Why We Need to Call Out Free Speech Hypocrites

And why we need to bring back fairness, humility and compromise as core political values

Let's continue talking about laying the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in shared values. So far, we have covered compassion and respect for the objective truth. I think we need to talk about commitment to fairness and willingness to compromise next, because these are strongly related to both compassion and respect for the objective truth.

Today, both the left and the right clearly believe that politics is only about winning and 'owning' the other side. This has led to no respect for the notion of fairness across the board, both in terms of cultural and political debates, and in terms of how groups of people seen as associated with the 'opposite' tribe are treated in the real world. The problem with this is that, a society with no commitment to fairness can't have a marketplace of ideas with a fair playing field, by definition. This leads to an inability for the most sound ideas to prevail, and in turn, for a just order to arise as a result. Therefore, any order that results from an unfair playing field is necessarily going to be bad and oppressive in some way. Commitment to fairness is therefore necessary to produce good and just outcomes, and a sound order for society. This is how fairness is linked to respect for the objective truth, and ultimately to justice as well as the common good.

I would even go as far as to say that upholding fairness in the marketplace of ideas is a matter of morality. Morality thrives when people are able to pursue the truth, and to understand the truth, because we only know how to apply our conscience and our values to a situation when we know the complete and unbiased truth of a situation. When people don't fully understand the truth of a situation, they can easily come to the wrong conclusions, and support a wrong or even immoral answer to the problem. This is why, when people are pressured to bow to ideological untruths one way or another, to obey falsehoods imposed by political and/or economic threats, immorality and injustice will result one way or another. Sadly, this happens far to often in contemporary politics. Both the illiberal left's de-platforming and cancel culture, and the reactionary right's zealous use of state power to fight the culture wars, and to impose their agenda on the whole of society, are examples of using power to silence dissent or otherwise distort the marketplace of ideas, and hence suppress aspects of the objective truth that are inconvenient to their ideology or their agenda. This is the core reason why, as a Moral Libertarian, I have long held that I find both the illiberal left and the reactionary right to be morally repugnant.

Which brings me to my next point: people who are essentially for free speech for me (or my team) but not for thee (or the other team). Despite the theoretical increase in scrutiny and transparency in the online age, where everybody's record is open for all to examine, the number of 'free speech for me but not for thee' hypocrites are sadly at an all time high right now. Just look at what is happening out there: many of the self-identified 'free speech activists' who vigorously opposed left-wing cancel culture in the past decade are now silent about the Trump's administrations attacks on free speech, or worse, coming up with excuses to justify Trump's blatant authoritarianism. I'm frankly very angry at these people, some of whom I actually wrongly believed to be free speech allies at one point. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that some of the people who are rallying in support of the victims of Trump's crackdowns didn't have much to say about left-wing cancel culture, or worse, actively supported it. I'm saying this not to excuse the right's free speech hypocrisy, but to point out that the hypocrisy exists on both sides. Both of the aforementioned types of people clearly don't support free speech as a principle, they only support free speech for their own team. This kind of hypocrisy has sadly been made more acceptable by political polarization and tribalism, and even actively encouraged by online influencer culture.

I also want to talk about a closely related phenomenon: the increasing unwillingness to compromise across the political landscape. I believe the two phenomenon are ultimately linked by the common root cause of a lack of humility, encouraged by tribalism and the toxic online political culture. Unwillingness to compromise effectively leads to a 'winner takes all' mentality. Given that nobody alive in this world is perfect, or has perfect knowledge of everything, this logically has to lead to social outcomes that are oppressive in some situations and to some people. This, of course, is incompatible with a true commitment to compassion or justice. The reactionary populist right and its recklessly harmful policies are a good example of this. The Trump administration, feeling justified by the 'mandate' it won in last year's election, has set out to fulfill all of the wildest wishes of the toxic online right, not caring about how many people it is harming in the real world out there. This immoral course of action is, in turn, cheered on by that same toxic online right that demanded it in the first place, creating a dangerous feedback loop. Of course, this problem is not limited to the right either. The illiberal left's cancel culture activism is also actively encouraged by the online left, and it similarly cares only about 'winning' and 'owning', and not about actual people and their welfare. The common theme between the right and left versions of this phenomenon is the 'winner takes all' mentality, where people feel justified to openly oppress and harm those that they perceive to be on the other team, simply because they can. This is basically aggressive animal instinct that belongs in the jungle, not in any civilized society. If we let this continue, I fear civilization as we know it will come to an end sooner rather than later.

It is time to bring back the values of fairness, humility and compromise. As a society, we need to relearn to be fair towards those who disagree with us, to have humility in the face of disagreement, and to be willing to agree to disagree and to compromise. Important long-standing values like compassion, objectivity and justice can't survive without these values. More fundamentally, I fear that our civilization won't survive very long without these values.

Why the Far-Left's Model of Change is All Wrong

But that doesn't mean that all hope for progressive change is doomed

Recently, I have been talking a lot about promoting a 'progressive conservative' ideal. IF you want to know more about what 'progressive conservatism' entails, you can start by reading my 'Progressive Conservative Manifesto'. One of the biggest reasons why I'm talking about progressive conservatism now is because, in the face of the Trump-led reactionary right's assaults on long-standing civil rights, programs and conventions that are too liberal for their liking, I have come to the view that we must take a stand for what we believe, before it's too late. My other, more long-standing reason for talking about progressive conservatism is because, over the years, I've found that the left's model of change is actually a massive failure. Like I've said many times, it leads to the needless polarization of society, and the burnout of generations of young people, and also opens the door to dangerous waves of backlash. Indeed, these two things are clearly linked in the present moment: it is the backlash to the 2010s 'woke left' that has allowed the reactionary right to gain power, to be in the position they are in right now, to do the damage they are doing right now. My hope is that a program of progressive conservatism will solve both problems.

Before a progressive conservative program can actually move forward, it has to gain enough support. Some of the support is going to come from centrists, moderate libertarians, and genuine anti-woke liberals, all of whom were frustrated at the woke excesses of the 2010s, but even more worried about the reactionary right's authoritarian overreach under Trump. I count myself as firmly belonging to this category. However, we also need to pull people from the more progressive side of the political spectrum because, let's face it: right now, all the energy is with either those who identify as 'progressives', or the MAGA crowd, and any movement that can't accept MAGA-ism will have to find allies on the progressive side, if it is to grow. The reason why I am criticizing the left's model of change is because I want to convince progressives to come over to our side. I want to convince them to come over, because the far-left's model of change is flawed, and we have a better way to move forward, to achieve what they want. The rewards of having a better model of change will be, of course, in the form of actually successfully making things better, and also in the form of defeating the reactionary right.

I think the biggest problem with the far-left's model of change is that it wants to tear down the status quo entirely. This is counterproductive, because it is much harder to build something good from scratch. It also leads to massive backlash, because people don't like to see what they have always known get destroyed in the service of some arbitrary philosophical theory. What we should remember is that the backlash always falls most heavily on the disadvantaged minorities of society. This is why I actually believe that the continued pursuit of radical change using the far-left's model is actually immoral. Indeed, history doesn't contain a single example where this far-left model of change has successfully brought good outcomes, while it contains many cautionary tales as to the harms this flawed model could bring. That many progressives became sympathetic to this failed model in the past decade, despite its historical track record, was almost entirely because of the influence of postmodern critical theory, which itself is an objectively unsound worldview.

Rather than tearing everything down, I would argue that a better approach would be to make what we have better, by drawing on our long-standing values. Values like freedom, compassion, caring for each other, commitment to improving our understanding of the truth, meritocracy on a fair playing field, and so on, are all embedded within our collective conscience, but their application to the real world remains incomplete. The progressive conservative project seeks to more fully implement these values in all areas of our life. It therefore seeks to strengthen, rather than deconstruct, our traditional inheritance. Through this process, we can certainly advance civil rights, make society more inclusive of minorities and fairer for everyone, and so on. This is especially true, if we can argue against the politics of the reactionary right, on the grounds of these traditional values. This should be easy to do, given that the reactionary right clearly does not care about harming real life people, and does not care about science or truth either.

I believe the flagrant violation of our long-standing values by the reactionary right under Trump gives us a good opportunity to argue for a better world based on upholding these values. But we can only successfully do that if we truly leave the nihilistic ideologies of deconstructionist postmodernism and oppressor vs. oppressed identitarian critical theory behind. I think the choice is clear, as to which path we should take going forward.