Years ago, it became apparent to me that decades of dark free speech (DFS) in America (lies, slanders, unwarranted opacity including silence in the face of inconvenient questions, irrational emotional manipulation, crackpot reasoning and conspiracy theory, etc.) was the single most important factor in polarizing and radicalizing the American political right. In essence, DFS has been normalized and accepted by millions of Americans, especially those on the political right.
Driven by years of relentless, often vicious DFS, American right wing politics has morphed into an authoritarian, anti-democracy wealth and power movement. The old pro-democracy Republican Party morally degenerated into what is reasonably called the Trump Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party, or some variant, e.g., the Trump Lies, Tyranny & Kleptocracy Party. At present, most of the TTKP rank and file openly support the ideological shift to far right extremism and authoritarianism. Thus, the movement is not confined to just the elites who created and drove it.
Of course, what I see as moral degeneration into deep rot is seen by most of America’s political right as a good and reassuring moral resurgence in the face of the allegedly tyrannical socialist and communist pedophiles, pervs and monsters that control the Democratic Party.
One can wonder, if DFS is so bad for democracy, why not ban, censor and/or tax it in an attempt to reduce the harm it continues to cause to democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, civil society and respect for inconvenient fact, truth and sound reasoning? All or nearly all tyrants throughout history have relied at least moderately on DFS. Dictators and wannabes like Putin, Xi and DJT all rely very heavily on DFS. If they have the power, they ban speech that criticizes or questions the tyrant or his lies or party line generally.
There are some major objections to trying to regulate DFS. One is obvious. If laws ban or tax DFS, tyrant will use those laws not to defend democracy, but to kill democracy and replace it with some form of usually kleptocratic tyranny operating under the rule of the tyrant, i.e., corrupt autocracy, corrupt plutocracy and/or corrupt theocracy.
The trap here is that with no restraint on DFS, it can be used exactly it has been used in the US to gather enough power to threaten and seriously damage democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. All of that has already happened in the US. So, a society awash in DFS like the US currently is winds up being damned if it regulates DFS and damned if it does not regulate DFS.
If I understand them right, in about 400 BC or thereabouts, Plato and Aristotle argued over DFS and the grave threat to democracy it posed. Plato gave up on democracy and argued that a benign philosopher king should to rule over people to keep the tyrants and demagogues at bay. Aristotle disagreed and said democracy (as it existed in his time) was best, but he could not come up with a way to keep the tyrants and demagogues at bay. Plato’s benign philosopher king would morph in due course into a demagogic tyrant. That constitutes a fatal weakness in his proposed solution.
Imagine DJT getting re-elected and finishing off American democracy and its rule of law. Would he be benign? Nah, it would be Clobberin’ Time for DJT. He would get his revenge against people, laws and democratic institutions he hates, while he refills his bank accounts and then over fills them by any means he has at his disposal in his fun-filled role as America’s Kleptocrat-in-Chief.
DJT enthusiastically starts
his 2nd term!
Another major objection to trying to control DFS is that what are facts, truths and sound reasoning to one person can be lies, falsehoods and crackpottery to another. The power of radical DFS has extended to creating mindsets in tens of millions of Americans where objective reality is challenged and belief in it distorted, not by lies or crackpottery alone, but also by social pressure. I posted about this in 2021, including these comments taken from a research paper:
The meaning of post-truth goes beyond being a fool or a liar — “in its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd's reaction actually does change the facts about the lie (...) what seem to be new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself.” In this regard, although political lies have always existed, “post-truth relationship to facts occurs only when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than truth itself. Thus, post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not.”
For politics, a lot of the rhetoric and assertions of facts, truths and reasoning are wrong or flawed, but that cannot always be easily proven or proven at all. Inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning tend to be kept as opaque or hidden as possible by people and interests that want secrecy. That is why authoritarians in power hate transparency and get rid of as much of it as they can.
One could then argue, that trying to restrain DFS amounts to tyranny via thought control. After all, who or what is qualified to say what a fact, truth or sound reasoning is? One could argue that this alone is a lethal problem for trying to fight back against DFS. Well, maybe not.
In defense of disincentivizing DFS in politics
DFS is usually quite effective in persuasion, or at least deflecting inconvenient issues and/or confusing those who are not persuaded. This is why negative attack ads are so popular in political elections. The politician who sticks to appeals to facts and reason alone usually lose elections.
Is it even possible to defend against a sustained DFS attack? Apparently it is in Finland. That country has learned how to fight off torrents of Russian DFS by teaching children and adults to be wary of it and resist the divisive emotional appeals usually present in DFS. I posted about that in 2019. That post also included comments about how authoritarian Texas state TTKP legislators were aware of the danger of teaching children defense against the dark arts. They put the kibosh on teaching public school children to defend themselves against DFS. That is how deep the moral rot has set in with the American authoritarian radical right.
That tells me there are ways to fight back against DFS without creating a new pathway for demagogic authoritarians to turn the defense of democracy against democracy. Another pro-democracy policy that seems to work against authoritarianism and its extremism has been tested in Australia. There, voting in elections is mandatory. Unexcused non-voting gets a tax penalty. Voting does not mean voting for anyone or anything on a ballot. It means returning a ballot, even if it is left blank as a protest. The effects of that policy appear to be two things. One is reduced extremism because politicians have to appeal to a broader audience than what many face in US primary elections. The other is that the voting population seems to be a little better informed, apparently because of some feeling of a need or civic duty to know at least a little something about what they are voting on.
Facts & objectivity: One last thought. Empirical facts are mostly objective things. They can be fact checked if the information exists and not kept hidden. Truths are more subjective, e.g., calling DJT an authoritarian will be seen as true by some but false by others. Still more subjective is “sound reasoning.” That activity is infused with personal biases, morals, family, group and tribe loyalties, concern for self-esteem, innate mental heuristics, etc.
But at least asserted facts that are fact checkable is a way to disincentivize DFS without offering authoritarians a way to attack democracy and political opposition. A news source that makes false fact assertions or defames people, and then refuses to retract, could be taxed more than sources that make mistakes but publicly retracts. That idea has been attacked as thought control policing and tyranny.
But is that really the case? When people act based on false beliefs they formed due to lies about facts, e.g., the COVID vaccine is toxic and worthless, they have had their thoughts and behavior controlled by the liar. Sometimes there are lethal consequences from false fact beliefs, e.g., acting on the anti-vaxxer lie the duped, unvaccinated person gets infected and dies, but would have survived if they had not believed the lie and gotten vaccinated. Who is the thought policeman here, the liar or the person trying to disincentivize lies? Is objective fact something worth fighting for, or is it too dangerous to try defending facts beyond laws that are in place now?
The most objective conflict is
facts vs false facts
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