“This Is the Third Red Scare:” Historian’s Warning for U.S. Free Speech

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And Fara Dabhoiwala, welcome to the show.

 

FARA DABHOIWALA: Thank you, Walter.

 

ISAACSON: Most recently in the United States, we’ve seen with some government encouragement, a network taking off the comedian Jimmy Kimmel. What do you make of that in terms of free speech rights?

 

DABHOIWALA: Oh, it’s, it’s terrible. It’s an abuse of governmental power. It’s done in a way that really also shows up the the power of the private media to shape public discourse. In this case, private corporation acting in its own interests rather than in the interest of the public, has decided commercially and politically, it’s sensible to bow down to the current administration. And that’s a terrible precedent for independent sources of news for independent voices which is one of the foundations of a flourishing democracy. We need to have independent news media that stand up to power not just bow down to it. 

The other thing about this that it’s really remarkable and dangerous is that the FCC — like regulatory bodies in other spheres, the the Federal Reserve the FTC there are many of them — are all bodies that are set up rightly in the public interest, to regulate something that is very important to our community. It’s not about individual rights, it’s about the public interest. And they’re supposed to, all these bodies are supposed to operate on a nonpartisan basis or at least a bipartisan basis, and not to be swayed, especially not to be swayed, by government dictates. And that system is now being attacked and undermined by the current administration. 

It’s extraordinary that a single person at the FCC basically, even though it’s the chairman, can make these kinds of pronouncements and wield this kind of power. That’s a complete abuse of what the FCC is supposed to be doing and what it stands for and why it was set up. 

 

ISAACSON: You once had your own experience of being — having your free free speech suppressed. Tell me about that, and what did that make you think?

 

DABHOIWALA: Well, I had many experiences because I wrote a book on the history of sexual attitudes in the West. And that’s a, a topic on which, you know, conventions in different cultures differ about what you should say in public and what you shouldn’t. But in particular, I went to China 10 years ago after my book was translated into Chinese. And first of all, my, my book was censored. The Chinese have different views on what you can say about sex even in history. That was trivial. But what really profoundly shook me was going to China and seeing that the communist dictatorship there had put in place this extraordinary system of censorship whereby everything that anyone said in public was continually monitored, scrubbed clean and forced to toe the party line. So that is clearly an oppressive dictator — dictatorial system that tramples all over individual rights of expression.

And I came back from that visit knowing that this was horrible, knowing that I believed in free speech and wanting to find out where that idea came from. Why do we all believe in free speech? And yet we can never agree on what it means within our cultures, across our cultures. And I’m afraid the bad news is that that is—because it is an essentially incoherent, weaponized concept. And it has been ever since it was first invented 300 years ago. 

The good news is, as my book shows, people have been puzzling over this for 300 years and come up with a whole lot of really interesting additional ideas, tools, theories of how to think about it that we really need to remember and pick up on, because our current mess is partly ’cause we think about this in a very simple way as: Free speech means just the individual, right, to say whatever you like. And censorship is always a bad thing, and it always comes from government. Those are too simplistic a set of presumptions with which to approach this very complicated, very interesting, very important right and ideal. 

 

ISAACSON: So you’ve got the book on free speech. Let’s go back to the beginning. To what extent is freedom of speech related to freedom of religion?

 

DABHOIWALA: It’s, it’s tangentially related. But there are many ways of arriving at the idea of free speech and, and freedom of religion is just one of those. It happens to be important in the English-speaking world, because the idea of freedom of conscience, which is the core of freedom of religion, comes out of the reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries. And then people developed the idea, which is radical at the time, that you should be allowed to speak freely on spiritual matters without being persecuted or put to death. Because ultimately human beings don’t know the truth about salvation, and so it’s better to discuss this and let God decide whether you are right or wrong. 

But that’s a very limited idea of free speech. The modern idea that we now take for granted is really about political speech. (02:59): It’s the idea that every individual has the right to speak out on matters of public affair — matters of public concern. And that’s a, that’s a development that doesn’t take off until the early 18th century. And it starts first in England, and it starts there because it’s a moment of communications revolution. 

Like our own day, freedom of speech is always becomes a hot topic when people are living through new kind of communications circumstances. And, and the, the media revolution of the 18th century is the revolution of print. So that’s where it begins.

 

ISAACSON: Well, the First Amendment, gives it as an individual right. It’s not saying that, Hey, free speech will get you closer to the truth or be the best of things. It’s, this is your own individual autonomy to think, to worship and perhaps to speak as you want. Isn’t that what’s different about the American Bill of Rights, is that these are individual rights for moral reasons, not just for the good of society?

 

DABHOIWALA: That’s, that’s not, that’s not, Americans would love to think that, but no. That’s this case with pretty much any legislation, enshrining freedom of expression and liberty of the press around the world from the 18th century. It’s the most popular constitutional right across the globe from the 18th century when people start writing down constitutions. 

But you do point to an important failing of our modern thinking more generally about freedom of expression, which is we tend to think of it as involving, on the one hand, the individual with the right, and on the other hand, the government with the power to censor. And already in the 19th century, people around the world, including in the United States, had come to see that that’s an insufficient way of thinking about free speech. 

Because you also need to look at the third very important power, which is the mass media: Who amplifies ideas, which ideas are more widely heard, more easily heard, which voices are suppressed. And from the 19th century onwards people started to see that the mass media are A) very powerful. First newspapers, then broadcasting of various kinds. And, and that this power was not generally just there to advance the truth and promote the rights of citizens. Newspapers exist and broadcasting was founded to sell advertising and to make money and to increase the power of the owners of these platforms. So out of that comes a very strong tradition, including in the United States, of thinking about the First Amendment as also something that involves the rights of the public more generally, and especially the rights to truthful information. 

By the thirties and forties in the United States. Most people looking at the First Amendment have come to see that that’s the key thing they need to focus on. How can we make the marketplace of ideas better able to support democratic deliberation? (16:00): And for that people start to experiment with ideas like public broadcasting, like regulating media. The FCC comes out of that. All sorts of arms length bodies that are supposed to be nonpartisan, not in the hands of the government, but, but trying to make sure that these very powerful entities amplify and moderate public discussion in ways that advance the truth. 

If you look at the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights drawn up under Eleanor Roosevelt, the right to truthful information is part of how freedom of expression is defined there. And that’s still the case in most other countries around the world.

 

ISAACSON: Early on in the United States, even before the First Amendment, there was a sense — and this was true of England as well — that even if you printed something that was true, if it undermined society, if it undermined the government, it could be called seditious — seditious libel. And that was fought against both in England and the United States. 

 

DABHOIWALA: So seditious libel lies in the, in the eye of the beholder. That’s always the case. That’s always the problem with defining freedom of speech in very balanced ways, that ultimately you end up with something very subjective. That’s why everyone hates and, and finds it impossible to make watertight laws because it’s, you know, communication is exquisitely contextual. It’s not just about what you say, it’s about who is saying it, about who the audience is, about all these things that we in normal communication can navigate. But once you start to make laws that makes it very difficult. Laws are based on simplicity, transparency, everyone should be treated the same, and that becomes then a giant mess. And we see that around the world today.

 

ISAACSON: So, isn’t there a problem with laws that try to restrict my own individual free speech?

 

DABHOIWALA: Laws should be as minimal as possible when it comes to speech. The only thing that I would say is that we do need to acknowledge that speech can cause harm, not just individual actions, but for example, the spreading of lies and untruth or libels of whole groups of people. We know from history that this can cause genocide, that it can really damage communal relations in all sorts of ways. And that’s a problem. That’s always been a problem. 

And so if we have guardrails in place — not against defense, not against people you know, having their feelings hurt, but against real harm. If we need to, if we try and define real harm, then it’s legitimate to have laws against that. And that’s what people are trying to do around the world. The real problem at the moment is that public discourse everywhere has become taken over more and more by American online social media companies that now monopolize discourse, and they are operating from different principles. They’re operating, first of all, from American principles that are more maximalist, more libertarian, but secondly, they’re also operating — as all mass media in the past, past have, not in the public good, but to make money. And that is a different kind of incentive from —

 

ISAACSON: Do you think that you should force, say online media companies to act in the public good instead of just acting for commercial purposes?

 

DABHOIWALA: I think that the minimal thing that we should understand is social media companies are publishers. They’re the most powerful publishers the world has ever seen. They’re constantly amplifying certain messages, suppressing others. They are censors on a, on a vast scale. So the minimal thing that we need as a society to require is transparency about how they’re doing that. Simple transparency. What are their mechanisms that the algorithms are using to amplify certain messages and voices and suppress others? And then, are they applying these consistency — consistently? 

That’s all. That’s not censorship. That’s just requiring some kind of responsible transparency about their huge power to shape public opinion in the world today. And that’s what people in Brazil are trying to do. That’s what people in the European Union are trying to do with the legislation that’s being put forward there. That’s not censorship. That’s an attempt to hold these giant corporations to account for the power they wield in shaping public discourse.

 

ISAACSON: Let me, let me quote something from your book, what you say, “A paramount purpose of laws and governments has always been to safeguard the public interest.” But perhaps I’d say if you went back to the Bill of Rights, which is exceptional in the world, it’s not the way other countries do it, that the paramount purpose of the Bill of Rights was to safeguard the individual’s liberty, not just the public interest.

 

DABHOIWALA: I think those two things are always in tension. And America has a wonderful, noble, proud tradition of individual rights. The, the First Amendment has a great history as safeguarding individual rights to political speech and political dissent and attacking the administration — all the things that are currently being trampled by the current administration. But on the other hand, you cannot have a society that works if you don’t agree on certain ways of living together. The public good is a very difficult thing to define, but we do need to define it in order to live with each other. 

And so a minimalist understanding of what the public good might involve, for example, not being allowed to spread untruth and lies about really dangerous things, or that if you are engaged in political debate, you may not in bad faith, just make it up as you go along. I think that would be helpful in just thinking about what free speech should mean and in policymaking as well.

 

ISAACSON: When you talk about maybe we should balance free speech with what’s good for society and political reasons, do you worry that when a party you may not like is in power, they can use it? In other words the Attorney General Pam Bondi saying things like, we should crack down on hate speech, which slightly echoes a little bit of what you said earlier in the show, or the head of the FCC saying, we should look at this.

 

DABHOIWALA: I think what we’re seeing in the United States right now is, first of all, an outrageous, hypocritical crackdown on free speech and on the accepted interpretation of the First Amendment. That’s absolutely a problem. But it’s a much bigger problem. We’re seeing really an attempt to undermine independent sources of authority and to silence voices and opinions that the current administration doesn’t like. And that’s a really dangerous undermining of democratic process in general. 

So absolutely at this point, we should be shouting from the rooftops that this is illegitimate. This is not the, the tradition that we as Americans are proud of. And ironically, the strong protections of the First Amendment that we currently enjoy, come out of the first and second Red Scares when something very similar happened. The idea that communists were beyond the pale, that their voices should be shut down without question, that homosexuals didn’t deserve to be in government. All these kind of progressive anti progressive government attempts at censorship in the 19 teens and twenties and 1950s led to the First Amendment protections for political dissent that we currently enjoy.

So this is really the third Red Scare, and its attempts to not just shut down particular voices, but shut down opposition to a would-be autocrat who is following the playbook that we’ve seen in other countries in Hungary, in Turkey, in India whereby you don’t just suppress voices that you don’t like. You try and cripple independent sources of authority, judges, institutions like universities, the independent working of scientists. And I think this is much more than just an attack on free speech. And we should be aware of that.

 

ISAACSON: Fara Dabhoiwala, thank you so much for joining us.

 

DABHOIWALA: Thank you very much, Walter.