Nadine Strossen: Keynote panel on free speech and the left
Introduction to our ongoing conversation series: Free Speech and the Left
Nadine Strossen is past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),1991-2017. She is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School, Senior Fellow of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and author of the book HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. Her latest book is: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press fall 2023)
Transcript:
Nadine Strossen: Conference Keynote
Nadine Strossen reviews the history and importance of free speech as she welcomes participants and viewers of Plebity's Free Speech and the Left conference.
Nadine Strossen is past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),1991-2017. She is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School, Senior Fellow of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and author of the book HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. Her latest book is: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press fall 2023)
*Note: Participation by any panelist does not indicate their agreement with or endorsement of the opinions of any other conference participant. The presence of any panelist does not mean Plebity endorses or shares their opinions.
Transcript
Mark: Welcome, Nadine.
I want to say first, before anything else, how grateful we are for you to come here and talk to us today about free speech in all its different angles and why it's so important, and especially why it's important in relation to our conference, which is the purpose of our chat here now to introduce the Plebity Free Speech on the Left conference for June 2023.
Nadine: Mark, it's just wonderful to be in conversation with you and with all of the participants in this really important conference. I was so excited when I learned about Plebity. Your website motto is just perfect for me. It cried out to me, if I may quote it, if you're a leftist who believes in free speech, you aren't homeless. So as somebody who is both a political liberal, a bleeding heart liberal after all of these years, and a so-called classical liberal who believes in enlightenment values, including free speech and robust discourse, I felt right at home on this website.
And I'm so honored to welcome two equally important groups of participants in this groundbreaking conference, those who will be speaking about a range of substantive issues and thereby illustrating free speech in action, and also endorsing the principles of free speech.
The second equally important group of participants are everybody else who is listening, engaging in respectful and engaged listening. Thank you for your commitment to and exercise of freedom of speech and dialogue and discourse.
Mark: So Nadine, you've written a lot and you've said a lot of things about free speech. And you said that without free speech, nothing else is possible. So I wonder if you could just elaborate for us a little bit about that.
Nadine: More important than my making that observation, Mark, so many philosophical, spiritual, academic giants throughout history have made that point. I mean, when we think of the historic figures in science and the arts who have been so committed to free speech that they were willing to give up their lives, going all the way back to Socrates, who poisoned himself rather than giving up freedom of speech and discourse with his students. You know, one of my favorite Supreme Court justices who was so eloquent about free speech, Louis Brandeis, made a really good point when he said freedom of speech serves both intrinsic values and instrumental values. It is and it promotes the intrinsic value, you know, good in and of itself to each human being as an essential aspect of exploring, developing and expressing who we are as individuals. You know, Descartes, a great philosopher, famously said, I think therefore I am. Justice Anthony Kennedy for the modern Supreme Court said the right to think is the beginning of freedom and speech is the beginning of thought.
So we put those two ideas together and we say, I speak, therefore I am. In addition, speech has an unsurpassed essential instrumental value as the vehicle for communicating with other individuals, other members of our society, with those who in our democratic republic seek to represent us and who are to be held accountable to be the people who wield sovereign power.
Not only is free speech essential to democracy, but it's essential to promoting any cause.
Indeed, if you are opposed to free speech, you need freedom of speech in order to be able to express your opposition.
And so that leads me to the question about, from the left, from the point of view of the left, it seems to be forgotten today in today's climate that how important free speech has been for the very people, the very groups and the very movements that the left has always sought to ally itself with and to promote as its most core functions, the social justice movement, civil rights movement, any marginalized or minority group has always needed free speech. So I wonder if you could help remind us about that.
Nadine: That is a very important point, Mark. And it is sad that it is forgotten that throughout
American history to this very day, by the way, I'm using the United States as an example, but the same thing is true throughout history and around the world as has been documented by many historians. But let me stick with our own country for lack of time. Since you talk about movements on the left end of the political spectrum, let me just reel off kind of in historical order the causes that absolutely depended on a very robust concept of free speech, robust enough to extend even to hate speech and disinformation and extremist speech and terrorist speech, because those detracting adjectives, those stigmatizing adjectives have been marshaled against every cause for social justice and human rights throughout our history, starting with the abolitionists, proceeding through the suffragists, all of the anti-war activists and advocates of pacifism through the World Wars and the Vietnam War, advocates of women's rights, advocates of reproductive freedom, civil rights, as you mentioned, LGBTQ rights, every single one of these causes was especially dependent on free speech and especially thwarted by censorship.
And it is no coincidence that leaders of all of those movements have always strongly supported free speech, strongly opposed censorship, even censorship of unpopular speech, such as hate speech or disinformation. Why? Because they knew that no matter what the rationale was, no matter what the term for this stigmatized speech was, it was predictably disproportionately wielded to silence them.
You know, you go back and you read cases from the abolitionist era, the women's suffrage era or the civil rights era. And these terms that we now hear deployed by the left in the hope or the advocacy of suppressing speech that they disagree with were wielded by people who were opposing civil rights, who were advocating abolition. They said that the abolitionist speech was insulting, was traumatizing, was causing them emotional distress, was defamatory and the same thing throughout the civil rights movement. So I do want to repeat that no matter what your views or values are all across the ideological spectrum from left to right, you do depend on free speech. But that certainly is true for those on the left end of the political spectrum. And to this day, Mark, there are many government officials and others who are denouncing various left of center speech as being hate speech, as being terrorist speech, as being extremist speech.
Those charges, every single one of those charges has been made, for example, against Black Lives Matter advocacy.
Mark: So those are the principles around free speech. And I wonder if you could just say a few words about the idea behind this conference. So we're promoting free speech, but we're promoting it specifically as a core value of the left, kind of a reminder to people. But we're not explicit, we're not trying to be a cheerleader rally for any, for leftist ideology, we really want to just demonstrate free speech and open exchange of ideas. And I wonder if you might just be able to say a few words about the conference, the idea behind the conference.
Nadine: The idea behind the conference, which is so compelling to me, and why I am so honored to participate not only as being able to deliver these introductory remarks, but I really look forward to listening to and engaging with and learning from everybody else who is participating in this conference. It is so compelling, Mark, because not only is it endorsing the intrinsic and instrumental values of free speech in general, but it is emphasizing the intrinsic and instrumental values for those of us who happen to have political values that are to the left of center.
And for those of us who care passionately about liberal or progressive public policies, we really have a special reason to defend free speech and to ensure that it is respected and protected robustly, because that is not only our best hope, but our only hope for advancing our ideological agenda.
We've seen that throughout history, movements for social justice and for human rights have a very long legacy in this country. You know, certainly the abolitionist movement goes back centuries, even movements for women's equality and reproductive justice and gay rights, you know, they began at least in the 19th century. It's no coincidence that they did not take off, did not get off the ground and make progress until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. Supreme Court robustly protected free speech, even for ideas that, let's face it, for most of our history, were deeply controversial.
And especially for those of us who are advocating ideas that do not have majoritarian support, let us not forget, even though he was not ultimately reelected, Donald Trump got the votes of, you know, about 50% of the people in our country who voted. So we can't count on majority support for a liberal public policy agenda.
Therefore, we especially need the freedom to advocate as vigorously as we can, even against those who are going to denounce our ideas as hateful and hate it. So that, to me, is the purpose of this conference, coming together to confer, to educate, to reinforce and reaffirm and encourage and galvanize each other and to launch continuing conversations about these incredibly important issues.
Mark: Well, thank you so much, Nadine, for ringing the bell on the conference. And as you said, we're hoping that this will turn into an ongoing series of conversations. And we hope that we'll be able to welcome you back again. Thank you.
Nadine: I would love that. Thank you so much, Mark, and congratulations on this really historic event.
Mark: Thank you very much, Nadine.