In summer 2018, a student named Oliver Kline wrote to Oregon’s leading newspaper about the political culture at his high school. He said he was proud of Portland’s progressive values, but that he also valued “free and open debate.” The left’s “New Inquisition” had been shutting down conservative speech, he wrote, and discourse was suffering.

Last year, a history teacher at my school was denounced after he published an open letter expressing his belief that “‘rape culture’ is a theoretical construct that is ill-defined.” His letter spread across the school like wildfire, leading to protests and to local news networks picking up the story. Many in the school and the larger community advocated for his termination, and he was publicly shamed for spreading “hateful ideas.”

I didn’t agree with the bulk of what he said, but that’s beside the point. Anyone should have the right to openly express their ideas and opinions without being met by virtual pitchforks and wanted posters. Even if his opinions were wrong – no, especially if his views were wrong – the American way to deal with it is to have a free and open debate about the validity of his ideas.

(The teacher eventually expressed remorse and a better understanding of what “rape culture” meant.)

Kline assured readers that he was no conservative himself—he just wanted a more intellectually liberal environment.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a conservative, nor am I a Trump supporter. But I’d like to be able to talk to one, to debate with one, to learn from one.

Kline’s piece generated responses from his fellow students. First, senior Caiden D. Reid published his own op-ed corroborating Kline’s description of school culture. Unlike Kline, Reid said he was conservative. He described being screamed at and sworn at by students in a history class because—he said—he had civilly expressed “my beliefs regarding Confederate statues and symbolism.” By his account, the teacher did nothing to defend him.

“This letter will not go over well with my peers,” Reid lamented. “After all, I am a straight, cis-gendered, white male — traits that prohibit me from holding an opinion.” 

A week later, senior Amelia Ernst and recent graduate Cal Quinn-Ward responded with another op-ed lambasting both of the first two pieces. Kline and Reid’s calls for civility, they said, were misguided.

They are merely upset that reactions to opinions — often founded in hate — are not presented in a palatable manner. This argument is a poor effort to try to mask their perceived entitlement to respect and civility, no matter their opinion.

Interestingly, Ernst and Quinn-Ward lumped Kline and Reid together in their argument, despite Kline’s insistence that he wasn’t conservative himself. That’s because rather than focusing on conservative vs. liberal speech, their piece focused on repudiating the very idea that everyone’s views should be aired.

Ernst and Quinn-Ward denounced ideals such as intellectual liberalism, free speech, and civility. They called these ideals distractions from what they believed mattered most: dismantling oppression. In this vein, they equated Kline’s, Reid’s, and perhaps the history teacher’s arguments with oppression and even fascism:

The cry that one’s ‘free speech’ is being infringed upon is often employed as a tool to distract from analyses of oppressive structures and promote a reactionary agenda…

While it is not the students’ intention, both students seem to classify oppressive ideas as just another different point of view as they make the call for a diversity of opinions. To consider chauvinistic rhetoric simply another perspective worth hearing out is to give fascism a platform.

I found these articles interesting because they captured a broader debate that’s been raging in society. Many people, from the left, right, and center, are advocating for more intellectual liberalism, open debate, and civility—long-held American values that seem essential to democracy and science.

But others are questioning or dismissing these values, branding them as outdated distractions from “what matters most.” This “civility skepticism” has been gaining traction in recent years.

Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which has famously defended the free-speech rights of Nazis and the KKK, has recently begun prioritizing the support of marginalized groups over the protection of free speech for the first time in its century-long history. A new cohort of younger attorneys has been making the same argument as Ernst and Quinn-Ward: that free speech can be a tool of oppression, and that it therefore shouldn’t always be protected. This changing philosophy has caused dismay among ACLU old-timers who see free speech as an unassailable democratic value.

I’m interested in this debate because it’s one of the factors contributing to the rise of illiberalism today. If a sizeable swath of the public doesn’t even agree that intellectual liberalism, free speech, and civility should be valued anymore, these aims will be far harder to achieve! And do the skeptics make good arguments? It’s worth examining this more closely.

Only the left is overtly questioning civility.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of civility skepticism is that it’s specifically occurring on the political left.

Certainly, the right has its own illiberal, uncivil ways of undermining democracy. There is right-wing cancel culture and censorship, and the right’s embrace of disinformation and rejection of democratic norms are arguably the greatest existing threat to the country. I’ll turn to these in upcoming posts.

And there are certainly people on both the left and the right who lack the skills to practice civility. These folks often approve of civility in theory, and might even think they’re good at it themselves, but simply lack the self-awareness, patience, and empathy to listen respectfully. When I was a co-leader of the civil dialogue group Reach Out Wisconsin, I was periodically tasked with disinviting such people from our public forums. They hailed from both the left and the right.

What’s more, I can’t ignore the troubling recent statistics on Republican support of political violence, such as the finding that the majority of Republicans would “support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life.” If that’s not uncivil, I don’t know what is.

But in referring to civility skepticism, I’m not talking about a person or group’s level of skill or their actual uncivil behavior. I’m not even talking about their endorsement of violence or other uncivil beliefs they may hold. I’m talking about their perception of civility as an ideal.

We co-leaders of Reach Out Wisconsin sometimes encountered open hostility about the concept of what we were doing, and this hostility occurred overwhelmingly on the left. In 2011, I wrote a frustrated blog post describing our trouble getting progressive speakers for our forums and the disdainful email I’d received from the chair of the local Democratic Party. While the local Republicans had been enthusiastic about our efforts from the beginning, we never could get the Dems on board.

By now I’ve been publicly advocating for civility for more than a decade, and I’ve continued to frequently encounter the left’s civility skeptics. As I mentioned in my post “The Other Political Spectrum,” some of my fellow progressives have accused me of naivete for engaging in dialogue with conservatives, or of failing, in their opinion, to adequately denounce conservative views.

I’ve even had a friend or two block me on Facebook for my stance on this. In one instance, a conservative friend had responded to something I’d written, and a progressive friend responded to him with a derogatory word for conservatives (“Repugnicians”). When I gently asked the progressive not to name-call on my thread, his response was to simply block me. We’d been real-life friends for years, but by asking for civility, I had apparently become as intolerable to him as the conservative he’d been sparring with. Or actually, more intolerable—he’d blocked me, not the conservative!

I haven’t witnessed this type of hostility towards the ideal of civility among folks on the right. Presumably, the Republicans who believe force may be justified also believe, however mistakenly, that they’d be taking up arms to create a country in which civility, free speech, and intellectual liberalism were valued—that these ideals have been abandoned by the left, but that they are the true and essential values of our republic and ought to be restored.

Meanwhile, a subset of progressives seems to believe something markedly different: that civility and free speech are fundamentally, ideologically flawed goals.

Back when I first encountered this belief, I was very confused. Most of my progressive friends were enthusiastic about Reach Out Wisconsin, and many progressives are quite supportive of dialogue and civility. In fact, since those early days, I’ve learned that most leaders and participants in the dialogue movement are progressive.

So what’s going on here? Why are some liberals so devoted to dialogue, while others are so against it? Why are liberals are so divided about the ideal of civility?

I think this progressive division relates to two broad trends: the reckoning our country has been experiencing over racism, and, separately, the GOP’s recent departure from facts, science, and expertise.

The skeptics’ two concerns

Civility skeptics tend to have two main concerns, and the first was articulated by Ernst and Quinn-Ward: that calls for civility are distractions from dismantling oppression, and that such calls can even be tools of oppression. Essentially, the concern is that “civility” is code for “niceness,” and that focusing on civility or free speech can serve to maintain an unjust status quo, when instead what’s needed is to center and heed marginalized voices.

Undoubtedly, this concern has strengthened in recent years as racism has risen to the foreground of progressive thought. With the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act fifty years after it was passed, the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the national discussions on police shootings and systemic racism, more people have gained a sense of urgency about righting historical and contemporary wrongs. Civility is patient work, and when it comes to racism and oppression, progressive patience has worn thin.

Skeptics’ other concern is that civility gives legitimacy to false ideas. In an intellectually liberal, free-speech climate, even bad ideas are allowed—i.e., even ideas based on “alternative facts” that are just plain wrong.

This second concern was voiced eloquently by two commenters on the Medium version of my post “The Other Political Spectrum,” in which I had advocated for respectful discourse.

Rowan White wrote:

I agree entirely with and applaud the broad message of this article. I would like to ask, however, whether the author suggests one should be respectful of views that clearly contradict scientific consensus to the detriment of humanity, i.e. antivaxx or climate change denial?

Arguments can be made in both directions here: listening creates inclusiveness and opens the door to change, while elevating such views to the status of debate can give the wrong message about their validity and cause additional delay where time is of the essence.

Similarly, DeClarke wrote:

I do wonder…whether there are boundaries we really have to draw when it comes to listening respectfully. For example, am I supposed to listen respectfully to someone telling me that Jewish space lasers started the California wildfires? Or that all Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers? Or that giving women the vote was a huge mistake that should be remedied pronto?

Because there are people out there who would seriously support each of those contentions. I could not agree more that there is a wide realm of discourse within which disagreement is healthy and dialogue is desirable – but surely that realm has some borders.

I think this concern about falsehood has strengthened in the last few decades as the GOP has stepped blatantly away from truth and science on several critical, urgent issues. Lying and gaslighting about election legitimacy, climate change, and the pandemic became especially alarming and commonplace during the Trump years. This has placed the left in a terrible bind. What if free speech and civility give more credibility to dangerous ideas?

While neither political party is perfectly transparent and honest, and everyone is guilty of confirmation bias, only one party has so thoroughly departed from the truth as to create an existential threat to the country. Right-leaning voters aren’t in the same predicament as those on the left—they aren’t grappling with opponents who have become completely untethered from reality on several crucial issues. And this untethering has fueled increasingly undemocratic, illiberal Republican behavior that has engendered still more progressive alarm.

Progressive civility skeptics and enthusiasts largely agree on what we ultimately want—an end to systemic oppression, a better social safety net, fair elections, climate action, etc. But we’re divided over strategy, and that’s understandable. We’re struggling to know how best to respond to a deeply disturbing situation.

The baby and the bathwater

As I said in my first post about illiberalism, I don’t have all the answers here. I’m convinced that illiberalism is bad—I can’t see how we could possibly have a functional democracy without retaining values like free speech, civility, and intellectual liberalism. I believe these values should be taught in school and cherished by everyone, and I’m quite concerned about their denigration among some of my fellow progressives.

At the same time, I understand the skeptics’ concerns, and to an extent, I share them.

The problem I see with Ernst and Quinn-Ward’s argument, and many arguments against civility, is one of overgeneralization. In their article, Ernst and Quinn-Ward seemed to equate a thoughtful critique of the concept of “rape culture” with chauvinism, and chauvinism with fascism. It seemed as if, to them, every hint of unconscious bias equated to fascism and should therefore be suppressed.

They also created a false dichotomy between free speech and civility on the one hand, and combating oppression on the other:

As of right now, we are in a struggle for control, not a dialogue. Making room for reactionary voices will further legitimize hate. Instead, let’s start having critical conversations and get to work dismantling power imbalances.

That “instead” bothers me. We can value civility and work for justice.

Conversely, in the Medium responses above, I liked both writers’ more nuanced thinking. Rather than completely dismissing the idea of civility, they recognized that it has both merits and pitfalls, and that it may be more appropriate at some times than at others. This is my belief too.

In a country and world on the brink, it makes sense to question everything, even core democratic values. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater — as we combat oppression and falsehood, let’s still hang onto our ideals, or we might inadvertently destroy our country in order to fix it.