Last week Matt Yglesias over at Vox tried his best to deflate the notion that America was becoming increasingly hostile to free speech. Unfortunately, as Daniel Bier over at Skeptical Libertarian noted, Yglesias's own charts indicate that support for free speech among "Liberal" and "Slightly Liberal" Americans is at the lowest point in over 40 years.
Utilizing data from the General Social Survey, Yglesias shows that the US as a whole has demonstrated a growing willingness to defend the freedom of homosexuals, communists, militarists, and anti-theists to speak freely. Of course none of this should be particularly surprising. Prominent politicians on the left have actively praised communist leaders, militarism has received bipartisan support for decades, and social trends have become increasingly more tolerable for homosexuals and atheists.
Meanwhile, the GSS data shows a drastic drop in support for the free speech rights of racists.
It should go without saying that defending the rights of racists to speak is not the same thing as defending those ideas. In fact, one's commitment to free speech matters most when it involves ideas you strongly oppose. As Andrew Syrios wrote for the Mises Wire:
Discerning what exactly free speech is can sometimes be challenging, as in cases of libel, slander, and direct threats. But these are really not the issues at heart here. The vast majority of speech being “regulated” today is simply that of an unpopular opinion. Yes, many ideas are bad. And they should be refuted. Moreover, resorting to the use of political force to silence adversaries is a sign of the weakness of one’s own position. But, in using force to silence others, anti-speech crusaders are making another argument. They’re arguing that political force can and should be used to silence people we don’t like. What idea could be worse than that?
By this measure, the support for using force to silence the thoughts of others is growing in this country. In fact, if we use Vox's own data, they are declining most dramatically among those who identify as "Liberal" and "Slightly Liberal."
In conclusion, Vox gets everything wrong, in their article titled "Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong."
