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December 19 - December 20, 2024
Despite the horrific consequences of his supporters’ violence—and the criminality of his post-election behavior in other respects—Trump’s speech was protected. He didn’t explicitly call for violence and he did caution his fans to protest peacefully.
Politicians must be encouraged to speak openly and passionately to their constituents, not deterred from doing so. Policing and criminalizing politicians’ speech—even speech riddled with lies—would do a lot more harm than good.
America is backsliding with its approach to speech. Today, more and more people are trying to silence voices they disagree with.
“There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities.”
Wasn’t a university supposed to be a place where free speech was respected? Wouldn’t a free marketplace of ideas help students learn? That was the whole point, I thought. The hostility to opposing views was truly perplexing.
It was also odd to me that brilliant people like Von Blum and Valle were so clearly biased in some instances. (As I learned later and examine in Chapter 6, bias among highly intelligent people is common.)
As long as everyone is treated and valued equally—which is essential—serious questions about human differences should be invited and respected, not silenced.
Many others have been punished for legitimate political speech, too. (San Francisco’s school board even cancelled—it’s true—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson by wiping their names from schools because of “ties to racism” and “dishonorable legacies.”)32
Harvard is the crown jewel of America’s higher education. It shapes the minds of America’s brightest students, and its professors are influential thought leaders. Google dominates the flow of online information. By adjusting its algorithms it can—and does—fundamentally alter what billions of people see and know about the world.33 And the New York Times, more than any other institution, sets the agenda for the national political debate. These three titans fundamentally shape the contours of America’s public square. For them to punish speech that, while controversial, is essential to a free
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The way to counteract speech you don’t like is to explain why it’s wrong. Silencing speech and canceling speakers is deeply counterproductive
Censorship can just as easily muzzle important truths as it can silence subversive lies.
“Independence means voluntary restraints and discipline, voluntary acceptance of the rule of law” Mahatma Gandhi
THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM The worst such tradition is the two-party political system.
George Washington, for example, warned against having only two political parties: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.”
John Adams, for his part, considered a two-party system a grave threat to the republic: “[A] division of the republic into two great parties … is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil.”
In 1992, for example, independent presidential candidate Ross Perot got 18.9% of the popular vote.
While the Democrats still have rational and sober-minded leadership, the party’s radical progressive wing is far too influential. The wing’s positions in areas like free speech (cancel dissent), law enforcement (defund the police), national defense (a trivial concern), and federal spending (deficits don’t matter)—to name a few—are unmoored from empirical reality.
The Republicans, meanwhile, are an unfathomable train wreck. Led by two-time President Donald Trump and energized by a band of nihilistic zealots in the House of Representatives, the party stands for little more than causing trouble. Traditional Republican leaders are aghast at what the party has become. Two-time Republican Attorney General William Barr, for example, said, “I think the historic problem we have is that Trump is a demagogue who is turning part of the Republican Party into a howling mob. And they have to start considering that acting just from impulsive anger and fury is not the
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America’s representative democracy depends on Americans believing in and adhering to the Constitution.
Americans must believe in the Constitution, as enacted, because a central, agreed-upon set of overarching rules is a precondition to a civilized and cohesive society.
America’s Constitution, legislation, and judicial opinions set forth laws on paper. But respect for the rule of law—in people’s hearts and minds—is the necessary precondition for a legal system to work.
McConnell said. “All we are doing is following the long-standing tradition of not fulfilling a nomination in the middle of a presidential year.” (Author’s emphasis—remember those words.)
Then came the decisive blow. Sitting justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a liberal) passed away in 2020, just a few months before the presidential election. Ginsburg was well into her eighties and had been encouraged to resign several years earlier during President Obama’s first term, when the Democrats controlled the Senate. She refused. And Senate Republicans did what Senate Republicans do: they flip-flopped. Confirming a justice during a presidential election year suddenly wasn’t a problem. And in strode another conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, to replace Ginsburg.
Thus, three instances of happenstance—Bush v. Gore, McConnell’s betrayal, and Ginsburg’s refusal—placed four new conservative justices on the nine-person court.
For better or for worse, America’s Supreme Court shapes the contours of the separation of powers, federalism, free speech, abortion, gun rights, voting rights, criminal justice, environmental regulations, and so much more.
In May 2022, the court overruled Roe v. Wade.46 A bare majority of five conservative justices shattered a fifty-year-old precedent on abortion—perhaps the most divisive topic in American politics.
And they didn’t stop there. The very same week, the conservative justices struck down a New York gun regulation, construing the 2nd Amendment to give Americans the broad right to carry firearms in public.47
right in the middle of a national crisis of gun deaths.
Respect for judicial review and the finality of court decisions is central to the rule of law.
But this won’t last if the court sacrifices its long-term legitimacy to satisfy short-term judicial cravings.
CAPITALISM Another essential tradition of the American experiment is capitalism. A market-based economy with strong privacy rights is a core feature of how America works.
When Hamilton took the reins at the Treasury the American economy was teetering on the ragged edge of post-war insolvency. He nationalized the debt, which bound the states together economically, and created capital markets that have supported American prosperity ever since.
While many of American capitalism’s negatives have softened with time (at least domestically), two huge scourges remain. The first is inequality.
But America’s excessive level of inequality poisons the body politic. Hundreds of billionaires (some with a net worth well above $100 billion)50 shouldn’t coexist with millions of people struggling to find food and shelter.51
American capitalism’s second big negative is environmental harm. Capitalism has an inherent trade-off: it brings an abundance of goods to the market, but it degrades the environment in the process.52 Large companies cut down trees to make paper; drill to excavate oil; pollute the air to deliver packages; warm the planet as a result of farming cattle; create non-biodegradable plastic to package merchandise; contaminate water to manufacture goods.
For example, as Harvard professor Steven Pinker explained in his book Enlightenment Now, in 2011 almost all “American households below the poverty line had electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a stove, and a color TV. (A century and a half before, the Rothschilds, Astors, and Vanderbilts had none of these things.)”
While some amount of inequality and environmental harm is inherent in capitalism, the depths of these problems are flaws in the American version of capitalism—not capitalism itself.
Echoing detractors of American government, critics of American capitalism often thoroughly enjoy the fruits of the system while bashing its flaws.
Data from around the world confirm capitalism’s positive net impact on humanity. Economic growth rooted in free markets and liberalized trade—two core features of capitalism—has lifted over a billion people out of poverty since the late twentieth century.53 The Department for International Development’s 2008 report Growth: Building Jobs and Prosperity in Developing Countries cites several examples of this miraculous progress:
Extreme poverty has plummeted from about 90 percent of the world’s population to about 10 percent.
In key measure after key measure, human flourishing has increased globally since America’s founding.
Around the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the trend line started reversing. This didn’t begin instantaneously on January 1, 2000. Not everything was great before then; not everything is terrible now. And the trajectory may again return to being positive. But around this time, as the internet began its intrusion into daily life, the causes of America’s decline started to take hold. A national addiction to social media, rampant tribalism, and America’s flawed political structure all combined to turbocharge irrationality and, in turn, degrade and destabilize the body politic.
“Within the character of the citizen, lies the welfare of the nation” Marcus Tullius Cicero
American democracy is backsliding in the twenty-first century. The root cause is the combination of three factors. First, political tribalism that enflames age-old cognitive biases. Second, brand-new social-media platforms that transform how people publish, consume, and process information. And third, long-entrenched structural deficiencies, like the two-party duopoly, that distort the US political system.
The polarized political debate, in turn, turbocharges over-stimulated tribal biases with partisan falsehoods (e.g., Trump colluded with Russia to hack the DNC’s email servers), gross caricatures (e.g., Hillary Clinton is a crooked felon), and abhorrent stupidities (e.g., Barack Obama was born in Kenya).
And they will eventually disintegrate if the American people continue to ignore them while fixating instead on short-term political battles. A nation is, indeed, little more than the hearts and minds of its people. And a big part of why America isn’t working is because Americans have stopped caring about how it’s supposed to work.
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t” Robert Benchley
Humans lived in tribes for most of our history. The bonds of tribalism are thus deeply hardwired into the human psyche. Tribalism makes us loyal to and biased in favor of fellow members of our own tribe. In the process, it distorts our thinking, overriding facts and data. And it makes us biased against outsiders who we dislike and perceive to be a threat.
About four-in-ten Americans who have married since 2010 (39%) have a spouse who is in a different religious group, compared with only 19% of those who wed before 1960 … When it comes to politics, a 2016 Pew Research Center survey found 77% of both Republicans and Democrats who were married or living with a partner said their spouse or partner was in the same party.”60
The essence of tribalism is to be biased in favor of your tribe and against another tribe.
