Justin Murphy is a political scientist who’s a lecturer  in “governance and policy” at the University of Southampton.  On his website he writes about politics and social phenomena from a left-wing viewpoint. His latest post, “Who’s afraid of free speech in the United States?” has some surprises for those of us—including me—who feel that the Left is especially censorious compared to the Right. His data, compiled from the U.S. General Social Survey, shows that that’s not quite right.

Murphy analyzed data reported over 45 years on American’s on political self-identification as well as willingness to censor those espousing a given view. Here are the questions people were asked about censorship:

For most of its surveys between 1972 and 2016, the General Social Survey asked a U.S. sample to consider the following types of potential public speakers. (They asked about a few others but the following are the ones they asked most consistently.)

• “…a person who believes that Blacks are genetically inferior.” (Henceforth “racist.”)
• “Somebody who is against all churches and religion…” (Henceforth “antitheist.”)
• “…a man who admits he is a Communist.” (Henceforth “communist.”)
• “…a person who advocates doing away with elections and letting the military run the country.” (Henceforth “militarist.”)
• “…a man who admits that he is a homosexual?” (Henceforth, “homosexual.”)

For each type of person, they also asked, “If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community, should he be allowed to speak, or not?”

Note that First Amendment Adherents should answer 100% to the “allow speech” question for any topic.

Murphy’s first graph, below shows that the proportion of people willing to allow expression of these five views has risen over time across all speech categories except one: racism. As expected with the increasing acquisition of civil rights by gays, which reflects society’s views, those willing to censor homosexual speech has fallen from about 35% to 10%.  The label of “racist” is still one that demonizes a person for good, whether or not it be true, and thus the 60% of people who would allow a racist to speak has remained steady over time, with a hint that it’s falling (that, too, is unsurprising).

The graph also shows that in no category except gays would more than 80% of people allow someone holding the views given above to speak. Since the First Amendment bars any abrogation of this kind of speech, these censors are clearly abrogating the Constitution. But it’s heartening that the degree of censorship is generally waning.

Murphy is puzzled by why “racists” haven’t gained like the other categories:

 As late as the 1970s & 1980s, the Left & the Right were, compared to today, relatively ambivalent about letting people, especially their ideological enemies, speak freely. Many conservatives did not wish to give freedom of speech to groups they were inclined to dislike, such as homosexuals and atheists. Liberals were less willing to give speech rights to militarists than they are today. But since then, the left and the right have become more tolerant to the free speech of many groups. Except racists.

. . . The general, national puzzle, therefore, is not “Why do leftists suddenly seem so opposed to racist speakers, or speakers deemed racist?” This is a puzzle, which we’ll address next, but it’s not the over-arching puzzle. The most general puzzle is “Why have racist speakers, or speakers deemed racist, been exempt from the rising tide of speech toleration, for liberals and conservatives?” As Figure 1 shows, the relatively stable attitudes toward racist speakers are visible as nationwide averages, ignoring ideology. I won’t try to provide an answer for this question here, as clarifying the question seems worthwhile enough for the moment.

The answer seems pretty clear to me: society at large has become more accepting of gays and atheists, not many people worry about communists or militarists, but as people of color gain more power and become more vociferous about oppression, the stigma of being racist has increased.

Murphy also gives the data subdivided by people’s self-description on the political spectrum. The headline tells much of the story:

Now the graphs are small, and it’s hard to make much of this out by eye, but Murphy claims that “generally, on average, support for free speech increases as you move from conservatism to liberalism. That seems clear, and the shaded area of “allowable speech” moves from 0.6-0.8 among extreme conservatives to about 0.6-1 as one goes towards liberalism. These data hold over the last few years, too, so the idea that the left is more censorious than the right, at least on these important issues, is wrong.  It’s not a surprise to Murphy, though:

To any political scientist, this should not be surprising; liberals are known to be higher in openness than conservatives, and conservatives have always been more concerned with social control (law and order). This is only interesting as a corrective for claims that have become very popular in the alt-ideological indie media world. This is understandably due to the presence of high-profile left-wing ideologues opposed to free speech—and the presence of high-profile free speech defenders who happen to lean center-right/libertarian. I think I have heard on separate occasions people such as Bret Weinstein, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan and others, all talk about how puzzling it is that liberalism/leftism used to be the camp of free speech but now they’re the camp of speech suppression. This is not really true. I think what they should say, and maybe what they mean to say, is that “a puzzling minority of vaguely leftist activists, who happen to have gained media attention, wish to suppress free speech.”

What does surprise Murphy is that the highest tolerance for racist speakers seems to be on both the extreme conservative and extreme liberal side, adding “maybe for different reasons.” Well, I can understand the conservatives, because many of them are racists, but the extreme liberals? Maybe it’s just part of their general approbation for free speech.

I’m glad my side of the fence is less censorious, but I’ll continue to call out prominent leftists who want to limit free speech. I’ve given up on the right.

Finally, Murphy plots the political-spectrum data from four years ago for just two categories of speech: racist and militarist.

Looking at the blue “racist” lines, we see that those who are least willing to tolerate racist speech are liberals near the middle of the political spectrum (people around 4.0), while those more liberal (up to extreme liberals) are more willing. As one gets more conservative, the willingness to let racists speak also increases, but then drops strongly towards more extreme conservatives, something I don’t understand since those should be the most racist conservatives. These data are confusing to me, but in general one still sees that the average on the left side of the plot (liberals) is higher than on the right (conservatives).

The pattern differs a bit for militarism (red line). Again we find extreme liberals less willing than moderate liberals to let militarists speak—those who would let the military run the U.S. On average, conservatives are far more censorious than liberals of letting militarists speak, something that I wouldn’t have expected. Maybe these are the gun-toting Rightists who fear the army taking over the country, and think that they can constitute the preventive militia prescribed by the Second Amendment.

Murphy then finds one more surprise—to him:

The fourth and final interesting observation to be made here is that people who would “no platform” racists are substantially more willing to let speak people who preace [sic] literal military takeover of the government. The label “militarist” in the GSS data is somewhat understated. Militarist here means “a person who advocates doing away with elections and letting the military run the country.” It is fascinating, given that anti-racism is often rhetorically linked to anti-fascism, that while 60% of Slight Liberals would allow racists to speak, almost 80% of Slight Liberals would allow a speaker preaching military fascism. This suggests to me that the vociferous wish to suppress anyone labeled “racist” is driven by an underlying psychology distinct from aversion to fascism.

Again, I’m a bit confused. The people who are the most censorious of racist speech are those who are slightly liberal, yet those are people who, compared to other liberals, are also most censorious of militarist speech (those at about 2.5 on the scale).  The same holds for extreme conservatives.  I agree with Murphy that aversion to racism has different psychological wellsprings than does aversion to fascism (if “militarism” is equated to fascism), but I don’t see the same pattern as does Murphy.

Perhaps my brain is muddled today—a very distinct possibility—but to me the big lesson from the data is that the Left in general is less censorious than the Right, and that racist speech is the least tolerated form of offensive speech. The former is a bit of a surprise, but not the latter.

One note: deplatforming of college speakers, as judging by the FIRE “disinvitation database”, is being done far more these days by the Left than the Right. That doesn’t comport with Murphy’s finding that the left is the least censorious wing of politics. But this could reflect Murphy’s claim that the most censorious leftists are “a puzzling minority of vaguely leftist activists, who happen to have gained media attention.” It may be those activists who are responsible for the deplatforming.

h/t: Kurt