It is because we wish to preserve the right of statesmen to
speak freely that we tolerate the demagogue. It may be important to point out
that the word “demagogue” did not always have a negative connotation. The
demagogue in ancient Greece and Rome was one who was uniquely able to speak to
the populace in terms they might understand; he was the vox populi. In a society rigidly separated by class – rich and
poor, privileged and non-privileged, free and slave – Greek and Roman demagogues
were what today we would call populists, a term of approval in some quarters. The
first notable Greek cynic, Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, would have found
himself right at home in Twitterville. The demagogue is the populist with a
golden tongue, popular because he is persuasive. No one very much minds
unpersuasive political opponents, unless they are largely inarticulate anarchic
mobs determined to destroy free speech.
The media favors the First Amendment – except when it
doesn’t favor it – for the same reason toothpaste makers favor toothbrushes and
the shrinking left in the United States favors Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth
Warren, a progressive demagogue. We all like the fellow-traveler sitting next
to us in our political pews attending rapturously to the demagogic sermon
pouring from the pulpit.
Milo Yiannopoulos is
the latest, but by no means the last, canary in America’s free speech
mineshaft. An address he was to give at UC Berkeley, the home of the Free
Speech Movement in December 1964, was terminated by puritanical protest
marchers and anarchists.
Yiannopoulos has a number of strikes against
him. He is alt-right, associated with Breitbart News, gay and a provocateur,
but no greater a disturber of the peace than was Mario Savio a little more than
a half century earlier, who opened the Free Speech Movement at Berkley with a
ringing demagogic speech against the machine of the day: “There's a time when
the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart —
that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to
put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all
the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the
people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the
machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Some people who
raged against the machine in the mid-sixties, after administering lessons on
free speech to college administrators and their parents, went on, later in
life, to reform the academic machine. Bernardine Rae Dohrn -- formerly of
the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for
the bombing of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon,
and several police stations in New York, as well as
the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three members
of the Underground – spent some years as Clinical Associate Professor of
Law at Northwestern University School of Law. She married her comrade in crime
Bill Ayers, also a terrorist, now a retired professor from the University of
Illinois at Chicago, College of Education, whose specialty was teaching social
justice, urban educational reform and how properly to stomp on American flags.
Yiannopoulos, who
has little in common politically with Dohrn and Ayers, finds himself on the
opposite side of their political barricades, though he is not an establishment
conservative, according to the editors a National Review. He describes himself as a
"cultural libertarian” and a “free speech fundamentalist.” During
his “Dangerous Faggot Tour," he has shown little patience with observant Salafists
who continue to throw gays to their deaths from tall buildings, third-wave
feminists who are strangely silent on the proper treatment of women as ordered in fatwas by Islamic scholars, fake social justice groups, authoritarian movements
of every color, ideologies he regards as noxious products of the regressive
left and, with barbed-wire vehemence, political correctness as embodied in the
protests that recently and violently shut down his appearance at the home of
the “Free Speech Movement.”
Sometimes men and
women lesser than saints carry the First Amendment flag. Such is Yiannopoulos.
It is never necessary to march in lockstep to advance the colors of liberty or
justice; forward movement is still progress of a kind. We should not discard
the message because the messenger is imperfect. It must be supposed that George
Washington regarded Thomas Paine as imperfect, if only because Paine was a revolutionary
atheist, but Washington most certainly appreciated “Common Sense.”
There are some signs
that Yiannopoulos may be a closeted Catholic. The cross he sometimes wears may be more than decorative. At the very least, he is not
animated by the kind of hostility to religion boastfully exhibited by, say,
Bill Maher, who lacks the elegance in anti-religious vituperation of a
Christopher Hitchens or, for that matter, a Thomas Paine. But, lovers of
liberty may agree, Yiannopoulos is a step-up from the confusing anarchism of Berkley
protesters who hate, one deduces from their actions, windows, Starbucks,
gays, and – incomprehensibly – disturbers of the peace such as Yiannopoulos.
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