Imagine a world in which Congressman Jamie Raskin attempts to deliver a speech on “Democracy, Autocracy, and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century” and is unable to deliver his remarks because Trump supporters drown him out, and authorities justify the disruption as an exercise in “democracy.” Democrats attempting to raise money for the opposition are surrounded on the street by Trumpists shouting “fuck Joe Biden” and abusing them with racial epithets.
These are the kind of scenes that come to mind when we imagine the authoritarian culture of a second Trump term. They are also events that have not only occurred but have grown commonplace. This pattern of behavior is illiberal and dangerous.
The twist, of course, is that the mobs shutting down the opposition to Trump are not Trump supporters, or at least not right-wing Trump supporters. Pro-Palestinian activists have set out to disrupt Democratic Party officials from speaking and raising funds to defeat Trump.
A New York Times story recently drew some attention to the political problem this creates for Democrats. Indeed, some of the protesters are trying to defeat Biden (ergo, to elect Trump) to teach the Democrats a lesson, and others are merely trying to force the Democrats to move left before the election.
Because Democrats perceive some of the protesters as potential Biden voters, they have soft-pedaled their criticism of their tactics. The handful of critics have focused on the political ramifications of the protest movement. (“If you are now organizing people to walk away from supporting the president, then you are now de facto supporting and helping Trump,” Senator John Fetterman told the Times.)
But the problem is not one of mere efficacy. Drowning out speakers and disrupting exercises in politics, regardless of its cause or the target, is wrong on principle.
I’m not referring to tactics like holding protest marches, speeches, social-media posts, organizing uncommitted votes in the Democratic primary, or other exercises of First Amendment rights. I’m specifically referring to a campaign to shut down speakers who oppose (or even, in many cases, simply decline to endorse) the movement’s agenda.
Usually, it means interrupting speeches with screaming insults until the protesters are dragged out of the room, which has become the norm at Biden campaign events. At events with sub-presidential levels of security, protesters often succeed in overwhelming the event and its security and shutting down the speech or event entirely, sometimes employing violence.
I’d place in the same category aggressive personal harassment campaigns, like gathering outside somebody’s home at three o’clock in the morning with bullhorns shouting “We will not let you sleep!,” or surrounding individuals on the street to scream insults:
The goal of these maneuvers is not to make the case for pro-Palestinian policy, but to abuse and deny basic rights to those who fail to endorse the protesters’ beliefs. And yes, being prevented from holding a planned speech to supporters, stalked on the street, or subjected to sleep denial are all forms of abuse. Almost nobody believes these are all just natural parts of the give and take of public disagreement.
The most elemental premise of liberalism is that politics should be governed by a uniform set of rules or norms that apply to everybody, regardless of the content of their beliefs. Over the last decade, an increasingly visible fault line has opened up on the left between political liberals and more radical activists. The illiberal left defines politics as a conflict between oppressor and victim and does not believe the former deserves the same rights as the latter. (Crucially, the special prerogatives of victimhood apply not only to victims but also to those struggling on their behalf.)
Abusive protesters usually meet critiques of their illiberal methods with a facile comparison to the civil-rights movement. But that movement was designed for a political environment in which basic liberal rights did not exist: Black Americans lacked the right to vote, to petition for grievances, or otherwise exert basic freedoms that white Americans enjoyed. The movement’s theorists did not intend their carefully designed arguments to be a permanent license for any progressive cause to declare itself beyond the law for all time.
Civil-rights demonstrators had been shut out of electoral politics by force since Reconstruction. The pro-Palestinian movement, by contrast, is barely even attempting democratic participation. The movement could have run an an anti-Israel candidate against Biden but never bothered, no doubt anticipating they would lose.
Force is not their last resort but their preferred method. It allows them to maintain the moral binary that animates them in all its purity without engaging in the unpleasant compromises necessary to win support of the majority of the country, or even a party.
Of course, large segments of the right dispensed with the guardrails of liberalism long ago. Donald Trump’s breakthrough insight is to stop even pretending that Republicans have to uphold any neutral standard of fairness. The Trump movement is a giant in-joke about this, delighting in the unembarrassed hypocrisy of endlessly complaining about crimes like corruption or weaponization of government that Trump engages in nakedly himself.
The illiberal left may have much less power than the illiberal right. But since this faction is demanding influence within the Democratic Party, it can no longer hide behind the notion that it’s too marginal to be worth criticizing. That old evasion — why single out a handful of college teens? — is comical now that illiberal tactics are playing an important role in a presidential election.
The ethics of the cause come into sharper focus if you imagine it being done by Biden haters in red MAGA hats rather than by Biden haters in keffiyehs. Sure, they’re “idealistic.” Plenty of Trump’s followers have ideals, too. If your movement’s goal is to prevent those who disagree from expressing themselves, and you delight in meting out abuse and humiliation to your targets, you’re showing the world you cannot be trusted with power.
