Coulter and the Right: When Does “Consensus” Become a Mob?
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KTK
By now I think everyone is aware of Ann Coulter’s latest outrage: her “witticism” (in her case, I guess it was one) to the effect that she couldn’t talk about John Edwards because she’d be criticized for using the word “faggot”. She was, and more vigorously than probably she, or anyone else, expected.
It’s refreshing to see the immediate negative reaction across the right-wing blogs and media. There seems to be little disagreement that what she said was inexcusable, and there are widespread calls for her not to be encouraged in such behavior. (The punditry is a bit ahead of the rank and file, here; the CPAC audience she was speaking to applauded her and then stood in line for two hours afterward to get her autograph. And I doubt we’ll see her book fall off the best-seller lists just because she’s vicious or disgusting - they never have before.) Some of the reaction is clearly self-interested; a common complaint is that Coulter is making conservatives look bad, not that homophobia is bad in itself. And there are the usual failures of comprehension and perspective: many right-wingers compared this incident to the case of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan’s organized hounding out of their jobs on Edwards’s campaign for supposedly offensive language on their personal blogs. Nonetheless, there was an unquestioning sense that this kind of talk is no longer acceptable (in stark contrast to complacency over previous incidents, such as Dick Armey’s “Barney Fag”, or Jerry Falwell’s blaming gays and feminists for 9/11). That alone is progress.
But the issue does raise familiar questions of how to deal with offensive speech, and especially offensiveness in a public or quasi-official setting. (Coulter does not represent any organization, but she was an invited speaker of a conservative group that surely knew of her offensive behavior in the past; she is also wildly popular among the conservatives who have made her among the most in-demand right-wing speakers and have made her books best-sellers. She clearly embodies a popular point of view and is given credence in that role by conservatives’ endorsement of her speech and behavior to date.) How does one react to such an offensive message without turning that into an attack on the speaker? And when the speaker clearly is never going to change their ways, how can one shun their message without turning that into ostracism?
The welcome condemnation of Coulter’s statement has bloomed into calls for her to be banned from talk shows or magazines. It is beginning to look like another example of conservative mob behavior, triggered by one incident, overrunning even people whose points of view they otherwise endorse - another “Zumboization”, in other words. Many of the right-wing blogs have called for conservative organizations and publications to shun Coulter from now on.
Aside from the superficiality of the response - I have seen many calls for Coulter’s ostracism, but not one for the denunciation of homophobia or right-wing hate in general; the intention, again, seems to be mitigating embarrassment, not really reflecting on the conservative values that made Coulter a star in the first place - I have to say I am concerned that this is not the right way to deal with the issue. As much as I despise Coulter, as much as I would like to see her and all her fans (including the critics who are now silently saying ” . . . but, you know, she has a point . . .”) gone from the public arena, I don’t want to see any more Zumbos, any more mobs, any more secondary boycotts or harassment or blacklists. To be consistent with my position on Zumbo, whom I didn’t really care that much about to begin with, and with that on Amanda and Melissa, who fall into an entirely other category, I must ask for the same consideration for Coulter, whom I truly loathe.
The easiest way to explain is to quote an exchange from another blog where I commented on this. Right-Wing Nuthouse comes down hard on Coulter (from the “avoid embarrassment” perspective, that is), and offers the following suggestions for dealing with her:
I urge everyone – right and left – to take the following actions:
1. Never write another blog post about Ann Coulter no matter how outrageous, cruel, or bigoted her language.
2. Immediately write the Presidents of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN demanding that they refuse to schedule Coulter on any show for any reason on their networks.
3. Write the editor of Human Events and demand that they drop her column.
4. If her column appears in your local newspaper, write a letter to the editor demanding that they drop her column.
5. If you see her writings in any on line or print publication, write the editor and demand that they stop carrying her columns.
6. Any upcoming forum in which she is scheduled as a speaker or panel participant, write a letter to the organizers and make it clear that the reason you are not attending is due to Coulter’s presence.
The goal is to starve the witch of the attention she craves. I’ll have more on this later today, including an on-line petition we can sign and send to the cable nets and a report on my progress.
My response, in comments, was the following:
I appreciate and admire your inclination to roust Coulter from conservative ranks (though . . . I think she is only the tip of the iceberg). But I am uncomfortable with boycotts and protests.
. . . I think it is perfectly appropriate to shun or boycott the products (books, speeches, etc.) of someone whose ideas you disagree with. I am uncomfortable with secondary boycotts – threats against those who merely do business with the offender – and demands for others to shun such a person. If the right of free speech includes the right to say hateful things – which it does, even for Ann Coulter – then it must include the right, not to be heard or agreed-with, but to say them without fear of harassment or retribution other than the disapprobation that the ideas themselves justify.
In the case of people whose product is speech – i.e., writers and speechmakers – the question is a little trickier, because to shun their products is to shun their speech, and to request that publications find better writers, simply because you want to read better ideas, is essentially to request that they fire offensive writers because you don’t like the ideas they promote. It’s hard here to draw a line between rejecting a professional writer’s ideas and seeking financial retribution for their having spoken them. But I think that line at least includes not organizing a mass protest to demand that they be fired.
Certainly no decent person should read or listen to Ann Coulter. Reasonably enough, people can indicate to publishers or program directors that they want better ideas to be presented. But I think there is a difference between saying you won’t read a publication because of the content it carries and demanding that they fire one of their contributors because you don’t like that person’s ideas. (It’s understood that in most cases an opinion writer’s ideas are not endorsed by the publication itself. That distinction does carry some weight, and should offer the publisher some protection.) That distinction, between an expression of opinion and a demand for appeasement, exists even if the end result – the publication will lose a reader if they continue to carry a certain author – is the same. And threatening boycotts of publications or programs because of just one person they carry is a means of using the economic leverage of a large corporation to give your personal grievance a heft it does not deserve.
Although these distinctions may be small, I would suggest that, while I endorse your point #1 above, points #s 3, 4, and 5 should be reworded from “demand that they drop” to “indicate you will no longer read them as long as they carry” the offending writer. Point #2, I think, is similar: the point to be made is that there are better guests to schedule, that you want to see them, and that you will stop watching the show if it does not improve; putting it in the language of “demand” simply makes it sound like you are being intolerant of them for tolerating Coulter’s intolerance, which rather muddies the moral issue.
Point #6 is complex: I don’t know if it’s really a good idea to boycott programs at which hateful people appear. There may still be many other good people on the program, and why cut yourself off from them? To the extent that attendance implies approval of a particular speaker, that is a problem, but one that it seems to me should be worked out case-by-case. But the idea of punishing entire institutions or programs because you disagree with certain speakers is a dangerous one – it smacks of the refusal by the Eisenhower administration to allow Columbia University to hire Bertrand Russell, or the threats today to defund public colleges because they invite controversial speakers. If it’s true that the right wing hardly needs more hateful crazies, it’s also true that they hardly need more McCarthyism.
Ann really isn’t the sharpest knife in the shed, either…(see video)
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2006/12/ann-coulter-gets-owned.html
Comment 3/3/2007
While in a general philosophical way I, too, object to silencing someone, even someone whose entire schtick seems to be finding ways to be ever-more offensive, and I agree with the saying that the best answer to “bad” speech is not censorship but “more speech,” as a practical matter there are other considerations here:
1. There really is no chance of Ann Coulter being silenced by any attempted boycott. At some point her star will simply fade; in fact it’s inevitable: Her success depends on being outrageous and to keep doing that she has to keep being ever-more outrageous. No one can maintain that forever. I’m not saying she will fade soon, but I do say she will fade. However, the salient fact remains that there is no realistic threat to Ann Coulter’s freedom of speech here.
2. Ann Coulter has no more inherent right to be on network TV or to have a syndicated newspaper column or to get paid big bucks for speeches to fawning audiences than anyone else has. If she is free to peddle hatred, others - i.e., media outlets - are equally free to say “not here, you don’t.”
3. “More speech” is not necessarily an option. (I know you didn’t use the term, but it is, as I noted at the top, a common rejoinder.) There simply is not an unlimited amount of time and/or space to always add “more speech” and editorial decisions about what will and will not appear are a fact of life. That’s particularly true in broadcast media: Every appearance by Ann Coulter (or anyone else) is an opportunity lost for a different voice to be heard.
4. Taking your argument literally would make if impossible to ethically challenge what anyone else says. If, for example, Coulter responds to the slams from Guliani, McCain, and Romney about her “faggot” crack by thinking “Geez, I’d better not say something like that again,” hasn’t she been to that degree silenced by some version of a “mob?” I agree than in Coulter’s case that’s very unlikely: If she moderated herself, she’d lose her audience. But it does apply to the nature of the argument you’re making.
5. Related to that, I’d say the proposal #1, which you endorsed, is exactly what should not be done. Trying to pretend Coulter or others like her do not exist, thereby giving them free rein without fear of opprobrium, is probably the worst response to the bigotry she celebrates.
6. Finally, just to show how tricky this free speech stuff can be, you endorse proposals #3-5 with the proviso they be amended to say you will not read the given publication so long as the offending writer appears in those pages. How are those not “secondary boycotts – threats against those who merely do business with the offender” of exactly the sort with which you are “uncomfortable?”
Comment 3/4/2007
LarryE:
You raise some good points, but I still think there’s a difference.
It’s true that no one has a right to be heard, but I do think people have a right not to be harassed into silence. The problem with censoring “offensive” speech is that it creates the “heckler’s veto” - anyone who claims to be offended can demand the speaker stop. And when the demand comes from a semi-organized mass action, the pressure - on the speaker and on third parties - can be insurmountable.
I don’t think my position makes it impossible to protest offensive speech. I didn’t say people shouldn’t protest. But I do think - and should have made this more explicit - that they shouldn’t encourage or organize protests from large groups who wouldn’t have spoken out if someone hadn’t put them up to it. You don’t want to read someone? Fine - don’t do it. Nobody’s forcing you. But don’t round up all your cousins who don’t even know what’s going on and go shoot their windows out. And don’t go threaten their employer into firing that person because you didn’t like something they said.
These incessant boycotts are just ways for the loudest minority to coerce large corporations to do their dirty work for them. In the Zumbo case, a bunch of yahoos spread vitriol to thousands more through blogs, while posting names and addresses of companies that had nothing to do with what he said and encouraging people to write those companies and demand they shut down Zumbo’s income as punishment. They provided sample letters to send, and talking points to mention. The sponsors all complied immediately, because one person’s fair treatment was worth less to them than a boycott by tens of thousands of customers, most of whom would have done nothing at all if they hadn’t been goaded into it. William Donohue’s 4-person Potemkin “association” did the same thing to John Edwards’s campaign, through blogs and big media, in order to harass two bloggers.
It was perfectly reasonable for the people who disliked those writers to refuse to read their material. For Zumbo, that would have impacted his revenue stream proportionately to the percentage of his target audience who objected - probably a noticeable but not devastating degree. For Marcotte and McEwan, the monetary effect would have been negligible because they don’t make their livings off their blogs; their regular readers apparently didn’t care either. And that’s appropriate - their consequences would be proportionate to the part of their audience they have impacted. But that wasn’t good enough for the gun nuts and Donohue. They had to destroy their targets to satisfy their personal political aims, and they did so by using inflammatory rhetoric to rope in people who wouldn’t have cared or probably even noticed if left to their own devices, and then prodding those people to put pressure on third parties in order to punish the unwary speakers. That’s unreasonable, unfair, and undemocratic.
Beyond merely avoiding speakers you find offensive, I do think it’s reasonable to inform the editors or programmers that you prefer better content. But, again, that’s different from organizing or even encouraging other customers to put coordinated pressure on. Let them write their own letters if they care enough - don’t try to create an incident to ratify your feelings about your pet issue. And if this proves to be an unworkable distinction, then just shut up. Read or don’t read what you want to - the publishers will figure it out eventually. But don’t stir up mobs to leverage your own anger with others’ easily-directed, but otherwise indifferent, force.
I’ve mentioned before the conservative habit of calling boycotts on everything in sight, often on wrong information. Using the same power against a single person is worse. It goes far beyond merely exercising your right to agree or disagree.
Comment 3/4/2007
I believe I understand the rather fine distinction you are trying to make: how to oppose offensive speech while not opposing the idea of speaking. Or at least I hope I do, since the alternative appears to be just throwing up your hands and doing nothing. (And no, refusing to read it yourself and otherwise keeping silent is not doing something.) That distinction is a tough one that has troubled free-speech advocates for a long, long time.
Unfortunately, I think you’ve come no closer to solving the riddle than anyone else has.
I don’t want this to get into a long-winded discussion, so I’ll make this my last here (unless you ask something of me). However, at the top I have to make an important point: We are not talking about Jim Zumbo, a relatively unknown figure (outside of his gun hunter community, that is) who expressed an opinion. We are talking about Ann Coulter, a famous figure who has repeatedly engaged in hate speech. Neither their fame, their power, nor the nature of the complaints against them are the same. Ignoring that seriously distorts the argument.
Now. First, I very assuredly did not say that “no one has a right to be heard.” In fact, that’s almost an absurdity: The right to free speech means nothing absent the right to have the opportunity to be heard. What I said was that no one has a greater inherent right to a nationwide (and well-paid) platform than anyone else. Ann Coulter does have a right to speak. She does have a right to be heard. She does not have a right to be on national television. Failure to distinguish between the former two propositions on the one hand and the latter on the other concedes greater free speech rights to the rich, the famous, and the powerful not just in practice but in principle.
Next, okay, your position doesn’t make it impossible to protest hate speech. It just makes it impossible to do it effectively. You register your complaint with the program director or the editor, tell them you will not watch their show/read their newspaper while so-and-so is associated with it and then you move on because, it appears, you are not ethically allowed to encourage others to do the same. The result is that things continue as they were before - unless by some coincidence wild enough to be called a miracle a whole lot of others, unknown both to you and to each other, happen to all express the same objection. Except, of course, if at that point the PD/editor, feeling the pressure of so many independent voices, cans the speaker, they have been “threatened” into firing them and the speaker has been “harassed into silence.”
The problem is, the one course you clearly endorse - ignoring such as Coulter, just not reading or listening to her, not writing or talking about her - is, I say again, the one thing you must not do. Hate speech does not die when it is ignored, it grows. Silence is not an option.
So I guess the question that needs an answer is, when you write that letter or make that phone call to express your objection, what are you hoping to accomplish? What do you hope will be the result? Do you hope it will change something? If so, isn’t that the “threat,” the pressure, you find wrongful? If not, why bother doing it? It almost seems that you have moralized yourself into paralysis, your only choices being ineffectiveness and ethical wrongness. Even if you don’t agree with that conclusion, can you at least understand why I find your argument troublesome?
What comes through to me more clearly in your response here than in your original post is a discomfort with the very idea of a boycott, with the very idea of any actions that could affect Coulter’s access to the national media - even though you agree such access is something to which she has no actual right - because boycotts, to you, engender visions of “a bunch of yahoos spread[ing] vitriol” to mindless boobs who “would have done nothing at all if they hadn’t been goaded into it.” That is, boycotts, by their nature, are “mob” - and therefore illegitimate - actions.
That, I expect, is the source of your equation of a call to boycott Ann Coulter and urge that she be denied well-paid forums with “round[ing] up all your cousins who don’t even know what’s going on and go shoot [her] windows out” and “stir[ring] up mobs to leverage your own anger with others’ easily-directed, but otherwise indifferent, force.” That is an equation (and therefore an argument) I find wholly unconvincing - not to say over-wrought.
The bottom line is, if such a boycott got off the ground, Coulter’s notoriety and I imagine some portion of her income would likely be at risk - but her freedom of speech would not. Period.
Comment 3/4/2007
When you loons on the left start reprimanding your friends for calling those with whom they disagree “nazis” and “Hitler” then get back with us and let us know about how your itsy, bitsy feelings are hurt by Coulter. I certainly believe it was a mistake to call perverts the f word in public.
Maybe you could spare a little bit of outrage for the racist performance of Hillary at Selma this weekend when she tried to talk like a black person. I didn’t see the video, but was she dressed in blackface? I almost expected her to say, “I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthin’ no baby, Miz Charlotte.” How about some criticism of well-spoken, clean Obama for his attempt to speak with an accent that is a stereotypical black accent? He also lied when he said that the Slema march had made the love of his white Kansas mother and his black African father acceptable. The Selma march was in 1964, and he was born in 1961. What a liar!
Comment 3/5/2007
[…] KTK: I have seen many calls for Coulter’s ostracism, but not one for the denunciation of homophobia or right-wing hate in general; the intention, again, seems to be mitigating embarrassment, not really reflecting on the conservative values that made Coulter a star in the first place - I have to say I am concerned that this is not the right way to deal with the issue. As much as I despise Coulter, as much as I would like to see her and all her fans (including the critics who are now silently saying ” . . . but, you know, she has a point . . .”) gone from the public arena, I don’t want to see any more Zumbos, any more mobs, any more secondary boycotts or harassment or blacklists. To be consistent with my position on Zumbo, whom I didn’t really care that much about to begin with, and with that on Amanda and Melissa, who fall into an entirely other category, I must ask for the same consideration for Coulter, whom I truly loathe. […]
Pingback 3/5/2007
Fred, here’s a little help for you re your Obama comment above. To make something acceptable is not the same as to make something possible. In the example you cite, Obama’s point is that mixed couples were unacceptable in 1961, but the civil rights movement changed public perception, so mixed couples became acceptable. Hope this clears things up for you.
Comment 3/5/2007
“Hope this clears things up for you.”
I don’t need your help. I know the difference between acceptable and possible.
The point is that Obama lied. The exact quote from his speech is:
“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama.”
Obama directly says that the march in Selma made it acceptable for his mother and father to get together and have a child. Do the math. Obama was born in 1961 and the Selma march was in 1965. Now, explain that. Oh, nevermind. I forgot that you don’t respond to my posts.
Comment 3/6/2007
I doth think that she protests too much. Has anyone ever seen her with an escort (male preferred)? Has anyone even tried to date the feminazi barfomaniac??
Comment 3/6/2007
Now there’s a classy statement by a good liberal.
Comment 3/6/2007
Fred, while making fun of Coulter for being hideous isn’t exactly high discourse, it’s still slightly better than she deserves. There’s really no way to take her seriously, except in the same sense that strep throat is serious. In any forum less right-wing than FreeRepublic, there’s no real need to discuss the merits of her or her opinions. All that’s left is sport, such as insulting her.
Comment 3/7/2007
Physician, heal thyself.
Comment 3/8/2007
Well, let’s see.
The only things I call faggots are bundles of sticks and cigarettes. Check.
I haven’t claimed any widows are enjoying the deaths of their husbands. Check.
Ah, screw this, she’s not worth looking up all the crazy shit she’s done.
Comment 3/8/2007
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Comment 7/2/2007