Yascha Mounk at Substack: Free speech is under attack. In the United States, government officials are increasingly telling social media companies which forms of damaging “misinformation” they should censor, and now have the Supreme Court’s implicit blessing to do so. In Europe, overly broad restrictions on hate speech have been used to threaten people making unpopular statements with jail time. According to a government-sponsored draft bill in Canada, political opinions that could be construed as supporting genocide would be punished with life imprisonment.
Plenty of arguments against free speech lack any credible pretense of sophistication. They simply jump from the undoubted fact that many people say dumb or disgusting things on the internet to the understandable, if wrong-headed, wish that anybody who says such things should be made to shut up. But those who argue for restrictions on free speech with an ounce of sophistication have increasingly begun to invoke an idea by a philosopher whose work they otherwise studiously ignore: Karl Popper and his “paradox of tolerance.”
Invocations of Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance started to gain currency in the early 2010s, when some progressives felt disappointed with what they perceived as the ineffectual high-mindedness of Barack Obama’s administration. As Sally Kohn argued in the Washington Post at the time, liberals are wrong to see tolerance as a virtue: “Tolerance plays by the rules, while intolerance fights dirty. The result is round after round of knockouts against liberals who think they’re high and mighty for being open-minded but who, politically and ideologically, are simply suckers.” Kohn adapted a quote she drew from Popper—that “unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance”—to lend her desire for Democrats to take the low road a halo of authority: “To put the current political climate in Popper’s terms,” she wrote, “liberals are neutered by their own tolerance.”
Invocations of Popper became even more common after Donald Trump took office half a decade later, especially in the wake of the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Commentators now turned to the Paradox of Tolerance to suggest that it was legitimate to ban the rallies of those who hold extreme political views…
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