The View from Right Field

Can Americans Be Trusted With Campaign Finance Disclosures?

Some Americans want to limit political spending.  They would limit how much candidates can spend and how much people can contribute.  They would limit what third parties can do.  And they would try to “level the playing field” so that one side wouldn’t win because it had more money to spend than the other.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has said that most of these ideas violate the First Amendment.  However, the Supreme Court does allow restrictions that are aimed at preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption.  Therefore, the Court has allowed limits on contributions to individual candidates and the political parties.

Some of the people who would like to limit political spending realize that the First Amendment doesn’t allow it and that money, like water, will find a way.  Therefore, they fall back on disclosure of contributions.  If we can’t limit spending, they say, at least we can require contributions and spending to be disclosed.  In the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (before he was on the Court), “[s]unlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

The question more recently has become, however, whether Americans can be trusted with the disclosure of campaign contributions and spending.  Earlier this year, Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign because he had donated money to the 2008 California referendum (Proposition 8) that tried to ban same-sex marriage.  (The proposition passed but California courts wouldn’t enforce it.)

A Proper Response to the Deaths of American Diplomats in Libya

The events in Libya are truly tragic, and our number one concern should be for the families of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the other members of our embassy staff who were murdered (not “killed,” “murdered”) in Benghazi, Libya, on Tuesday, September 11.  After we have appropriately cared for those families, we need to figure out how to respond to this kind of attack in the future – because there will be more attacks.  And our response to this attack was inadequate.

The attack in Libya (and other attacks in Egypt) was supposedly the result of some anti-Islam video/Internet movie that has been circulating in the United States.  I say “supposedly” because my guess is that the movie was a handy excuse used by some group or another to incite crowds as a cover for deliberate attacks on our embassy/consulate, whether for internal Libyan (or Egyptian, in the case of the riots in Cairo) political purposes or for an al-Qaeda-like attack on the U.S.  But regardless of the real reason for the attacks, our government’s response to them was wrong-headed.

Here is what Secretary of State Clinton said, in part:

"Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior, along with the protest that took place at our Embassy in Cairo yesterday, as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet.  America's commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.  But let me be clear--there is no justification for this, none.  Violence like this is no way to honor religion or faith."

President Obama said such the same thing:

"Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence.  None.  The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts."

Both of the statements miss the point.  Certainly, the United States respects all faiths.  After all, we have a Constitutional amendment that guaranties freedom of religion.  But this is not just a matter of religious “tolerance” and there being no justification for violence.

This is a matter of defending free speech.  I don’t know what this video says or shows, and I don’t care.  I don’t care because the same Constitutional amendment that guaranties freedom of religion also guaranties free speech.  We in the United States don’t have a Constitutional amendment against getting your feelings hurt.  We do have a Constitutional amendment protecting “freedom of speech” and “of the press” and protecting “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The First Amendment is part of what makes the United States special.  Not many other countries – or people – are lucky enough to have such a special protection of the right to speak out.  These are the values and the principles that our President and our Secretary of State need to be defending, publicly and proudly.

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Update (9/13/12 11:50 pm):  Earlier today I criticized both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton for their inadequate responses to the deaths of four U.S. diplomats in Libya on Tuesday and rioting in several countries in the Middle East, including especially Egypt, allegedly in response to an anti-Islam video circulating on the Internet in the United States.  I criticized the President and the Secretary of State for failing to defend the First Amendment and freedom of speech in their responses to these murders and attacks.

While neither President Obama nor Secretary of State Clinton mentioned freedom of speech in their first reactions, they did, in subsequent statements, eventually get around to the First Amendment.  The defense was certainly not as strong as I would have liked.  Here is what the Secretary of State said:

“Now, I know it is hard for some people to understand why the United States cannot or does not just prevent these kinds of reprehensible videos from ever seeing the light of day. Now, I would note that in today’s world with today’s technologies, that is impossible. But even if it were possible, our country does have a long tradition of free expression which is enshrined in our Constitution and our law, and we do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views no matter how distasteful they may be.”

But she said it.  And the President said it, too: “[W]e believe in the First Amendment.”  And so, I wanted to acknowledge it.

Further Update (9/15/12 12:05 am): It looks like my acknowledgement of the President's and Secretary of State's defense of the First Amendment in the controversy of the anti-Islam video on the Internet may have been premature.  According to this report, the White House tried, in effect, to get Google/YouTube to take the video down.  Thankfully, Google refused

The Return of the Know-Nothings – Part 2

I wrote earlier on Professor Geoffrey Stone’s rather appalling article in April 30’s Chicago Tribune, "Our-faith based justices." In his article Professor Stone comes close to accusing the five justices who upheld Congress’s ban on partial-birth abortion (or "intact dilation and evacuation," if you prefer) of doing so because they are Catholic and they let their religious beliefs control over the law.

I understand that Professor Stone is very upset at the Supreme Court’s decision, but I wonder if he has fully thought through the implications and possible consequences of what he is saying. The charges he made are not only very serious but also very dangerous.

The problem is that Professor Stone’s article at least borders on bigotry, if it is not bigotry, pure and simple. Bigotry is one of those things that is, sadly, part of human nature. Humanity has struggled for centuries to overcome its tendencies towards things such as this. Progress has been slow, and uneven at times, but we have progressed. Still, too often it seems only a thin veneer of good manners and civilized behavior separates us from these prejudices and biases that are part of our dark side.

Because this veneer is, in places, so very thin, we must be careful to guard it and protect it. Those of us who should know better, and that would include professors at law schools such as the University of Chicago, have an especial duty to avoid appealing to those base tendencies that would break through this veneer.

Once one side in a dispute makes a charge such as this, the other side will feel justified in replying in kind or even worse. Back and forth this goes, as matters spin out of control. Once our fears and base emotions are unleashed, it is hard to know what will happen, but there have been too many examples throughout history of what can happen.

Abortion is one of those issues where we need to be particularly careful to avoid appeals which could incite the extremists on either side. Terrible things have happened in the past. We should not tempt those parts of our nature which could do such things again in the future. I would hope that Professor Stone did not fully realize the risk he was taking, for all of us, in saying the things he did in his article. I would hope that because it would be even worse if he knew it and said them anyway.

Truth and the Right to Be Wrong

Julian Baggini in the Guardian of April 14 discusses what he, and others (including those as different as the British Ministry of Defence and the Vatican), see as the clash between "pragmatic relativism and dogmatic certainty." Mr. Baggini says

"the MoD [Ministry of Defence] believes that ‘the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values’ [is] causing more and more people to seek ‘more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism’."

Baggini asks

"[h]ow did we get to this dismal Hobson's choice? The finger of blame has to be pointed largely at academics and intellectuals who have been so keen to debunk popular notions of truth that they have created a culture in which the middle ground between shoulder-shrugging relativism and dogmatic fundamentalism has been vacated."

Baggini says that many left-leaning intellectuals think

"that denying objectivity and truth is politically important, as a way of liberating people from the ways of seeing the world promoted as the Truth by the powerful. However, it turns out that [they have] seriously misjudged what happens if intellectuals deny truth stridently and frequently enough. Far from making liberal openness more attractive, such denials actually make it appear empty, repugnant and weak compared to the crystalline clarity and certainty of dogma."

Baggini concludes that "[u]nless we can make a convincing case that the choice is not between relativism or dogmatism, more and more people will reject the former and embrace the latter."

I am not a philosopher, and I do not want to get into all of their debates on "Truth." However, I do think there is a real world position between what seems to many to be a principle-less moral relativism and the kind of dogmatic certainism that leads its believers to try to subject the world to its rules. That position is "the right to be wrong."

I believe that some things are right and that some things are wrong. But my certainty does not make me think I have the right to force my beliefs on others. Even though I believe, even though I know, I am right, I do not think I have the right to force others to do or to believe as I do – because I think we all have the right to be wrong.

Obviously, there are limits on a right to be wrong. Some things, such as stealing something just because you want it or driving 120 mph on city streets, must be prohibited. Other things should not. I can think it is absolutely clear that government-run health care is a bad idea for the United States today, but I would not pass a law making it illegal to support that idea. I know that Wrigley Field is the best baseball park in the world, but I would not require all ballparks be made to look like the Friendly Confines. The reason I would not do this is not because I think I might be wrong. I do not. I am sure I am right and other people are wrong. I just believe that other people have the right to their opinions even though they are wrong; i.e., they have the right to be wrong.

It is important to emphasize that saying a person or a country has the right to be wrong does not mean that I think I might be wrong or that he or they might be right. It just means I am not going to use force to make them believe or act like me.

Drawing the line between where a person or society has the right to be wrong and where they do not is not always easy. However, that does not mean all things are relative and nothing is right or wrong. Just because something is not prohibited does not mean it might be right. Things can be legal and wrong. There is truth. We just do not force it on others.

Now some people may think "the right to be wrong" is an obvious thing, a superficial idea that it is nothing more than a cute little turn of a phrase. It may be a nice phrase, but it does have real meaning, and it requires two things. First, you have to actually believe that what you think is right is right and that, this is the hard part, what somebody else believes is wrong. This is difficult because people do not want to be confrontational. They do not want to say that they are right and somebody else is wrong. They would rather just say that you can believe what you want and I will believe what I want. But that, on a society-wide basis, is just another form of moral relativism. To have a right to be wrong, you have to first believe you are right and the other person is wrong. You do not have to be obnoxious about it, but you do have to clearly believe you are right – and they are wrong.

Second, once you believe there is a right and a wrong, you then have to agree that other people can do what they want, within appropriate limits, even though it is absolutely clear they are wrong. For example, even though you know (as we all do) that cigarettes are dangerous, you have to let people smoke them. Similarly, people must be allowed to build houses which do not fit the style of the other houses in their neighborhood even though their neighbors do not like it. People must be permitted to believe in whichever god they want or that there is no god at all, and to meet with other people to worship their god or to talk about the fact there is no god, even if the majority of society believes differently.

While these may seem obvious (they do to me), they are not obvious to many people. There are places where government tries to make it against the law to do "wrong" things. Some times it is done to protect people from harming themselves. Other times it is to because one group has more votes than another. And some times it is just because it can. There are plenty of people in the United States who would like to ban cigarettes. There are rules in some communities prohibiting new architectural styles or architectural styles that do not "fit" what the community thinks is right (rules that, if they had been in place in the past, would have stopped some of our greatest architects in their tracks). In Saudi Arabia it is against the law to worship any but the official god. The right to be wrong, however, means that people must be allowed to do and believe as they want.

One final point: Some will object to my concept of "the right to be wrong" on the ground that I am disrespecting them and their beliefs when I say they are wrong. That is not true. In fact, I am giving them the ultimate respect: I am defending their right to believe what they do even though I know they are wrong.

"The right to be wrong" is the proper middle ground between a moral relativism that accepts everything while believing nothing and a dogmatic fundamentalism that would force everybody to believe and do as it says. In spite of what some philosophers may say, there is truth in this world. The point of the right to be wrong is that I have no right to force others to agree with the truth as I know it. They have a right, subject to proper limits, to believe as they do, even though I know they are wrong – because they, like all of us, have the right to be wrong.

Tolerance and "The Right To Be Wrong"

Here are some initial thoughts on a topic that has been of interest for a while:

The problem with tolerance is that it is too often confused with approval. But that is not what tolerance is or means, and by confusing tolerance with approval, one gets two things wrong. First, one establishes too narrow of a scope for tolerance. Second, one raises the stakes on tolerance too high

Tolerance is not the "right to do" a certain thing. Rather, tolerance should be viewed as allowing other people "the right to be wrong." This is important distinction. What it means is that we do not have to approve or accept or agree with what is being done to be tolerant of it. We can know with absolute certainty that what somebody is doing is wrong and still allow them to do it, to be tolerant of what they are doing, because they have the right to be wrong.*

We tolerate people doing what they want not because they might be right or because we do not know what is right or what produces the best results. We tolerate what a person does or thinks, even though we know for a 100% certainty they are wrong, because each person has the right to be wrong. It is not because a particular view or act might be right in the future or better in the long run that we tolerate it. We tolerate it, we allow a person to do it, because each person has have the right to be wrong.

Viewed this way, being tolerant becomes much easier. If tolerance does not mean acceptance or approval, then it is easier to be tolerant. I can tolerate something even though I know it is wrong because people have the right to be wrong. It is much harder to be tolerant if tolerance is based on the possibility that what somebody is doing might be right. If that is the basis for tolerance, then an act can be prohibited, in fact, it should be prohibited, if a majority is 100% sure it is wrong.

If only things that might be right or which cannot be proved wrong are tolerated, then the fact something is tolerated means it might be right. That is a problem because it means the mere act of tolerating something becomes an acceptance of the possibility that it might be right. And it is not a very large step from that to saying tolerance means something is right.

This is where the problem comes in. If toleration means something is right, or at least not wrong, then we have raised the stakes on toleration because if somebody really believes something is wrong, then they cannot tolerate it.

On the other hand, if one has the right to be wrong, then tolerance only means accepting that a person has the right to be wrong. When tolerance does not mean or imply approval or even the possibility of approval, then tolerance becomes easier, and people can more easily tolerate what other people do or think, because, after all, they have the right to be wrong.

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* Obviously, the right to be wrong does not include the right to harm other people or interfere with the rights of other people. Rights do not extend that far, but even the idea of "not harming other people" must be narrowly drawn or the exception becomes the rule, and we are right back where we started.