patrick.net

Can liberals be tolerant? Should they be? Liberalism is about liberty, surely, and liberty means freedom for people to say and do – more, or less, to be sure – as they choose. Freedom of speech, in particular, might seem at the heart of liberalism. Liberalism is surely identified with ideals of political freedom and self-government, which pre-suppose freedom of speech and debate on public questions.

Yet in recent years there has clearly been a counter-trend, if not a wave, of opposition to free thought and free speech from people and institutions usually accounted liberal. Universities and colleges – supposedly citadels of free inquiry – are an epicentre of this: “islands of repression”, as they began to be described some decades ago, in what was then – perhaps optimistically – thought to be, and sure to remain, an off-campus “sea of freedom”. The jargon of campus intolerance is now familiar: micro-aggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, “no-platforming”. Speakers are shouted down or physically attacked at campus forums, or disinvited before they arrive. Ideas, views, and facts that challenge or differ from now-compulsory campus opinion, “liberal” opinion, are condemned as “hate speech”. As one chastened liberal writer observes, these are not “just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over”, nor “a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the deligitimization of dissent as a first-order goal”.