The Last Generation That Has a Say

-- By BriannaCummings - 09 Dec 2015

Introduction

This election cycle has been particularly troubling for me. I consider myself to be a well-informed voter; I read the paper, watch the news and see what the net has to say most days and even vote in mid-term elections. In doing so I find myself wondering; “were people were always this crazy?” or “is this a new kind of craziness?” I see the comparisons of Donald Trump’s campaign to that of Adolf Hitler and reflect on the sordid history and current predicament of my own people in the country and tell myself no there’s always been pervasive evil in the world. I tell myself that evil has always found a way to garner power and support. But the millennial in me still wonders would think have been the same in the past if the masses had access to information in the ways the current generation does?

24 Hour Media Cycle

Having constant access to news is both a blessing and a curse, we have the tools to be the most informed and knowledgeable generation at the least cost in modern history. The world-wide use of personal computer connected to the web has put the world at our finger tips, after all there is nothing Google doesn’t already know anymore. This is a blessing many of us (millennials that never lived in a world without internet) constantly take for granted. The use of personal computers connected to the web also allows independent journalism and blogging to occur without publication costs. This is key for the transmission of information needed for a number of revolutions currently underway. It is also important in the era of corporate sponsored news stations that often pick and choose what stories get coverage and what perspectives are presented. This is a curse, it is exceptionally easy to completely block out any media coverage that does not agree with our beliefs and views. Major “news” outlets such as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC can all cover the same event with such bias that it is hard to recognize the report are for the same event. Fox News has gone so far to the right that a commentator has to refer to the President of the United States as a pussy to be suspended from the air (only for two weeks though).

Being so ‘tuned in’ has made following this election nearly unbearable and were still eleven months away from Election Day. A majority of the candidates for president this cycle are particularly disturbing and frankly dangerous with their words. The twenty-four hour media cycle allows us to listen, share and retweet every insane thing that Trump utters of types. This rhetoric is exceptionally dangerous given that even when making objectively false statements Trump and Co. double down and claim to be the victims of the liberal media when called out by fact-checkers.

Trump is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Many dismiss Trump as ‘crazy’, ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ and unfit to run for office as his antics continue. However, he maintains a strong following and continues to rise in the polls, with each sound bite more outrageous than the next, while liberals and moderates anxiously wait for the moment when even his supports decide he’s gone too far. (I’m losing hope that this day will ever come). Without a doubt Carson, Cruz, Rubio, Fiorina and Huckabee have said things equally outlandish and unsupported by facts as Trump with Christie, Graham and Paul close behind. It is truly concerning with Jeb!Bush and John Kasich have become the ‘voice of reason’. The democrats have been having a fairly uneventful primary and have essentially become the party of boring. Hillary has let her hawkish side show a number of times this fall but not many have noticed or got too caught up in the latest GOP snippet to remember.

The latest slew of ignorance from presidential candidates surrounds Syrian refugees and Muslims more broadly. After last month’s attacks on Beirut, Lebanon and Paris, France several Republican presidential candidates and governors called for on the U.S. to stop granting Syrians refugee status. Others just wanted to stop granting refuge to Muslim Syrians and would allow Christian Syrians to seek refuge here. Some governors went as far as claiming they would not accept Syrian refugees in their state, which is laughable because they have literally no standing or authority to deny placement of refugees in their state. But, this is no laughing matter as the general public (non-law folk) is most likely unaware of this fact. Allowing such Islamophobia rhetoric to flood the media (TV, digital and print) is dangerous to say the least.

Hate Speech vs. Free Speech

The Hate Speech readings made me reflect on the false dichotomy of hate speech vs. free speech that has been created in the United States. Countries around the world manage to have free speech while still punishing hate speech (See Canada), but the U.S. continues to struggle with this. The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression but there have been limits put on free speech in our countries history. For instance it is well known that you cannot scream “FIRE” in a crowded movie theater when there is not a fire. I think the same principle should apply to political candidates, especially those running for President (the highest office in the land). Presidential candidates should not have free reign to incite fear and violence by spewing hate speech while hiding behind free speech. This is exactly what they are doing by advocating religious tests for entrance into the United States and calling for open discrimination of Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim.

Our Last Chance

If we as Americans allow this propaganda to take hold of our government and political process we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of Germany during World War II. I am not sure if the U.S. or the world will be able to recover from another Holocaust in the age of nuclear, biological weapons and large-scale complex terrorist organizations such as ISIS/ISIL. This generation must take our place in history and ensure that this does not happen on our watch.

I read this as an opinion piece. It doesn't seem to me to aspire to convey new information. I don't think it's self-consciously engaged in presenting an argument, in which there are steps from point to point in a chain of reasoning. I don't find any passages in which the objections that someone thinking differently might raise are acknowledged and addressed. I think the particular opinion at the center of the essay is that the democritization of technology that has led to a very great democritization of opinion—as the equalization of individuals and media entities has proceeded in the Net—has lowered the tone of public debate. This seems to you particularly evident in the rhetoric on one side (not your favored side) of the two-party contest for the Presidency now ramping up.

In the first place, I'm not sure the history bears you out. I wonder if you have ever had occasion to read the newspapers and campaign oratory of, for example, 1864. Barack Obama, much vilified as he is, is not more vilified than was Abraham Lincoln. Mr Trump's form of anti-immigrant rhetoric is grotesquely distasteful in this nation of immigrants, but if you think about the "Know Nothing" anti-immigrant politics of the 1850s---which Mr Lincoln, Salmon P. Chase and other ardent anti-slavery Whigs carefully danced with and around in order to co-opt Know Nothingism into an anti-slavery but not anti-immigrant Republican Party---I think you will find yourself heartened to discover that we have been through, and survived, this form of xenophobia more than once, without "the Internet."

Your discussion of hate speech regulation would suit better our work next term, in the "Computers, Privacy and the Constitution" course, but let me say here that I don't think you've captured the real dispute between the First Amendment and hate speech regulation. The issue isn't First Amendment absolutism. The issue is whether more speech or less speech is the correct response to upwellings of hate or sedition or other anti-social communication. European hate speech regulation comes from statist origins in regimes that always used censorship, from the adoption of printing onwards, to shape opinion. American attitudes in the direction of "more speech" as the remedy for bad speech begin from the absence of any precedent anti-liberal tradition in American culture, as Louis Hartz famously noted more than fifty years ago. Many ways of expressing the American view could be cited, but this one seems most important to me:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

which comes from Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address. If one adds from the same speech this:

[H]aving banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

one has, I think, conveniently located in one place the key propositions from which a response to your opinion might be fashioned, and from which, at any rate, you might take the creative tension necessary for another, richer, draft.

To chime in here, I think an issue to consider is whether the rise of a "personalized" Internet degrades the quality of the democratic forum. There is a lot of evidence out there that the manner in which most users acquire information online -- through social media sites, for example -- tends to reinforce rather than challenge existing belief systems. It can be viscerally satisfying to read news you like and agree with, so users who are not vigilant risk falling into partisan wormholes where they never confront opposing ideas.

I do agree with the above proposition that the best response to hate speech is to force it to stand side by side with reason and truth. The proper question then, in my view, is how do we ensure that hateful and erroneous belief systems are exposed to material that will defeat them.

-Shay

I think discussion of the solutions law can, or should, bring to the problems you identify. While Trump is a disgusting man, I think he is red herring for this essay. Not much at all of what he says in new in any meaningful way. Does it make sense to focus on the presidential candidates? Electoral politics are certainly interesting with regards to the modern news media, but there have long been hateful demagogues, as you note with reference to e.g. Hitler. In fact, your reference to "other holocausts" might undermine your pondering whether there is something unusual about this cycle in particular.

Re the final paragraph: what propaganda? Is this term to refer just generally to hateful things that candidates say? Would their victory ensure that those outrageous proposals come to being? How would "our generation" stop this from happening in terms of the law?

Textual edit: "have been limits put on free speech in our countries history." --> "countries" should be "country's."

- Gregg

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