This is part of Wedge Issues, a pop-up advice column about politics, running now through the election. Submit a question here—it’s anonymous!
Dear Wedge Issues,
We recently went to a parade in our small-ish and very blue college town, which is located in a red area of a red state. The parade was full of community organizations. There were a few political groups that walked in the parade, including a Free Palestine group and a disturbingly large cadre of people supporting Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for Senate, and the pro-life cause more generally. My husband yelled, “You’re ruining this country!” a few times at the Republicans, while everyone around us fell into a hushed and disturbed silence at their presence. One of the Republicans, a guy wearing a cowboy hat, looked at him with a huge smile on his face, like he was happy he got a reaction. And a guy on the balcony of a nearby frat started yelling, “Trump, Trump, Trump.” Then the group passed by, and everyone stopped yelling.
I was embarrassed, but also sort of proud, and my husband still thinks he did the right thing and would have felt worse if he said nothing. Should one yell such things at these people who are, actually, in my opinion, ruining this country, but who are also walking in a community parade? Is the general expectation that such display should be met with annoyed silence, or should one, as it were, see something and say something?
—They’re Ruining This Country!
Dear They’re Ruining This,
It’s OK to have explosive emotions about American politics. It’s OK to express them openly. It’s even OK to yell at your neighbors, up to a point. It’s a free country! That said: I don’t personally love this kind of shouting at Trump supporters, and it sounds like, even though you felt some sense of pride, you ultimately didn’t love it either.
I think the disconnect is this: Yes, the Republican candidate for president is threatening to dismantle democracy. But the citizens who were expressing their support for him? They were participating in a civic activity, during an event meant for everyone in the community. They were doing so within acceptable bounds. They weren’t actively threatening anyone. Maybe they felt threatening to your husband or the group you were standing with, but the reality is, the way you describe the scene sounds pretty mundane—at least, in a historical sense: No weapons, no threats to physical autonomy, no swastikas or Klan hats, no armed guards standing by in fascist formations to curtail dissent. Just people with different sociopolitical goals—Free Palestine protesters included—marching in a local parade. To be honest with you, Ruining, your husband sounds like he was one of the obnoxious ones, too, yelling into a crowd.
Let me be really clear: Your husband’s right to yell is, also, protected speech. And in that sense, I should tell you that I was uncomfortable with my own discomfort about it. Just as the Trump supporters and the frat boys get to have free speech, so does your husband. He can yell all he wants!
If there is one thing I have come to believe in the past few years, following the news and discourse as Slate’s politics director, it’s that the liberals have to embrace everyone’s right to obnoxious speech. Getting outwardly upset by a gaggle of dudes in MAGA hats is losing the plot. (So too is getting too upset at the guy yelling at the guys in MAGA hats.) And if Democrats could make themselves free speech enthusiasts, the party will be a lot better positioned to reject the excesses of the far right in its quest to curtail speech and strip away other rights and freedoms.
Limits on free speech, after all, are most often used on the marginalized and vulnerable—even if they were put into place to protect those groups of people from hate and intimidation. A notable example comes from the late 1980s when the University of Michigan, after a series of really ugly incidents on campus, adopted a hate speech code that prohibited speech that “stigmatizes or victimizes” anyone based on race or gender. The code was eventually ruled unconstitutional—but not before it was used by white students to charge more than 20 Black students with racist speech. Not a single white student was punished for racist speech, even though that was what prompted the rule in the first place.
Another really raw example of a crackdown on free speech, from this year, is the response to the anti-war protests that took hold at many college campuses. The students protesting Israel’s devastating destruction of Gaza were, at times, over-the-top, lacking in nuance, and again, obnoxious. Some of them veered into active hate speech and ugly antisemitism. But the response by the ostensible adults in the room—the college presidents, legislators, police—was profoundly illiberal. Over 2,000 campus demonstrators were arrested, sometimes really violently. Some members of the media (who, by the way, are completely reliant on free speech codes to exist) argued students should be punished by being prevented from future jobs and internships. Grown adults posted identifying information so that these students could be more easily harassed where they lived.
(Never mind that only a handful of years earlier, many of these same adults were on their high horses lecturing college kids about how even hate speech was free speech—which is true—and calling them “snowflakes” for protesting the flame-throwing right-wing pundits who came to cause trouble at their campuses in the early Trump years. But I digress!)
The more we can brush off plain obnoxiousness, the better prepared we can be to fight real threats to our liberty. We can say: Trump supporters live in our communities and have a right to back their candidate and to publicly show their support. But we are not OK with the policies that restrict our rights to our bodies or freedoms, or anyone else’s. There is a profound difference between those things. And supporting the First Amendment rights of those we think might be ruining the country, in my opinion, helps to make room for a world in which they cannot ruin the country.
One of these things about speech, the reason we have the impulse to shout people down whom we disagree with, is that speech is powerful. Perhaps your husband could think of the ways that he could exercise his speech proactively: participating in the parade himself, or protesting people who are in office and who are making choices he disagrees with. (I will say that I feel a lot better about him yelling at a Senate candidate than I do about the idea of him yelling at random civilians.) Or maybe he wants to show up as one of those counterprotesters that use satirical imitation? (Clowning can be a great act of creative resistance, after all!) If your husband does decide to keep yelling at parades—that is up to him, and frankly, I support that too. I am glad we live in a country where he can do that. But, if you feel embarrassed and annoyed, I get it. And if it happens again, it’s also your right to tell him you’ll be walking away to go get food, and leave him to yell by himself.
