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Notes -
Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
In a world where
then obviously the winning move is to suppress your opponents speech. But this proves too much - obviously the winning move is to go full Sulla, execute your opponents, steal their stuff, keep half of it and use the other half to reward your supporters, and use the temporary lack of opposition to amend the Constitution to permanently install your preferred policies. This doesn't happen because all factions in real-world politics rely to varying degrees on the support of normies who care more about the fate of the country than about their preferred faction winning.
The more serious issue about "is speech suppression tactically wise" is that empirically movements which don't support free speech can't stick to a free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee policy, and end up suppressing their own internal debate as much as they suppress the enemy. Whether it's the Nazi Night of the Long Knives, the various Communist purges, McCarthy turning on right-aligned institutions like the army, woke cancel culture purging far more lefties (whether for heresy or just mis-speaking) than righties, political movements which start suppressing speech mostly end up turning speech suppression from a weapon against the outgroup to a weapon for resolving intra-group personal beefs. And then you have a culture of fear which gums up your own internal decision-making processes and you end up doing something self-destructively stupid like Arische Physik, Lysenkoism, or defunding the police.
Liberalism didn't just win in the debating club, it also won at Hiroshima. There might be a reason for this, and I think resistance to self-destructive purges is a big part of it.
The problem is the fate of the country often depends on who does win. In large parts of American society there’s been a huge and growing quiet withdrawal from certain demographics that even the Brookings Institutions has published books about, simply because the people steering the helm of the cultural ship excludes and doesn’t partake of the vision of society that would include these people. You won’t get people to participate if they feel there’s nothing in it for them. That’s why it’s so imperative that your side win out. Because if the other side wins, you don’t just lose, you lose everything, including a reason to keep trying.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people because ideology isn’t always relevant to most of what people had to do to get along with their daily lives thousands of years ago. And information also had a much shorter range and traveled much slower.
A society can often only please one party at the expense of another losing out. It’s why every society that exists on Earth, liberal or not, consists of winners and losers. Effective ones can figure out a way for people to make do with their unhappiness or until a political pressure valve allows them relief of their anger and frustration, which is difficult to manage. But it’s better than a liberal society that tries to please all parties involved because a society that tries to please everyone will end up pleasing no one in the long term.
Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.
His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.
It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he personally lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope. Taking the L may be the best move.
Here's the fun epilogue: Two generations later, Augustus Caesar pulled a reverse-Sulla. Augustus realized that the office of Tribune was so powerful that it was the only office he actually needed to hold in order to rule Rome with an iron fist. He kept all the forms of the Senate in place, but he turned every office from Quaestor to Consul into powerless ceremonial roles he could use to reward his supporters while he himself ruled as a 'mere' Tribune.
Sulla weakened the Tribunes to shut the common people out of power, whereas Augustus weakened everything except the Tribunes to shut the Senate out of power. Unlike Sulla, Augustus' 'reforms' actually stuck.
The thing about the Senate is that it held almost no legal power at all. It was basically a club which every notable Roman was a member of. It had power as long as its informal methods of influence worked: elected public officials had to align their values with the Senate norms or they would be badmouthed and never win any important election. It was their version of "the Cathedral".
When political outsiders realized they could bypass the Senate by dialing up their populism without violating the letter of the Roman law, the whole republican system started crumbling. It took them a hundred years to get from Tiberius Gracchus to Augustus, but
Israel in 4BC had no mass communicationRome had no mass media, let alone social media.The actual heck are you talking about? The Senate had almost unlimited power through the Republic and well into the Empire (in theory if not in practice). The Senate could declare the Senatus Consultim Ultimum to suspend the constitution and grant the Consuls unlimited power, which Cicero used to execute a high-ranking Senator. The Senate could appoint a Dictator. The Senate appointed the governors of provinces. The Senate could declare someone an enemy of the Republic. The Senate could declare war.
To be clear: Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus usurped all that power, but they did it by packing the Senate. Julius Caesar added 300 of his supporters to the Senate, including non-Roman Italians and Gauls. This is like if Trump added 10 diehard loyalists to the Supreme Court and told them how to vote on each case, and someone came along 2,000 years later and said "the Supreme Court held almost no legal power at all." The Senate had lots of power, that's why Julius and Augustus spent so much time usurping it!
It was not a legal power, the difference is subtle: they were not saying, "by the power of the Senate, this man is above the law". They were saying, "the members of the Senate have agreed to never prosecute the man for his actions in the service to the Republic". And since every public official was a senator, this approach worked. It's like the blue wall of silence.
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