An Urban's Rural View

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

That's what moms taught kids of my generation to say when we received verbal abuse on the playground. Don't let them get you down, our moms said -- and if they do, don't let them know it.

They're only words, moms told us. The concept of hate speech as a form of violence had yet to be invented. For actual violence, the moms' mantra was, "If they hit you, hit 'em back." Having been blessed with an unusual first name, I had my share of opportunities to engage in fisticuffs.

But I was in grade school in the 1950s. For many decades now, moms must have been singing a different song. Kids seem to have been taught that they're entitled to feel "safe." If they feel unsafe, someone should shut up.

Please understand, I detest bullying and support efforts to discourage it. What worries me is that kids raised this way have lost enthusiasm for freedom of speech. The First Amendment line defining suppressible speech seems to have been redrawn in the minds of many young people.

Old fogies like me still believe the courts were right in 1978 when they let neo-Nazis march and display the swastika in a Chicago suburb with a large Jewish population.

Hateful that speech surely was, but the courts ruled it protected by the First Amendment.

Only speech aimed at provoking "imminent lawless action" is unprotected, the Supreme Court has ruled. The neo-Nazis' right to demonstrate was supported in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, which at the time was headed by a refugee from Nazi Germany, Aryeh Neier.

To many younger Americans, hate speech should be legally quashed -- or even physically squashed. That was underlined in a survey Kevin Wallsten, a professor in California, conducted last year.

He showed Americans eight politically divisive statements and asked them to pick the one they found most offensive. He then asked whether using violence to stop a speech was "never," "rarely," "sometimes" or "always" acceptable. (https://www.wsj.com/…)

"The bad news," Wallsten wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, "is that the story changes dramatically when looking across generations. While 93% of baby boomers and 86% of Generation X say violence is never acceptable, only 71% of millennials and 58% of Generation Z do."

It's tempting to blame this on academia. No one is surprised when Princeton professor Fara Dabhoiwala published "What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea," a book decrying the harms the First Amendment allows. (The New York Review of Books' review took the book's arguments seriously but faulted the author for failing to acknowledge the harms the amendment prevents. See https://www.nybooks.com/…)

Tempting as blaming academia is, though, Wallsten found "no meaningful difference between the attitudes of 18- to 26-year-olds who are and who aren't enrolled in college."

There doesn't seem to be a big left-right split on political violence, either, even though the left thinks the right favors it and the right thinks the same of the left. According to surveys by the nonprofit More in Common, Americans on both sides overwhelmingly reject it. (https://moreincommon.substack.com/…)

Something interesting that More in Common found in a recent survey is that the more time people spend on social media, the more likely they are to agree with the statement, "I feel that violence is sometimes needed to advance political causes in the U.S. today." This tends to support Wallsten's generation-gap thesis. Statistics show young people tend to spend the most time on social media. (https://www.statista.com/…)

Many journalists are First Amendment absolutists. In their view, no speech should be in any way restricted. If they had their way, there would be no libel laws and demonstrators would never need a permit to block the streets.

I'm not in that camp. To me, no right is absolute. When my right to do something conflicts with your right to do something else, society needs to weigh the importance of each right and draw lines.

I am, though, a near-absolutist. Freedom of expression is such a fundamental right in a democracy that the line drawers should give it wide latitude. Libel laws since New York Times v. Sullivan exemplify this kind of line drawing. Defamation suits can still be brought, but they're far more difficult to win than they once were.

America needs speech to be mostly free. That means we need to remember what moms told my generation: The answer to offensive speech isn't to ban it. It's to develop a thicker skin.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

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