– Another chapter in the radicalization of young Andrew Sullivan, generated by AI based on the essay below –
“Words connect with the rational part of our brains; images target the sub-rational. And in a sub-rational world, liberal democracy simply cannot exist” – Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan can’t get enough of the video of Charlie Kirk’s murder. In a recent Substack, he claims to have “watched that video a couple of times.”
The video of Kirk’s shooting, along with the recording of a young Ukrainian woman’s murder on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, especially the quasi-beheading character of the killings, seem to have reinvigorated Sullivan’s old-world imagination.
Sullivan correctly notes that these truly horrific murders attack two core principles of any decent democratic society: “the right to be safe in public, and the right to speak freely without fear.” Sadly, Sullivan goes on to write a Tudor-era fiction, and he needs villains.
Andrew enlists “the woke” as his story’s villains: Muslims, critical theorists of all kinds, anti-exclusionary feminists like Judith Butler, faggy gays, Trans* activists, Black activists, and others. These villains are those who Sullivan believes can’t handle the truth: speech is never violent.
“The woke left, especially in the fringes the mainstream left adamantly refuses to rein in, condemn, or control,” Sullivan asserts, “bears some responsibility [for Kirk’s murder], because it has long equated speech with violence.” The “deeply illiberal idea” that a “bullet is no different in kind than a verbal provocation” has, according to Andrew, been forced upon a nonconsenting “young generation” by “the academic and journalistic left.”
Sullivan believes that speech and violent behavior are fundamentally separate realities, and he ridicules the supposedly woke notion that speech and violent actions can—and do—overlap. However, every democracy acknowledges a connection between speech acts and violent or hateful conduct.
In the U.S., the law makes a distinction between what is considered harm and actual harm. For example, it may hurt Andrew’s feelings if I call him a twat—but legally, my disagreement with Andrew is actionable only if I slap or scratch him. Actual harm involves a physical toll (Martha Nussbaum points out that courts recognize that smell can cause actual harm. See Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law [2004], e.g., 158-163).
A similar logic applies when distinguishing between speech, protected by the First Amendment, and conduct, which the law can restrict. Consider R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), a case Judith Butler discusses in Excitable Speech (1997).
In R.A.V. v. St. Paul, the Supreme Court ruled that a white person burning a cross in a Black family’s front yard is speech, not violent or harmful conduct. Therefore, St. Paul’s ordinance banning such burnings was declared unconstitutional.
The Court corrected itself in Virginia v. Black (2003). In this case, the Court ruled that Virginia’s law banning all cross burnings, regardless of context, is unconstitutional. However, the Court also decided that when context shows that a speech act, like cross burning, is intended to cause harm, it becomes unprotected speech and may be lawfully regulated.
U.S. courts distinguish between speech and violent acts (e.g., burning a cross at a klan rally). In these cases, words can—and do—act like bullets, piercing our psyches with unforgiving force, but that doesn’t make them unlawful or punishable by law.
U.S. courts also acknowledge a connection between speech and violent acts (e.g., a klan member burning a cross on a Black family’s yard). Every democracy affirms that words can—and do—act like bullets when they are fired off with the intent, for example, of inciting a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.
Andrew’s beef with his young woke despisers (he’s consistently miffed that the young woke don’t like him) is that they won’t make a distinction between speech and violence. Thus, the young woke believe, according to Sullivan, that violence/self-defense/legal regulation is always justified agianst speech they don’t like because such speech is always actually harmful speech.
Sullivan, on the other hand, contends that speech is never actually harmful. Words can never actually hurt us. Thus, violence/self-defense/legal regulation is never justified against speech.
So what?
Denying any overlap between speech and violent conduct enables Sullivan to neatly drop all speech acts in one bucket and all violent acts in another. Charlie Kirk’s public murder on a college campus in Utah, the young Ukrainian woman’s slaying on a train in Charlotte, and George Floyd’s death at the knees of a white cop in Minneapolis all go in the same bucket.
Likewise, arguments against gay marriage and abortion are treated similarly to arguments that deny or demean Trans* existence and oppose parents’ rights to make healthcare decisions for their Trans* children (while at the same time justifying the right of religious conservatives to determine the character of their children’s public school education [see also the New Thoughts Podcast, episode 4, Sex Changes]).
Sullivan’s refusal to recognize any link between speech and violent or hateful behavior allows him to take rhetorical aim from a high position on the whitewashed tomb of piety. “Tell the truth fearlessly,” Andrew preaches, “but always be open to correction. Decency, civility, nonviolence, humor, humility, grace: these are the virtues a free society needs to endure.”
Yet, without irony, humor, or humility, Sullivan claims, “It is never ‘hate’ to tell the truth: that men are not women; that children cannot meaningfully consent to sex changes. . . ,” while insisting that “the mainstream left . . . rein in, condemn, or control” the so-called “woke left,” including, presumably, parents of Trans* children (emphasis added).
It is dishonest, absurd, and manifestly wrong to either (a) collapse the distinction between speech and violent actions or to (b) deny any connection between speech and hateful acts. But what should a fair democracy do about and with disturbing speech?
The delicious irony is that Sullivan’s answer to that question (i.e., no regulation) closely resembles Judith Butler’s, as it is presented in Excitable Speech (1997).
Although Butler does acknowledge the overlap between speech and harm—arguing that speech can harm the human subject (i.e., the human being) because the subject is made of language—their solution to hurtful speech is resistant speech: more speech (of a different kind).
In fact, it is Butler’s reasonable, in my view, insistence that resistant speech acts–rather than political/legal intervention/regulation, are the solution to, say, fascist speech acts, that contributes to Martha Nussbaum’s damming assessment of Butler’s theory–worked out in Gender Trouble (1990) through to The Psychic Life of Power (1997)–as “quietism.”
Nussbaum concludes that Butler’s theory “collaborates with evil” (see Nussbaum, Philosophical Interventions [2012/1999], 215; responses and Nussbaum’s reply, 215-222).
I cover the specifics of Butler’s theory and Nussbaum’s critique of it in a forthcoming essay. For now, I want to emphasize what is at stake (at least for us villains) in denying any link between speech and violent or hateful behavior, namely, the monarchic spirit manifestly possessing some speech acts is allowed to go entirely unchecked.
As I was reading Sullivan’s Substack, I kept thinking about Anne Boleyn as she’s portrayed in the Broadway musical SIX. In the song “Sorry, Not Sorry,” Boleyn reflects on her tonsorial audacity.
Speaking of Catherine of Aragon, she says, “[King Henry VIII] doesn’t wanna bang you / Somebody hang you. . . . / Mate, what was I meant to do? . . . / Sorry, not sorry ’bout what I said / I’m just tryna have some fun / Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t lose your head / I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
Later, Anne recalls Henry taking issue with her flirtatious behavior with other men. She responds, “Mate, just shut up / I wouldn’t be such a b- / If you could get it up. . . . And now he’s going ’round like off with her head. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he means it (seems it).”
Even while lamenting that Trump is incapable of cooling the rhetorical temperature, and demanding that we “[c]ool the rhetoric,” Sullivan denies that what he—and any of us—says has any real consequences. Kirk/Andrew desperately wants us to believe that he is just having some good ole, traditional political fun. Like, what is he meant to do?
Don’t lose your head, Andrew.
Kirk/Andrew’s “free” speech leads to the free reign of conservatives over the most vulnerable in U.S. society, such as immigrants, Trans* adults and children, Muslims, and others.
That’s why any just democracy should make speech acts that re-create and re-enforce a U.S. caste system, speech acts that come at the cost of the dignity of others, speech acts that demean and subjugate fellow citizens—and those who aspire to become citizens—not worth the cost of such illiberal behavior.
We can begin to rid our democracy of its monarchic spirits by supporting, defending, and fully funding a rigorous public school education in the sciences and humanities.
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