Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
I try to be a partisan of neither a Turkish nor an American ideology. (Well, if you push me real hard, I might lean in the direction of William F. Buckley-type conservatism.) So, what I am going to ask here is not because I have a stake in liberalism, progressivity, open-mindedness, broad-mindedness; I am going to say what I am going to say despite conservative values I espouse: What in the world are U.S. President Donald Trump and the so-called new version of conservatives doing to the “good ol” U.S. of A.?
With their infinite callousness, in their endless pompousness and in the sham bliss of their ignorance, Trump and his ilk are ruining the liberalist approach of the founding fathers and liberal and conservative administrations. Believing in equality and individual liberty, supporting private property, personal rights and the idea of limited constitutional government, and recognizing the importance of related values such as pluralism, toleration, autonomy, bodily integrity and consent have been the basis of the first man-made political structure. As a consequence, the American nation has been based on free speech.
Free speech has always been a glamorous aspect of America for me. I was invited to the U.S. first by the U.S. Information Agency in their journalist exchange program in 1971; I asked my program organizers to help me see and interview Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Reverend who?” they asked. As a small church pastor in Chicago, Jackson was busy creating the “People United to Save Humanity” (Operation PUSH). Later, he became an inspiration to a whole generation with his rousing speeches on equality in education and employment. But in those early years, he had inspired me all the way from Chicago to Istanbul with his motto “Free But Not Equal.” You probably know him from his National Rainbow Coalition and presidential run in 1984, as well as his subsequent activities.
The word “free” would come back to me in similarly controversial contexts in articles and TV debates of William F. Buckley. You must remember his signature magazine, The National Review, and his signature television program, “The Firing Line.” Oh, how he hosted so many liberals and conservatives down in those debates. Twenty years later, I had the opportunity to meet Rev. Jackson and Bill Buckley after attending a recording of one of his episodes in his studio. I hardly remember the question he opened the debate with, but the main line was about capital punishment and crime prevention in the U.S. At one point it reminded me of the discussion we had with Rev. Jackson: free speech as the essence of freedom and how much of would be detrimental to the society (to the degree of killing the owner of that speech or writing).
You might consider Jackson and Buckley to be at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, but I remember their answer about the limits of free speech: none. No end to that freedom, no matter how ugly its content is.
I am not going into the technical details of that 1919 decision. But you can say anything in the U.S. under the First Amendment law, but you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater. It is a testament to the power; it is why we used to covet the limits of political power in America.
Can’t speak freely anymore
No limits to the spoken and written word, ha? Not anymore! If you talk or write bad things or lies about Trump (or whoever is the holder of the political power), “It’s no longer free speech.” Trump last week reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is “illegal.” He is having TV commentators fired, not because he and his administration were taking actions that chill free speech, but, for instance, Trump said that, “Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else, and he said a horrible thing about a great gentleman known as Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. They should have fired him a long time ago. So, you know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent.” What about Stephen Colbert? Trump had a thing to say on him, too: “He is not funny, which he gets paid far too much to be; he is not wise; he is very boring and his show is dying from a complete lack of viewers. I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.”
(Hey, Jimmy Fallon! Probably you are the next; Trump took a shot at you on his own social platform: “I hear the moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show is next.”)
When presidents start mocking the hosts of entertainment shows, their next stop is the news, as Trump began already: “All the negative stories about me are ‘illegal.’” Yes, they declare themselves to be “a powerful person for free speech,” but they think they have to protect the public from those “illegal” stories. His Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr says his having Jimmy Kimmel’s show suspended over remarks he made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was not government censorship!
Only six years ago, the same Brendan Carr was lecturing Americans about government censorship: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the public interest.” Now he must have realized that, as FCC chief, he has to safeguard the public from the adverse effects of free speech.
Yes, we know “freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.” Yet as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis schooled us all long time ago, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” However, this president insults his political adversaries (“George Slopadopolous had to pay $16 million to me because of what he said, and that’s ABC”) and lies about who paid him and why? (“Paramount said late Tuesday that it had agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle his lawsuit over the editing of an interview on the CBS News”).
Even former President Barack Obama weighed in, sharing articles on X about the importance of free speech and writing: “Freedom of speech is at the heart of democracy and must be defended, whether the speaker is Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel, MAGA supporters or MAGA opponents.” Republican Senator Ted Cruz broke MAGA ranks to describe the administration’s actions as “dangerous as hell,” likening the FCC’s tactics to those of a mob boss and warning conservatives of what liberals will do if returned to power.
Fatigued democracy
We need to ask ourselves and the U.S. voters: What would your opponents do if or when they take power? But I am afraid it is too late for such hypothetical questions. This president is already distributing stakes in social media platforms to the richest Americans to create his own media moguls.
Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist well known for his authorship of works on the information society, communication and globalization, has a definition for such situations: a fatigued democracy. In his book titled “Rupture,” he explains that in times of deep crisis of political legitimacy, a period of uncertainty opens up in the lives of people. In such periods, the old tricks of fundamentalist nationalism, bigotry, racism, xenophobia and intolerance are played by demagogues to conquer the state over the ruins of a fatigued democracy.
But don’t despair: Professor Castells points to the prospect of new beginnings, particularly in Europe and in the U.S.: “But these are periods in which new social movements rise to assert human values and to reconstruct democracy, real democracy from the bottom up, grassroots participatory institutions.”
