Where is Christopher Rufo now when the university needs saving, not from left-wing professors with zero real social power but overt assaults from the American State? Or is Donald Trump really invested in the academic integrity of American universities? That must be the explanation behind his 400 million dollar cut to Columbia University imposed because of its purported failure to combat “anti-semitism.” One might be forgiven for worrying that the demand that the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department be subjected to “academic receivership for a minimum of five years” is an overtly totalitarian attack on the independence of academic institutions from the state. But I guess I am one of those left-wing professors who control everything, so what do I know?

So in order to alleviate my ignorance I ask again: where are the right-wing zealots who decry attacks on free speech on campus? Free speech is the genus, academic freedom is the species: who amongst the conservative crowd that brays regularly about how DEI and wokeness are destroying independence of mind is going to step up and denounce the naked use of state power to suppress critical thought? Or is the use of state power only wrong when it affects one’s own side? In which case, there are no longer political principles but only raw power. If there is only raw power then there is no problem with the suffocation of dissent say, by arresting and imprisoning Mahmoud Khalil, one of the organizers of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia. Rufo and his gang portray themselves as radicals bravely swimming against the stream, but their silence now shows them for what they really are: hypocritical worshippers at the altar of state power.

That is all we will hear from them: hypocritical cheerleading for the state whose power they supposedly want to keep out of the minds of people. The arrest of Khalil is alarming for a number of reasons– he did not engage in any criminal acts nor is he charged with any; he did not incite others to violence and he is not a member of any proscribed terrorist organization. What he did do was protest the overtly genocidal threats made by the Israeli government to kill or expel the entire population of Gaza, the actual killing of over 45 000 people, and the complete destruction of the infrastructure of life-support. In short, what he did was to use the First Amendment to the purposes for which it was written: to articulate political arguments, to voice objections, to lodge protest against grave injustice, to testify that war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, and to mobilise opposition to them by using his voice, not weapons. For these political acts he was arrested in front of his pregnant wife, threatened with the cancellation of his green card and deportation, and imprisoned.

Freedom of speech, just watch what you say, as Chuck D once rapped.

Time and again we are subjected to right-wing stunts like Qu’ran burning or wildly offensive jokes designed to enrage the wokies as object-lessons in the importance of free speech. Book burning in any form is anathema to free minds, and as for jokes, they need to be taken as jokes and laughed at or tolerated, as per one’s tastes. Chacun a son gout: if you don’t find them funny, don’t listen to the comic. Free speech gives people wide but not unlimited latitude to offend, but it is not fundamentally concerned with protecting a space for profane humour. Freedom of speech is not first and foremost an aesthetic principle, although it is that too (and sections of the left needs to heed the universal implications of the principle). Freedom of speech is first and foremost a political principle that protects public space for the free, i.e., not-state controlled- dissemination of political arguments, including arguments about the need to mobilise political movements, criticise existing governments and policies, and organize against them and in favour of alternative parties and priorities.

As Hannah Arendt might say, the right to free speech is an eminently political value. Politics is the use of the power of mind and argument to organise and direct collective energies towards the end of protecting and extending the space for democratic power. Where politics ends, coercion and violence begin. Lacking convincing arguments to refute the critique of Israeli tactics and strategy in the struggle against Palestinian self-determination, the Netanyahu government is on a global crusade to convince the governments of purported constitutional democracies to criminalise argument. They have found a willing executioner in the Trump administration.

Such attacks are not only attacks on a particular constitutional principle, they are direct attacks on democracy itself. Democracy is much more than parliamentary chatter. It involves at the deepest level collective control over the resources, goods, institutions, and relationships upon which need-satisfaction and the free-development of our affective, intellectual, creative, and relational capacities depend. As I have put the point in other works, genuine political democracy is possible only in democratic societies in which all major social institutions, including economic institutions, are collectively controlled and governed by majority decision following free deliberation amongst all parties affected by the decision. But parliamentary chatter– deliberation, in its highest form– is very much central to the practice of democracy. Consider any democratic institution, from the Athenian agora, to the Great Law of Peace, to early soviets, and even the American Senate– the world’s greatest deliberative body, purportedly– and you will find at its core open-ended talk. In principle, parties to political deliberations argue for as long as it takes to arrive at a mutually agreeable compromise. In practice material necessity imposes time limits. But time limits and decision by majority vote are distinct from ideological constraints on the content of allowable speech. Trump and his Heritage Foundation handlers are openly and explicitly threatening to destroy opponents rather than convince them through superior reasons. Trump goes so far as the argue that criticism of his policy in the media is illegal.

Funny conservative sense of heritage. Aren’t conservative the ones who regularly warn of liberal experiments with ‘social engineering?” If Khalil’s arguments are as egregiously bad as his captors think, or Trump’s policies so much better than his critics argue, they should be easy to refute in the one case and support in the other, no? And if America was once great, why was that? Slavery? Jim Crow? The Trail of Tears? No country worships its constitution like America. The hermeneutic effort expended, especially by conservatives, to discern the intentions of the “Founding Fathers” makes Talmudic scholars look lazy and superficial. Where is the Maimonides who can explain this to me, a perplexed philosopher who wants to know how respect for the Constitution, whose First Amendment reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” can be squared with the arrest– without criminal charge– of a protester exercising exactly the powers granted him by that amendment or to threaten the “free press” with criminal sanction for criticising the government of the day?

The student encampments were dramatic efforts to get the American government to listen to the voices of the dying people of Gaza. To claim that they are anti-Semitic is nonsense. Is opposition to Trump anti-Scottish American? Was opposition to Jim Crow anti-white? Here again we see the pernicious effects of the identity politics to which conservatives claim to be dead set opposed. The attack of the right to employ the freedom of speech to protect criticism of Israel or Trump is based upon the conflation of the state of Israel with Jewish identity and Trump’s policies with being American. If that is not identity politics, what is?

Of course, many, many stupid and naive things were said about “the resistance” and Hamas’s tactics in some of the demonstrations and encampments. Freedom of speech is the right to make good and bad arguments equally. The antidote to bad argument is better argument, not prison and deportation. Despite right-wing hyper-ventilation, the encampments were not violent: these were not Weather Underground fools who thought that burning ROTC buildings was going to hasten the anti-imperialist revolution. Keffiyehs are not Kalashnakovs. They were simply gatherings of engaged young people– many Jewish– exercising their right to freely express their opposition to the catastrophe unfolding before the eyes of the world. Again, some failed to properly understand Hamas’s cynical complicity in provoking the invasion, but youthful naivete is not criminal, and voicing abstract support for a liberation struggle is not equivalent to membership in a terrorist organization.

How quickly history unravels. In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama claimed that political history was over; liberal-democratic institutions represented the high point of the evolution of political rationality. They would inevitably sweep the world in the wake of the collapse of Stalinism. He appeared to be correct: the world was swept by liberal-democratic revolutions, but today those institutions have largely betrayed those who struggled for them. The betrayal was not caused by the ideas behind liberal democracy: rule of law, separation of powers, formal equality of all institutionalized in constitutional rights of citizenship, peaceful transfer of power. Those are all elements of any practically workable democratic society of any significant size. They are frames to be built upon, not rubbish to be cleared away. No, the ideas did not betray those who fought to build liberal-democratic societies, it was capitalism and the substantive powerlessness it imposes on the majority of people, a powerlessness manifest as monstrous and growing material inequality and the impotence of social democratic and liberal forces to protect people’s lives and livelihoods. That material damage has undermined the liberal-democratic state from within and created a legitimacy vacuum being filled in state after state by right-wing populist nationalists. Contrary to Hegel and Fukuyama, the Spirit does not move inexorably forward and the future, at least in the near term, looks a whole lot worse, politically, than the period that stirred Fukuyama’s hopes.