Liberal Speech

I was talking with a colleague at the Cato Institute about the over 300 student visas the Trump Administration revoked. The students targeted, many of whom have been violently arrested by immigration police, are said to have protested Israel’s bombings of Gaza. One of the students, interviewed on TV, has fled to Canada, fearing that she would be sent to prison in Louisiana, or worse.

My colleague wisely observed that one of the most powerful ways that the U.S. has inspired the Liberty Movement worldwide now for two-and-half centuries is that visitors have seen with their own eyes that speech here is quite free. When students from countries in which speech is not free come here, they go home with liberal ideas. Jesus says in Matthew 5:16, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” Our Civil War 1861-65 was in part a demonstration that the U.S. could be a “light unto the nations.” It could show, as Abraham Lincoln put it, that a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could succeed—that the sneering tyrants would not have the satisfaction of seeing it “perish from the earth.” The tyrants are still hopeful that the U.S. experiment in essential liberalism will fail, and even some Americans are working to make it fail.

The record of the government of the U.S. on this score is of course far from perfect. Governments, with guns, are dangerous. What is unusual in the modern world is that there are any such lights of liberalism, however dim. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a portion of which never got off the books, and is now being revived by the Administration, made it a crime to criticize the government. During our long history of Black slavery, abolitionists were regularly silenced— by contrast, not in Brazil during the early 1880s, and so Brazilian ended slavery without a civil war. In the early 1900s in the U.S. the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman, a naturalized citizen, was repeatedly imprisoned for advocating for birth control. In 1917 she was imprisoned for two years for opposition to the drafting of soldiers in World War I. During the post-War “Red Scare” in the wake of the Russian Revolution, she was deported to Russia—which she left in 1923 because of its tyranny, living for the rest of her life in Britain, France, and Canada. Those three countries were also light-stands of liberty of speech. The Russian Prince Peter Kropotkin ended up in Britain, writing there the entry for Anarchism in the 11^th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet also in Britain the philosopher Bertrand Russell was imprisoned for six months in 1916 for opposing the War. The light of liberty flickers everywhere it is lit.

To achieve silence and serfdom the state does not of course have to imprison everyone who criticizes it. Three hundred students might do the trick. When judges ruled against the immigration officials, they quickly revoked the revocations.

But of course, as we say in English, you can’t un-ring a rung bell.