Archives for December 2017

I had a few thoughts about free speech that I wanted to get out on a blog post here. These thoughts aren’t quite developed enough yet for a full-blown op-ed, but given that I had a rough time answering a question about free speech in my mock interview in class, I figured this might be a good space to explore some of these thoughts.

I work at a newspaper. While I’m not a “proper” journalist, what I do usually entails giving a platform to opinions and viewpoints that are interesting and deserve to be heard, and The Daily Texan is a decently big part of my life. So I’d like to think I know, first-and, why free speech is really important. The work that the press do is essential to democracy, and for speaking truth to power, and all that.

Within the past several years, though, I’ve noticed more politicians and academics — from the right, left, and center-left — criticize the fact that college students can’t seem to handle free speech anymore. The idea that students cannot handle perspectives that they don’t agree with fits in nicely with the overall stereotype of the soft, liberal, raised-on-the-participation-trophy millennial. Perhaps that’s why it’s difficult to go to any kind of talk nowadays without running into some kind of lamentation on how “kids these days” can’t seem to listen to perspectives that they don’t agree with.

This narrative is almost certainly shaped by the fact that college students have a lot of protests over speakers that come to campus. I’m not particularly interested in defending every single protest any college group has ever had over any speaker — that’s far too broad. But I am interested in the protests students have over white supremacists and neo-Nazis, because they seem to be popping up at a greater rate nowadays.

I think we can all agree that people from the alt-right/neo-Nazis have horrendous beliefs. Should they still be allowed to speak on campuses, or publish op-eds in student newspapers?

The most common answer, among conservatives and liberals, is yes — anything less would violate freedom of expression. There’s a legality aspect of this (for instance, public schools are bound under pretty strict laws that they cannot impede speech that comes from a student). But legality aside, most people who perceive freedom of speech to be under attack at college campuses would also say that bringing all kinds of speech — no matter how horrific — to light is good because then hate is in full view of everyone, and can be attacked and argued and publicly shamed by everyone. And that’s how progress happens.

But is that true? Does bringing hate speech (which, I know, there is no constitutional distinction between hate speech and free speech) to light actually work towards progress? Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, with the sorts of things he says, empowered the alt-right movement to filter into the mainstream. Hate crime rates, especially against Muslim and LGBT people, rose. There was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. It may have been reviled by the entirely of the nation, but the movement shows no signs of going away. It’s a force in politics, still. The “marketplace of ideas” is a great concept — but perhaps, just like a real marketplace, there are still people who have entrenched power and privileges, whose ideas can carry more weight and be more harmful.

It can be scary to be a woman or a person of color, on campus when you know that people like that are empowered. There was a white supremacy rally on the UT campus at the beginning of November. Students found out about it on Twitter, and weren’t given any official notification of it by the university until the next day morning. And in that email, the first thing President Fenves affirmed was the tight to free speech (and only later did he disavow the white supremacists). Those white supremacists weren’t a student group, so UT could kick them off campus — but what would have happened if they were affiliated somehow with the university? Would their rally have been okay, within UT’s commitment to “maintaining an inclusive environment for all who come here”?

I wish I had an easy, straightforward answer to all of these questions of free speech. As a journalist, as a citizen, I know free speech is vital. People should be able to express their points of view. But I don’t know if everyone should be allowed a platform.

I wanted to touch briefly on the idea of civic participation, and some thoughts I have on it as it relates to the recent Alabama senate race. I’ve talked a lot about civic engagement and voter participation, specifically as it relates to the Asian-American community, these past few months. While I feel like this has become part of my #brand now, it’s only been within the past year why I’ve discovered why I’m so interested in it.

The APIA (Asian Pacific Islander American) category is pretty wide-ranging — I use it as a term that encompasses Southeast Asians to South Asians, groups that are big and have significant variation within them — but they all have comparatively low levels of voter turnout. It’s frustrating to me when people that I’ve grown up around aren’t political, because I believe voting is such a basic right that people in our democracy that people have fought for, but it’s more than that. As I started to do more Asian-American voter registration, I began to realize that the more elected officials see a community as a voting bloc, the more they start pandering to you for votes. Of course, I’d rather have substantive and thoughtful change over pandering, but I’ll take what I can get.

This brings me to Tuesday’s Alabama Senate election. I was, like the rest of Twitter, anxiously following the results as they trickled in (partially because I was sick and unable to concentrate on anything else, partially because I was desperately hoping that Alabama would reject a racist, homophobic pedophile of a candidate. It was a good early sign for Doug Jones, that the exit polls were showing that 30 percent of the voters who showed up were African-American. Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight tweeted “All the talk about black voters not turning out…If Jones wins it, it’ll be because black voters turned out.”

After Doug Jones was officially called the winner, the exit poll data that compared the vote on gender and racial lines showed some damning statistics — 63 percent of white women voted for Roy Moore, while 97 percent of black women voted for Jones. What followed was a cascade of tweets — some performative, some sincere — praising black voters, particularly black women, for “saving” Alabama (so much so that #BlackWomen was trending on Twitter). The backlash, quick as it is in the Internet age, generally focused on reminding non-black folks that black women were voting their own interests and to protect their own communities, rather than because of a desire to “save” anyone.

But the most interesting part of all of this to me, is how the Democratic Party will take this new information, that African American voters will turn out with effective voter mobilization and sway elections in the Democrats’ favor, even despite heavy voter suppression. For the past year, it seems like much of the establishment’s focus has been on chasing this notion of the “white working class” voter who voted for Trump, a group whose economic interests seem like they might be better served by shifting support to Democrats. We’ve seen New York Times piece after piece on these Trump supporters, that try to get at the bottom of why they voted for Trump. But so far, trying to pinpoint who these voters are and trying to persuade them to join the Democratic party has seems to have had little success.

My interest in mobilizing Asian American voters is so tied into this ideal of how democracy should work, and was meant to work — on which elected officials take notice of characteristics of their electorate and work to try to address the issues that they care about — so it is frustrating to watch the Democratic party take one of their core bases for granted. Roy Moore was a horrifically bad candidate, who not only has been accused of sexual misconduct by several women, but has also said things like America “was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery.” It’s clear that African-American voters were paying attention to that. But Democrats cannot just wait for the Republican candidate to be racist — they have to proactively work to advance issues that matter to the African-American community in order to get the political participation for an important voter base.

“The Death of Expertise: The Risk to American Security and Democracy” was a talk given by Dr. Thomas Nichols, to promote his book by the same name. Dr. Thomas Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He previously worked in the U.S. Senate, specializing in defense and security policy. He specializes in Soviet/Russian affairs and is a former Secretary of the Navy Fellow at Naval War College.

Nichols began with the concept of the “death of expertise” in policymaking which he acknowledged was a dramatic but yet real phenomenon that was posing a real threat to U.S. national security and democracy. Americans have very little foundational knowledge about the world, but a lot of strong opinions (to demonstrate, he pointed out a particular 2014 study that demonstrated that the worse someone could place Ukraine on a map correlated with them advocating a much stronger and aggressive military response to the situation). A more recent phenomenon, occurring hand-in-hand with populism, is the impulse that ordinary Americans have that they know just as much or more than experts.

Nichols partly attributes this phenomenon to what he called “40-50 years of the therapeutic approach to education”, which is what is making college kids soft and making them think that education is not supposed to be uncomfortable, so that they don’t learn anything. As a current college kid, this kind of rhetoric is both generally expected from certain adults and rather frustrating to listen to. I mean, I cannot compare my anecdotal educational experience to whatever anecdotal evidence he has of his own educational experience. But generalizations of college kids never wanting to be uncomfortable seems strange given that we’re growing up in a moment where racism emanates from the top political office and stories of workplace and campus harassment are coming from people of all ages. I’m sure there are certain trends in education now that may or may not be actually helpful. But it’s frustrating to be treated like college kids have no sense of personal responsibility.

Another big contributor to the fact that Americans are not super well informed is the media. Talk radio essentially reinforces people’s own views, and the 24-hour news cycle is too much. It’s great to have the diversity of viewpoints, but now we have an overload, and people can only graze the news. I think this is an interesting point, because I do agree that we are oversaturated with news, and it does lead to people distrusting the mainstream media more for fringe sources, which can be problematic. But I don’t think limiting ourselves to 3 news channels, like Nichols suggests was a superior model, is the right answer. Either way — the explosion of Twitter and social media means that it’s highly unlikely that we can ever go back to a time when we weren’t constantly bombarded by news. Now, we have to instead focus on strategies for dealing with it, and I think Nichols could have spent more time on that.

Rejecting expertise feels empowering, but it poses a significant threat to national security. Many people might think that many political problems stem from the fact that Washington does not listen to them enough. But in fact, Nichols says, the problem is that Washington listens to them too much, and the people, because of their lack of foundational knowledge, cannot actually give coherent direction. This can be seen in the example of the public wanting the repeal of Obamacare, but to keep the Affordable Care Act, not realizing that they were the same thing. And while the public wants decreased taxes, they do not necessarily understand what the current Republican tax bill has in it. Propaganda and fake news suddenly have a new power in our broken system.

Populism is great for expressing anger but not necessarily for governing. Nichols says the threat to democracy, then, is not necessarily rule by mob, but rather rule by a technocracy. If a mob can’t keep the lights on, the people may turn away from governance entirely and allow the experts to run all foreign policy matters without any public input, Nichols says. And that’s the real threat to American democracy and security.

I’m not entirely sure if I entirely follow this concluding point that he makes — it sounds slightly too dystopian, and I don’t think he spent enough time building the evidence for that particular conclusion. But overall, I think he isolated a salient issue that requires further study. I’m interested in learning more.