OPINION

How hate wins

What happened in Charlottesville was terrible.

But our hysterical reaction to it, which has given the most despicable creatures among us vastly more influence than they deserve, might be more terrible still.

First, and most obviously, by producing a thoughtless, pell-mell rush to remove Confederate statues, as if a statue of Robert E. Lee was really what Charlottesville was all about.

Unlike many things for which the metaphor is invoked, in this case there really is a slippery slope--once headed down this path it is difficult to construct a decision rule that can stop us before destroying the Jefferson monument, renaming Washington, D.C., and even taking down the statue of Franklin Roosevelt (there was, remember, the ugly internment of Japanese Americans during World War II).

Since most of American history doesn't measure up to the standards of our social justice warriors, most of American history will have to go; the compulsion to cleanse and eradicate anything which anyone might be offended by will eventually leave nothing standing.

Even worse was the craven argument presented for removing such monuments, often, revealingly, in the middle of the night--that, as with the Lee statue in Charlottesville, they had become "rallying cries" for KKK and neo-Nazi types.

One recalls here that after Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans in a South Carolina church, Confederate flags came down all over the South and Wal-Mart and other retailers abruptly stopped selling them, as if a mere piece of cloth had really had anything to do with what some maladjusted, ignorant redneck had done. But through hysterical overreaction we had unwittingly granted that maladjusted, ignorant redneck vastly more influence than he deserved, and thereby encouraged others of his ilk to do similar things.

So, too, with the monuments: if the operative principle is that we must get rid of anything that neo-Nazis and KKK types decide to celebrate, what happens if they suddenly embrace Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Or take a liking to Wagner operas because they (mistakenly) think they contain Nazi sentiments?

In such precedents is found a formula for granting the barbarians in our midst the power to decide what elements of our history and culture we can keep and what we must get rid of.

The issue here isn't whether we should take down confederate flags and monuments, but the way we go about making that decision and when. But we have now allowed the Dylann Roofs and James Alex Fieldses to jerk our chains and control our public discourse.

Even more troubling than the unseemly, panic-driven scramble to tear down marble soldiers has been the way Charlottesville has added still further momentum to the ongoing war on free speech, with many people who should know better now arguing that the speech of white supremacist types should be banned as "hate" and their right to assembly revoked; that they are so appalling they shouldn't have the same constitutional rights as the rest of us.

But as Charles Cooke helpfully reminds us, there is no Nazi exception in the Constitution. To the contrary, the founders (and a string of Supreme Court rulings since) took the greatest pains to protect political speech, with such protections considered even more necessary for unpopular speech (like that spewing from neo-Nazis).

Cooke effectively summarizes the inherent circularity and subjectivity of the "hate speech" concept when he notes that "Hate is hate. It is not speech; it's hate. Sometimes hate is violence, even when no action is attached. How do I know, you might ask? I know because hate is, by definition, hateful, and that means it's not speech. And why isn't it speech? Because it's hate, and hate isn't speech. This is basic common sense, rejected only by haters."

The Mad Hatter illogic here should be visible to anyone willing to think, but in the hysteria and emotion after Charlottesville thinking has been in all too short supply.

Along with the impossibility of objectively defining "hate speech" comes the staggering danger in granting the government the power to suppress it. Under current circumstances, that would mean giving such power to a Republican Party that controls the vast majority of state governments and both Congress and the presidency.

So do progressives hell-bent on banning speech they find hateful really want to put Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions in charge of that project?

Finally, there are those who have used Charlottesville as a pretext to go even further, to endorse the use of violence against neo-Nazis and, inevitably, against other groups they dislike--there are, of course, genuine neo-Nazis and white supremacists out there (we saw them in Charlottesville), but such terms, like hate, are also sufficiently capacious to usefully brand a wider range of targets. For many on the left, anyone who disagrees with them is a fascist or Nazi.

While solace is found in recognizing that those advocating such measures tend to be wimpy armchair types who merely play at being street-fighting men and would likely be useless in an actual bar fight, there remains no excuse in a democracy under the rule of law for advocating political violence.

In the end, those who hate too much those who hate risk becoming them.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 08/28/2017

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