Opinion: What the Left Keeps Getting Wrong About Free Speech – By Ben Burgis (Daily Beast) / April 2, 2022
Laugh off concerns about “cancel culture” all you want. But even recent history shows how vital free speech is to winning social justice.
Free speech is a left-wing value.
As a matter of self-preservation, any movement arrayed against the most powerful forces in our society needs to care about the right of free expression. And as a matter of principle, it’s not possible to separate the goal of empowering the working class from the necessity of opposing those who think ordinary working-class people are too dumb to be trusted to listen to different points of view and make up their own minds.
As such, I’m always disturbed when I see some of my friends and comrades on the left dismissing concerns about the weakening of free speech norms as merely an unserious preoccupation of elites who just don’t like being criticized.
Our position should be to zealously defend what few free speech protections already exist in a late capitalist society, where most employment is “at-will” and most political speech happens on platforms controlled by a few corporations. And we should pledge to fight like hell to deepen and extend such rights to all the tens of millions of anonymous people who enjoy no meaningful safeguards against being fired or deplatformed for speaking their minds
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