Snowflakes, left and right, threaten free speech

America’s foremost First Amendment organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), conducts a survey every year on the state of free speech on college campuses.

Anyone who pays even passing attention to what’s been happening on the country’s more than 2,500 four-year, degree-granting institutions in the past quarter century knows the big picture over time: Students have grown increasingly intolerant of opinions with which they disagree.

This year’s FIRE report would have been unremarkable in every way other than being yet another plot point on a map that depicts an increasingly, dangerously closed-minded America. When the people at the age and in the places that are supposed to be the most open to different ways of thinking are increasingly brittle and intolerant, the implications for the larger society bode ill.

But on the day the report, months in the making, was released, Charlie Kirk was assassinated while expressing his views on a college campus. The most significant finding of the survey — that 34 percent of college students believe that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in some cases — went from being another headshaker to headline news.

It would have been an even bigger story if it would have fit one of the main competing narratives in the wake of Kirk’s death. Our politics just now are dominated by the pitched battle between the left and right over who is to blame for the problem of political violence. But the report shows that students across every political and ideological subgroup are alarmingly at ease with not only violence, but also the other, less extreme means of silencing opposing views.

For example, almost three-quarters of all students think it’s sometimes OK to shout down someone expressing an opposing view, including majorities of both parties. But it's in the use of physical force to silence others that we see the biggest increase and the most worrying kind of bipartisanship.

From the foundation’s report: “Students who identify as ‘Strong Democrats’ are one of the few groups that haven’t markedly increased in support for using violence to stop a speaker, but only because they started at a higher rate of acceptance. … The portions of ‘Strong Republicans’ and ‘Republicans’ who accept the use of violence to stop a speaker have more than tripled in four years. Even acceptance among ‘Independents’ has more than doubled.”

Right-leaning students are now as comfortable or even more comfortable than their left-wing counterparts with the use of force to silence speech they do not like, spoiling what could have been an otherwise very useful tool for Republicans or Democrats who would like to pretend that the problem of political violence is one-sided. 

A decade ago, the loud and proud American left was exploring the question of whether people would have had the moral courage to “kill baby Hitler,” which evolved from a time-traveler’s hypothetical conundrum into a flesh-and-blood question: “Is it O.K. to punch a Nazi?” The journey from there to the online affection for Luigi Mangione is a grimly straightforward one.  

When authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt published their social science blockbuster “The Coddling of the American Mind” in 2018 — an update to Allan Bloom’s groundbreaking 1987 book, “The Closing of the American Mind” — the problem of intolerant youth was rightly understood as more of a problem of the left than the right.

But the underlying problem that both books were pointing to is about atomization: the increasing view among Americans that their own ideas are precious, special and terminally unique. 

Bloom’s point was that the humanities had been destroyed by a lack of rigor and standards in which “virtues” were replaced by “values.” It’s a postmodern way of thinking in which we wouldn’t study Thucydides, Shakespeare or Kant for what they wrote, how they wrote it or what the context was, but in which we would explore how we feel about it. 

Three decades later, the “Coddling” authors described a much broader problem, what Lukianoff, who is now the president of FIRE. calls “safteyism.” It’s an approach to child-rearing and education in which children are treated as fragile and taught what the book says are “the three great untruths”: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

When the book came out, it confirmed the suspicions of many conservative Americans that young people were a whole bunch of “snowflakes,” a term that was in wider use before the surge in popularity for the more politically coded “woke.” Snowflakes were the pronoun-conscious, trigger-word-vigilant, censorious young people who were the right’s cartoonish depiction of the young adults of the left. 

But there was obviously a great deal more going on with young people than could be contained within one party or the other. We see that not just in the growing fragileness of right-leaning students in the FIRE studies, but in the rise of a “cancel culture” on the right to match the one on the left.

What author Thomas Chatterton Williams dubbed “the woke right” sprang up with its own speech codes and its own vendettas for individuals and institutions that did not adhere to its own version of political correctness, no matter how petty. Seeing online mobs hunt for perpetrators of “bad speech” in the wake of the Kirk killing confirms that the problem that FIRE has long been tracking on campuses has gone far beyond any campus or any ideology.

It would be comforting if this was a story about a political movement that had introduced dangerous ideas into a society that was otherwise healthy. But all the evidence points to something much worse: The political movements are exploiting an underlying trend in our society as a whole in which fragile people seek protection from ideas they dislike.

Chris Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.