Not PP but in my opinion there is a big difference between how the law addresses speech that makes people interested in a different government and speech that promotes extreme ideologies.
For example, if you look at countries like Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, etc... what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian.
Whereas in a lot of Europe it is illegal to promote only extreme ideologies but apart from that the democratic discourse is as messy and varied as you'd expect it to be. (And due to variety of electoral systems I'd argue that political discourse in much of Europe is mush more varied than in places like the US.) We have countries swinging from left to right wing governments and even powerful political parties that started as far right wing or terrorist groups.
What we all see is how the balance can be tipped from fragile democracy to repressive authoritarianism e.g. Hungary.
Democracy is a constant effort, requiring constant vigilance. These are all discussions worth having, at least in good faith.
How laws are sold to the public are not how they get applied. Nixon's 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, meant to regulate campaign finance, was immediately used to curtail speech critical of Nixon.
Here's former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser in a podcast at 1:49:10 [1], transcript [2]:
> Times writes back and says, we can't publish this ad because we – because you criticize Nixon and it's 1972, and it's in the middle of an election campaign, and if you criticize Nixon, unless you have his permission, it counts against the ad – the expenditure limitation of his opponent. I said, I have to get his permission in order to criticize him, what are you, crazy. It's the same issue that Cambodian bombing ad...
> So, we file a lawsuit, we win that lawsuit, and we strike the law down for the second time. This goes on over and over again, and I'm saying to myself, this is a law that is supposed to get in the way of nasty rich folks, and the only two times it's been used so far is against these three aging radicals and the ACLU on totally legitimate, core First Amendment speech, how can that be, and that's how we get into this issue, and why we see it so clearly as a free speech issue. It goes on and on and on and on, and they kept coming back, doing it again, and again and again and again in 16 different versions.
Earlier in that podcast episode he makes a good case for campaign finance being like the right to travel around 1:36:10 [3]. Have a listen, you might learn something. The embedded player on this page [4] lets you skip around the episode without subscribing to Soundcloud.
> How laws are sold to the public are not how they get applied. Nixon's 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, meant to regulate campaign finance, was immediately used to curtail speech critical of Nixon.
This is an argument against laws, corruption, and government. It is not, however, an argument against any particular position on speech. A capricious supreme court could revert to the speech precedent the US had for the first 150 years of it's existence, which we both presumably agree is flawed. Laws can be written and misapplied.
Neither of those things being possible suggests that, as a value, free speech maximalism is superior to free speech...almost maximalism. It's clear that you can have stability and discussion and support for fairly extreme ideologies under the more restrictive speech standards of Europe.
> This is an argument against laws, corruption, and government.
No, it's an argument for studying the history of law and understanding that some are good and some are bad. They don't come with a cover sheet saying so. You need to figure it out for yourself.
> Laws can be written and misapplied.
All the more reason to study them and give careful consideration to how they have been misapplied in the past. We're in agreement there.
You're a different commenter than above, so I'm not sure if your main point is to agree with them, disagree with me, or both, and on what exactly.
> It's clear that you can have stability and discussion and support for fairly extreme ideologies under the more restrictive speech standards of Europe.
I think any anti hate speech laws are more experimental than the American experiment. The point of free speech is to protect minority voices. It was championed in the '60s when the left needed it, and it rose from the ashes in the early 1900s after Comstock tried to surreptitiously-but-not-so-surreptitiously squash it. The censor never calls himself a censor.
> I think any anti hate speech laws are more experimental than the American experiment
The modern American jurisprudence on speech is fairly recent, as I alluded to above. There's tons of cases through the 18th and 19th century where the supreme court upheld blasphemy and obscenity convictions, allowed the federal government to censor speech, favor Christian religion and churches over others, and even consider libel a Crime.
As late as 1951 (Dennis v. US) the Supreme Court ruled that members of the US Communist Party could be imprisoned because socialist organizing was a threat. And it took 20 more years for Brandenburg to cement the modern jurisprudence, 200 years after the American experiment began, and only 50 years ago.
> No, it's an argument for studying the history of law and understanding that some are good and some are bad.
No, my point is what is socially acceptable goes beyond simply what is legal. And this is always and has always been true. Many laws can be used for tyranny. If you want to avoid the potential for tyrannical laws, you can't have any laws, and that doesn't work either.
Like again, this whole thing comes down to the fact that Western European countries (and the US!) have had more restrictive definitions of free speech for far longer than Brandenburg has been the law of the land, and they aren't tyrannical.
The concern that people have is that the definition of what is "extreme" tends to creep, in one direction or another, in western democracies. Perhaps that's a feature of democracy itself, from a certain point of view, but for example the nominal opinion in the US on immigration in the 1990s is not really that different than that of today's average Trump voter. Democracies tend to have short memories when it comes to their own history.
>...what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian.
What happens in democracies (or at least in the US) is that this just gets branded as "mis" or "disinformation", or worse a "conspiracy theory". A formulation I'm fond of is "this isn't happening, and it's good that it is", because it's a pattern repeated throughout political discourse. Depending on who is talking, something is either a crazy extremist conspiracy theory, or something we should all be cheering on.
> The concern that people have is that the definition of what is "extreme" tends to creep, in one direction or another, in western democracies. Perhaps that's a feature of democracy itself
It's a feature of humanity from where I stand. People crave both stability and change. Beating them over the head to force stability doesn't work so well, nor does changing too quickly. The idea of a system that encourages peaceful transitions is to find some balance. Of course, that balance can also be disrupted.
the Overton window basically. That's where the constant vigilance and discussion comes in, to keep open the possibility of moving the window. for example, I still hear a LOT about conspiracy theories, anti-vaxx, etc... even though I don't want to. It's basically two sides shouting as loud as they can that the other side is talking nonsense, just one side is the government that the majority of people voted for and support, so gets a lounder voice. Anyone equating how speech about covid restrictions or vaccinations was handled in most of Europe vs true authoritarian repression of discussion about changing governments in China, Iran, etc... is hyperbolic, disingenuous or ill-informed.
Societal totalitarianism is a very real concern. In its benign form it leads to quirky cultures and in its extreme leads to total suppression of any opposition to the zeitgeist, even without a fully authoritarian government. Unfortunately there's a massive fuzzy grey boundary between the two and it's up to the people of a country to course correct when they can, as getting back from a restrictive society is difficult.
For example, if you look at countries like Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, etc... what's illegal or repressed is any promotion of opposition to the government. This is plainly anti-democratic & authoritarian.
Whereas in a lot of Europe it is illegal to promote only extreme ideologies but apart from that the democratic discourse is as messy and varied as you'd expect it to be. (And due to variety of electoral systems I'd argue that political discourse in much of Europe is mush more varied than in places like the US.) We have countries swinging from left to right wing governments and even powerful political parties that started as far right wing or terrorist groups.
What we all see is how the balance can be tipped from fragile democracy to repressive authoritarianism e.g. Hungary.
Democracy is a constant effort, requiring constant vigilance. These are all discussions worth having, at least in good faith.