for that matter, who has the slightest confidence in his own ideas and their ability to compete with ones of which he disapproves of in open competition.
Canadians and Englishmen value freedom, but they seem to value niceness more. I think they would do well to reflect on the point that if ideas- however ugly- can be suppressed by force of law, there is no reason in principle why good ideas should not in the future be suppressed by those who espouse ugly ones. There are precedents for that sort of thing. But I am neither a Canadian nor an Englishman, and while I think their understanding of the concept of freedom of speech is profoundly deficient, it is not my place to criticize them for it.
But I draw the line when it comes to Americans parting company with ideas so essential to the founding values of our nation. If you don't have enough confidence in your own ideas to trust them to defeat those with which you disagree in free and open competition, that's your problem. But you have no right to try to coerce me into agreeing with you.
There is nothing so un-American as the concept of a thought police. And speech which does no one concrete and immediate harm cannot be constrained either by law or by any other form of intimidation without compromising the very principle of free speech. The expression of thought can no more be sort of free than a woman can be sort of pregnant.
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