Misunderstanding your own predilictions for power is dangerous

“Hate speech is back in vogue and hate speech is the bedrock of building Nazism”. Er…No.

That’s a dangerous inversion of what our fragile democratic rights are built on.

Accusations of US Nazism are floating around now that Trump has won the 2024 US Presidency, and with Elon Musk flailing his arms at a rally.

I read this week of one correspondent claiming that with Trump 2.0 elected, hate speech is back in vogue and hate speech is the bedrock of building Nazism. A picture of 1933-38 Nuremburg ensued.

I disagree. I disagree even though hate speech exists and (properly defined) I deplore it. Here’s why.

I focus here not on left or right politics, but on avoiding totalitarianism from either side. The big names of my childhood in genocidal totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century (with maybe around 2 billion people blighted by living under it) are Hitler (which many seem to associate with right-wing), and Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot (left-wing). I went behind the Iron Curtain and saw some of it.

They all built power, not by creating a society where political disagreement is respected as vital, but by expanding what could not be said.

The problem with attacking ‘hate speech’ is that it’s about this – what cannot be said. Rather than using the ‘90%’ test – i.e. defining the horrible excesses fully and accurately in a way that 90%+ of the population agree – the receptacle ‘hate speech’ always becomes an ever-expanding tool of left-wing totalitarians. Anyone disagreeing with anything they say is told, “That thought or disagreement is ‘hate speech’”. Much like a two-year old just demands what they want, irrespective of the rights or needs of others.

As an example, in the UK, Islamophobia is about to be ‘defined’ – deliberately indefinably and broadly – and put in the aforesaid receptacle of ‘hate speech’. Any legitimate criticism of the State’s view and policy on matters even loosely connected to ‘Islamophobia’ (eg questioning immigration policy, housing policy, tax policy, benefits policy, schools policy) will become illegal. The problem is, anything can be connected to it, if the political masters want to see it that way. Any dissenter can be accused of phobia and lose their livelihood, or be criminalised at will.

This power is so, so attractive to the unconscious psyche of those who have the will to control others.

The 20th Century shows that totalitarianism is created by:

1. an undemocratic elite drawing support and power to itself from abusing sympathy for, and exaggerating, just causes
2. taking power (or getting elected), then
3. banning criticism of itself (eg through widening ‘hate speech’ laws or ‘anti-State’ speech laws), and then
4. banning the election cycle (or making the election cycle irrelevant with constitutional reforms that emasculate Parliament).

So no, banning ‘hate speech’ is a reflexive, myopic response that is not the answer to the emergence of Nazism; but is, in fact, a key facilitator of it.

What to do instead then? I’ll have an attempt, in an area where left and right often do not (cannot?) reference each other…

Hate speech from both sides is awful (eg racism from the right; demonisation and livelihood-removal from the left).

Democratic society as a whole relies on the populous using their ‘free speech’ to call out the ‘hate speech’ for the majority to condemn. This makes hate speech unpopular and impotent, in anything but narrow, closed tribes. And the condemnations of, rather than the banning of, hate speech in a free speech society rightly propel society towards the evolving moderate view, and away from the extreme one (much as the language of racism in the UK declined significantly between 1960 and 2020, as most 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants attest).

So racism etc declines significantly over time in a liberal, ‘free-speech’ democracy, and despite those who abuse its freedoms. The problem is it takes time, and some can’t accept that.

Free speech based on individual rights and including protections (slander, libel, harassment, fraud, defamation, indecency) is not a panacea or immediate, it has imperfect outcomes on the way. Some people, and at various times of life, are more vulnerable than others to nasty one-off speech (any more is already harassment and actionable), and are more likely to receive it over time. But the alternative to free speech is terrible for everyone.

What is not true empirically is the assertion made in some DEI programmes – that unless we have an attitude of silencing unpalatable language, then microaggressions lead to bullying leads to violence leads to genocide. The experience of the UK 1960-2020 has been the opposite. We were and are imperfect but we were getting there. Surveys support this view.

So call out bad speech where possible (or if you can’t, at least do not feed it) and the damage is reputational to the speaker. This gives the vast majority, including in minorities, the best chance of a great life over the generations to come. It requires the basic Christian ethic of “love thy neighbour as thyself”, to minimise the asymmetry of the effects of ‘hate speech’ on the vulnerable.

In conclusion then, no, to think ‘hate speech’ is the pathway towards Nazism is an inversion of reality. Because the definition of ‘hate’ gets diluted and expanded grotesquely for power. The definition of what is ‘hateful’ won’t stay in its box in any State which is full of flawed humans who don’t know their own limits.

The populous taking responsibility for maintaining its freedoms, is the only way to avoid totalitarianism from either side.

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