This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.

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You can buy "When the Clock Broke," now available in paperback wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there.

I’m very grateful to say that When the Clock Broke received an extremely thoughtful review by Will Davies in The London Review of Books.

In case you missed it, my piece on the Charlie Kirk assassination was republished by The New Statesman.

I appeared on the Time to Say Goodbye podcast to talk about Charlie Kirk and the lost art of debate.—

Time To Say Goodbye

Charlie Kirk and Do We Need Better Debates with John Ganz

Hello! This week we talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, what he meant to the GOP and the right, in general, and the space he occupied within the broader political discourse. Our guest this week is John Ganz of Unpopular Front…

Listen now

4 days ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Time To Say Goodbye

Additionally, Jamelle Bouie and I have launched a weekly politics podcast on our Patreon. We’re going to have relatively short (half an hour or so) commentary on the week’s big stories.

In a piece from last year worth revisiting, Jay Caspian Kang considers the importance of free speech to a radical left and wonders if the First Amendment is ever enough. I want to highlight this part:

I may now be guilty of another flaw in contemporary free-speech debates, which is how frequently the debaters criticize others for not caring about the right things. This reflex, with its attendant charges of hypocrisy, makes up the vast majority of modern free-speech discourse. If you are outraged by police repression of pro-Palestine encampments, you will be asked what you would say if a pro-Trump rally had been shuttled off campus. If you stand up for a conservative speaker who has been deplatformed by chanting students, you will be asked to offer the same defense for someone who’s lost a job on account of a social-media post that was sympathetic to the people in Gaza. The spirit behind such tests isn’t wrong. The defense of free speech should be viewpoint-neutral, and many people—including quite a few elected officials—are hypocritical about such things. (Consider Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, who signed a campus free-speech law in 2019, in response to the deplatforming of a few conservative speakers, and then turned around and brought in what certainly appeared to be excessive force against campus protesters in late April of this year.) But the discussion around free speech has become mired in these hypotheticals. What should be a lively and malleable conversation about the law and what it protects has instead devolved into a series of online show trials, polarized along familiar political lines.

I think Kang is pointing to a more general problem in contemporary political understanding, which is the inability to distinguish form and content. For instance, in the recent debate about Jimmy Kimmel, there has been a lot of dismissal of the seriousness of the event because Kimmel was irrelevant or unfunny, or that it demonstrates liberal hypocrisy. That last charge doesn’t just come from the right, but also from leftists who are embittered that liberals did not stand up sufficiently for people who spoke on behalf of Palestine. In some cases, this type of objection is bad faith intended to throw up cynical chaff and confuse the issue, but, in other cases, I think people feel they are making a trenchant critique of unexamined prejudices. But it often seems to me that people have trouble judging what’s particularly serious about the case in front of them—government suppression of speech—or recognizing that there’s political value in joining others in a cause. I think either with malicious intent or innocent dismay, this kind of “whataboutism” contributes to the poisoning of the public sphere with cynicism. In public life, worry less about whether someone is a hypocrite than about whether what they are saying now is good and worth supporting. Maybe they’ve seen the light! It was once a commonplace of civic life, but now apparently a forgotten one that these basic liberties affect all of us.

This is less a substantive point about the present than an antiquarian curiosity, perhaps, but Kang’s reflections about whether or not those shouting down speakers were exercising their own rights to free speech or were acting as censors reminded me of how disruption of public speakers was understood in the mid 19th century to be legitimate “speech,” even when they got extremely rowdy and even violent. Norms around what’s considered legitimate speech change. From a piece I wrote several years ago on the Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849:

A certain amount of rowdiness among theater goers was tolerated and even understood to be a democratic right of the audience. As the author of a pamphlet describing the Astor Place Riot helpfully explains, “The public and magistrates have been accustomed to look upon theatrical disturbances, rows and riots, as different in character from all others. The stage is presumed to be a correction of the manners and morals of the public, and on the other hand, the public has been left to correct in its own energetic way, the manners and morals of the stage.” Freedom of speech was understood to extend both ways — to the audience and the players.

Jay writes, “This means that free-speech radicals need to reject the premise that a certain set of words should be set aside as ‘hate’ and prosecuted as crimes. Words are not violence.” I think I sort of have the opposite view but with the same practical consequence: language, insofar as it changes the world, is always akin to violence. It’s an argument I tried to make in my recent piece on Charlie Kirk’s assassination and previously, but free speech does not contribute to civic peace or mutual respect; it also menaces, oppresses, persecutes, and ostracizes. And it can incite and cause public panics. As I’ve tried to argue for years, free speech creates conflicts more than it resolves them. “Free speech absolutism,” if we are to take it seriously as a term, would admit no exceptions for libel or incitement. Such a situation would devolve quickly as persuasive speakers to convince large enough publics—mobs, if you like—to swarm the people they’ve maligned. That’s “cancel culture,” which few seem to realize is a result, not an abrogation of free speech, down to the First Amendment right of private institutions to set their own agendas. Or rather, free speech taken to its extreme will necessarily involve the eventual violation of the rights or dignity of others—silencing requires a lot of noise. It’s a paradox we try to deal with piecemeal by restrictions on speech in the case of legal exceptions and norms of civility. But it is much healthier if we can see in public how and why people are being cowed or shouted down. We can extend our sympathy and support to them and thereby lend their cause power. If these decisions are made secretly in high councils of state or corporate boardrooms, we no longer live in a free society.

Thomas Jefferson said, “The basis of our government’s being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.” Now, I’m sure a learnéd Early Americanist will come along and tell me how I got this all wrong, but before the pedants descend, I think there is a certain interpretation of the present where often it seems we have more “newspapers”—broadly understood a chaotic media sphere—than “government,” but note that Jefferson also says “every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.” Among the civic skills sorely lacking now is basic literacy.