WHY IT MATTERS.

Back in the day, the common room might have people who would respond to a contrarian viewpoint with "How can you say that???"  Often, though, you could talk them off the ledge.   Sometimes, though, they never learned how not to be stupid about being smart. These days, it might be worse.

In the cultural battle over free speech in the US right now, it is libertarians, conservatives, and a minority of old school progressives standing up to protect free expression, both public and private, and an increasingly authoritarian Left that clearly does not “respect or accept behavior or opinions different” from their own. They want to label speech they don’t like as “disinformation” and cancel anyone who disagrees with their narrow vision of what is socially acceptable in today’s America.

The contemporary Left is not liberal. It is becoming more illiberal by the day.

The Based Politics folks have their platform. I have mine.

The “pausing” of Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board could be another example of elites realizing they might be taking things too far. Thinking they could get away with exerting even more control and quickly discovering they were mistaken.

One classic aspect of being an elite is not realizing when the culture has changed. That you have lost a degree of control. This usually happens because elites try to exert too much power over determining what’s acceptable and unacceptable. People will only take so much.

[The Daves] Rogan and Chappelle are not right-wing. Neither are similar famous figures fighting for the same freedom of expression, like HBO’s Bill Maher or billionaire Elon Musk. Neither is Netflix. Neither necessarily are millions of Americans who have had it with elites trying to control speech in their country.

But in the political culture war, it seems to me that it is the Right which is primarily standing up for free expression in our culture. We ought to reclaim the mantle of true liberalism and apply its principle across the board. We should “respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own” in government, the broader culture, and anywhere ideas are expressed in the US.

Is now the turning point, the great pushback against our technocratic censor-happy overlords? Time will tell.

But free speech must be defended if we are to protect a basic liberty most Americans for generations have considered their birthright.

It takes a bit of nerve to defy conventional wisdom.  When being stupid about being smart goes from doubt to hectoring to condescension to outright rudeness, the epistemic closure might have unintended consequences.

The insult-and-intimidate approach, though, does have a downside: it may well alienate people who are somewhat aligned with the opposing side but may still be persuadable. Even if they are intimidated from speaking out, they may still remember the sting of the insults when they alone in the voting booth. Few practitioners of meme-driven insults and other forms of hostile political communication seem worried about this side effect of their work, though.

A factor that should not be underrated: many people get a certain kind of pleasure from engaging in cruelty while feeling virtuous and also reinforcing their sense of membership in an in-group.

That's Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster.  He's focusing on meming, which is sort of do-it-yourself political cartooning, and if you remember Herbert Block or Jeff MacNelly, people with a major newspaper could get away with a lot.  These days, anybody with some decent photo editing skills can get into the business.

The cruelty, though?  Ask yourself, dear reader, how many people might have blocked you or unfriended you on social media when you push back?  The common-room cruelty is a power move only if you concede your interlocutor the power.

SECOND SECTION. Right and Wrong Ways to Reform the University.

Epistemic liberalism requires a willingness to challenge prior beliefs on the basis of evidence and other ideas, even when they are unfamiliar or even heterodox. Faculty and students at a university thus participate in a program of producing new knowledge by questioning received wisdom, all the while strengthening the tenets that stand up to their relentless queries.

Such epistemic liberalism fits university students to be leaders in a democracy, a form of government that necessarily makes its way by trial and error—one that in the long run depends on civic openness to ideas and evidence. It also makes them natural pluralists who tolerate the opposing views of others even as they debate them. Ultimately, the success of the university’s first two missions of discovery and productivity also depends on the third: science rests on an empirical mindset, and business too requires the flexibility of mind that epistemic liberalism encourages.

Universities are not performing well on this third mission today.

The reform part of the article will reward careful study.