The British writer Brendan O’Neill, an editor of online journal Spiked, has become quite congenial to News Corp’s stable of grumpy old men. Despite self-identifying as a Marxist, he’s recently become a kind of honorary member of the Australian right.

O’Neill protests that he’s really a lefty but, as George Monbiot pointed out long ago, he “and his fellow travellers have sided with the toffs” in the class war. The Spiked editor begs to differ, yet he’s been showing up more regularly in the Australian and has earned repeat invitations to appear at conservative thinktanks and as the “contrarian” on the ABC’s Q&A program.

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He’s just concluded another tour of the colony, so it’s interesting to note that US rightwing outfit Breitbart recently published an odd story celebrating the rise of the “cultural libertarians”, O’Neill among them.



The “movement” includes professional anti-feminists like Christina Hoff Sommers, and celebrity culture warriors like Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos and Firefly actor Adam Baldwin, of late a supporter of Gamergate.

Perhaps unintentionally, the Breitbart article exposed the self-contradictory positions held by O’Neill and his fellow travellers – a bunch of people who talk endlessly, and proprietorially, about the right to free speech but squeal like stuck pigs when their opponents use speech to get things done.

Breitbart grounds the movement with the same story of victimhood that fuels everything from Piers Akerman’s columns to Donald Trump’s yelps about political correctness.

Apparently, “cultural authoritarians from both the left and right occupy most positions of power in government, academia and the media”.

In practice, the “authoritarians” that seem to exercise the cultural libertarians the most are feminists – whether they are people like Anita Sarkeesian who criticise the hypermasculine tenor of videogames, or the women scientists who objected to condescending remarks about them by Tim Hunt.

Yet judging by the state of, for instance, Reddit, social media and talk radio, these authoritarians are doing a pretty lousy job of shutting down offensive or abusive speech.



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Nevertheless, the cultural libertarians have had enough. Breitbart helpfully lists their core beliefs. The problems begin almost immediately.

First, we’re told, they value freedom of expression above all else:

No idea is too dangerous for cultural libertarians, who want total artistic and intellectual freedom. They often indulge in deliberately outrageous jokes and wacky opinions to test the boundaries of acceptability.

Interestingly, the very next tenet is a commitment to “resisting identity politics and public shaming”. According to Breitbart, they criticise:

[M]odern methods of cultural control and the neo-puritanism they say has infected modern cultural criticism. The newest of these is a rash of social justice-inspired online vigilantism where professional offence-takers use the power of social media to destroy the reputations and careers of their targets.

You can see the difficulty. The objection is not to the kind of threats to free speech that libertarians have traditionally concerned themselves with: security services executing dissidents, journalists going to jail, or police searching luggage for smuggled pornography.

What they’re squawking about is that the “authoritarians” with whom they disagree are themselves airing criticisms and finding allies on social media.

It’s a wounded, moralising condemnation of the presumed intent of “professional offence-takers”. The libertarian response to what they call “neo-puritanism” is, often, smears.

They’re complaining about people doing the same thing they do. It’s pure projection. It would appear that “no idea is too dangerous” for the cultural libertarians – apart from those expressed on Twitter by their political opponents. Inevitably, these turn out to be the political claims of feminists, queer activists, and those exploring the ramifications of white supremacy.

No doubt this is an uncomfortable position to be in. How to project oneself as a free speech warrior while deploring the success of others in using their capacity for political speech to get results?

One way out is to adopt a shrill and overblown rhetorical style, in the hope that bluster will win the day. O’Neill is a past master here. Last month, when some people on Twitter objected to the insensitive timing of an article on Nick Cave’s late son, and the newspaper pulled it, he wrote:

A free press that sometimes does dumb things is so much better than a press that can overnight be induced to self-flagellation and self-censorship by the new moral guardians. Because if we have the latter, then we’re essentially okaying tyranny.

Take that, Twitter tyrants!

People who have lived under real tyrannies might be insulted by this. The rest of us, trying to work out how a newspaper responding to public criticism in any way resembles authoritarian rule, might just wonder if O’Neill is taking the piss.

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It’s even more puzzling when you place this extraordinary sensitivity to the alleged crimes of self-righteous Twitter “mobs” alongside the fact that many of the cultural libertarians Breitbart celebrates spend so much time excusing, or simply ignoring, the harassment recently directed at their authoritarian critics, who they derisively term “cultural marxists”, or “social justice warriors”.

It’s almost as if the values the cultural libertarians articulate aren’t intended to be applied universally at all. They just seem to want free speech for themselves and their mates.

Liberal rights, like free speech, were supposed to help us to reconcile the conflicts that arise in pluralistic societies which lack a uniting existential faith. But they can’t, not least because not everyone has faith in liberalism as a universal arbiter.

One reason for that may be that people so often see that the loudest caterwauling about liberal rights seems to occur when powerful interests are threatened. When Zaky Mallah pointed out, quite correctly, that the way government speaks about young Muslims risks alienating them, the ABC was pilloried for weeks for giving a platform to a terrorist sympathiser.

But the same people who got hot and bothered about that were manning the barricades on behalf of Andrew Bolt when he was found, at law, to have published racially discriminatory blog posts.

This is laughable, but also to be expected, because rights aren’t settled things which can be quarantined from political beliefs and interests.

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As the disillusioned liberal John Gray pointed out, rights are indeterminate. Which is to say that in the real world, the right to speech might come into conflict with the right to be free of harassment, or racist abuse, or even with itself (online harassment provides an example of a case where an untrammelled right to speech might work to silence people).

That means we have to balance the interests that rights represent against one another. In advance of these acts of balancing, where conflicting interests are brought into contact, indeterminate rights like “free speech” have little meaning.

All of this points to open-ended, ongoing, messy conflict. In increasingly plural societies, it may require accommodating new kinds of political demands, and new definitions of harm.

In this context, the people described by Breitbart – including O’Neill – are better thought of as reactionaries of a liberal bent. They bellow reductive caricatures of Enlightenment values in order to ring-fence their own privileges, and to delegitimise the claims of identity politics in advance.

In one sense, it’s just another rhetorical move in the messy business of culture war. But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking that these people are the guardians of the Enlightenment when their positions don’t stand to reason.