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The Left Needs Free Speech

2021; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dss.2021.0046

1946-0910

Katha Pollitt,

Law, Rights, and Freedoms

The Left Needs Free Speech Katha Pollitt (bio) When W.W. Norton decided to cease distributing Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth after several women accused Bailey of rape and other out-rages, I called up my local bookstore and reserved a copy. When Amazon stopped selling When Harry Became Sally, which argues from a conservative point of view that it is not possible to change your sex, I went to Alibris.com and bought a used one. I would have bought the Dr. Seuss books withdrawn from distribution by their publisher, too, but I was too late: the few copies for sale online are going for hundreds of dollars. That these books had become "controversial" made me more curious about them than I otherwise would have been. I'm a grown-up, I thought to myself; I can make up my own mind about them. These books were taken out of circulation for different reasons. Bailey's book was discontinued by the publisher because of its author's alleged wrongdoing. The Dr. Seuss case involves the business group that owns all his rights. When Harry Became Sally is just about one bookseller's right to choose its wares, but it's a bigger deal because of Amazon's size: its sales account for more than half of all books sold in the United States. What these cases share—along with the successful drives to get Hachette to de-accept Woody Allen's memoir and Simon & Schuster to cancel plans to publish Josh Hawley's The Power of Big Tech—is that the challenges come from the left, broadly defined: trans activists, feminists, anti-racists, anti-Trumpers. The left's new enthusiasm for getting bad books taken off the shelves is a mistake. It's in everyone's interest, but especially the left's, to have as broad a discourse as possible. On elite campuses, or in the pages of the Nation, where I write, the left may look powerful and entitled to flex its muscles. But in the nation at large the left is weak. Republicans control all branches of twenty-three state governments; the Democratic Socialists of America, by contrast have around 90,000 members. In media, nothing on the left end of the spectrum is as popular as Fox News or right-wing radio shock jocks. And polls show Republicans are far keener than Democrats to ban from school libraries [End Page 45] books they don't like: ones about LGBTQ characters, witchcraft, vampires, evolution, and atheism, or that use "explicit language," for example. Some left-wing positions, such as universal health insurance and a much higher minimum wage, have a lot of support. But many do not: few Americans want to abolish the police, prisons, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or think looting and arson are great ways to stick it to the Man; according to a recent Gallup poll, only one-third of voters support trans athletes in women's sports. What gives leftists the space to promote these unpopular positions in unfriendly places is the respect most Americans give to free speech. People who want to deplatform a speaker or deep-six a book love to point out that the First Amendment only applies to government. But socially and culturally, the notion that people have a right to say what they think and read what they want is much broader than that. That is why common dismissals—you can still get the book online, the speaker has plenty of other ways to express herself, books go out of print all the time—sound flip. Deplatforming a speaker who has been chosen through the accepted university channels, or attacking Powell's Books for selling Andy Ngô's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, means you lose the high ground. Now you look just like your enemies. And what have you won, really? Powell's doesn't put Ngô's books on the shelves, but it sells it online. Charles Murray gets to look like the victim of a mob at Middlebury. Josh Hawley, like Woody Allen, takes his book to another publisher. When you ban a book or shut down a...