President-elect Donald Trump’s surprising popular vote victory reflected many things, including nostalgia for low inflation and peace in the Middle East, distrust of establishment elites, and the kingmaker role of one antiestablishment titan, X master Elon Musk. Yet pundits have ignored empirical evidence that the free speech voters Musk tried to mobilize may have made the difference in a close race.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan pro-free speech group, commissioned NORC at the University of Chicago to implement a nationally representative survey of 1,022 people, conducted three weeks before the election. While most respondents expressed concerns about inflation, healthcare, crime, abortion, and immigration, 63% considered free speech a “very important” election issue. Only inflation scored higher at 68%.
To me, this makes perfect sense. I’ve been called racist for being a white person referring to Venezuela, a country run by people of color, as a dictatorship; for pointing out that Black Lives Matter policies such as cutting police budgets cost black lives; and for supporting former President Barack Obama’s education reforms intended to close racial achievement gaps. To critical race theorists, high-achieving racial and ethnic minorities suffer “internalized whiteness.” Indeed, one of my graduate students, Nate Bork, lost his job teaching at a Colorado community college for contesting whether the school should water down academic standards and impose race and gender quotas on grades in the name of equity.
Unlike Nate, I’m a tenured professor at a public university whose leaders value free speech. I have protection. Unfortunately, many others do not. As FIRE researchers document in The Cancelling of the American Mind, today’s campus purges which mainly hit conservatives and centrists have fired more professors than the 1950s Red Scare’s blacklists and legislative hearings harassing alleged communists. Today’s witch hunts, which Democratic commentator James Carville derides as a part of “faculty lounge politics,” started on campus but have metastasized across society, with half of people now self-censoring.
Institutionalized attacks on free speech now come mainly from progressives, so Democrats have shown little interest in protecting First Amendment rights. Many, including Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), whom I spoke with in April, deny that any free speech crisis exists. When House Republicans recently passed a bill responding to the free speech crisis on campus by prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation and assuring that speech limitations cannot be selectively enforced, only four House Democrats voted in favor, and the Democratic Senate showed no interest. In fairness to Democrats, the bill’s title, the End Woke Higher Education Act, seemed designed more to score political points than win bipartisan support.
But liberal elites are starting to wake up to the fact that, as Danish journalist Jacob Mchangama documents in Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, speech restrictions designed by rulers to restrict their opponents boomerang once those opponents take power. On censorship, what goes around comes around. Even before the election results, the prospect of Republican rule was leading liberals to the realization that censorship of the Right could become censorship by the Right.
In May, the liberal Washington Post editorial board opined that colleges undermine free speech when they require job applicants to endorse diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. Recently, the New York Times ran prominent stories showing that DEI bureaucracies eroded free speech at the University of Michigan and highlighting the complaints of pro-Hamas professors, such as Columbia University’s Mohamed Abdou, that restrictions on “hate speech” normally used to silence centrists and conservatives are now targeting them. As Republicans take charge, Democratic constituencies may find that the same First Amendment that hinders them when they have power protects them when they do not.
That means the incentives are aligned for a bipartisan breakthrough protecting our First Amendment rights in this lame-duck congressional session. In their last days running the Senate, Democrats have incentives to pass and rename the End Woke Higher Education Act assuring viewpoint neutrality in regulating campus speech to forestall likely Republican legislation and executive orders specifically targeting Democratic constituencies. For the Senate to pass and President Joe Biden to sign into law free speech protections positions Democrats to claim they really are the party that respects democratic processes, including free speech for opponents.
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A second innovation should be among the first pieces of legislation proposed by the Trump administration. Since the Eisenhower years, the bipartisan U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its 50 state advisory committees have issued reports and held hearings to safeguard our 14th Amendment rights. (I serve on the Arkansas committee.) Today, we need a bipartisan U.S. First Amendment Commission with state-level affiliates to highlight our rights to speak freely, petition government, and practice the faiths we choose, countering DEI and other antifreedom bureaucracies on and off campus.
To restore faith in our pluralistic democracy, it’s time for both parties to disavow using state power to crush the free expression of political opponents, because competitive elections mean nothing without the free expression of competitive ideas.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, a former school board member, and a founding member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science. These views are his alone.