I am quickly coming to the realization that free speech as currently practiced in the United States is dangerous to the survival of our republic and needs to be re-imagined.

The fundamental problem is that for a constitutionally enshrined ethos of free speech to be viable as a protective force in any society, it requires two essential elements: (1) well-informed people who can be generally relied upon to objectively and effectively distinguish between truth and falsehood, and (2) people who are aware enough of their own personal biases that they can neutrally assess contrary information based on its objective, factual content while muting prejudicial emotional response in the primitive, reptilian nodes of their brains.

And, importantly, they must also be imbued with good faith, a sense of responsibility for fair, honest consideration of any question.

Free speech for imbeciles

But we’re seeing very little of any of these virtues in American life right now, where uber-partisan conservatives, mostly devout Christians, are long used to thinking magically. And the president encourages them to not think independently, as he did with this admonishment yesterday:

“What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

This is exactly what dangerous free speech sounds like, when the hearers are incapable of hearing it for what it is: lying.

That’s why Trumpies have elected a president so flagrantly unrepresentative of traditional American core civic and moral values, even basic human rights, and why more than a third of the electorate still thinks he is akin to the second coming, apparently unaware his behavior manifestly reveals an appalling, self-obsessed human being, not a paragon of virtue.

So, for free speech to “work,” so to speak, it requires a populace informed by higher reason rather than lower passions. The electorate needs to be able to tell the difference, as Mark Twain once joked, between lightning and a lightning bug.

Indeed, that’s what the post-medieval Enlightenment was all about: learning to listen to substantive reason above the airy divinities and demons wafting about in our minds. To identify what is real over what is only imagined or hoped for.

Character flaws

For instance, our current president’s character flaws — his abusive disrespect of women and serial adulteries, his racism, his lack of intellectual depth or curiosity, his staggering narcissim, his lack of compassion — are manifestly, provably real. The demigod aura his supplicants seem to imagine around him is not.

Yet, he continues to spew daily, sometimes hourly, falsehoods, deceiving the American people with a rapacious, cold-eyed mendacity rarely if ever seen in any American political leader, much less a president.

Unfortunately, American free-speech and presidential protections being what they are, there seems to be virtually nothing reasonable citizens can do if pols in the president’s timidly self-serving party, who currently control both houses of Congress, refuse to hold him accountable for what are clearly high crimes and misdemeanors. Forget about his pathological lying.

Biased speech matters

The free speech of the president and his men (and women, like press secretary Sarah Sanders and advisor Kellyanne Conway) matters because it is not only purposefully destructive to the important work of American public government institutions like the FBI, CIA, IRS and even the Congress itself, but with malice aforethought also purposefully undermines the entire American experiment in democracy.

It’s an attack on the American nation from within (with Russian backing) to create a right-wing authoritarian government that favors white Christians over others, and rich over poor.

Those who believe otherwise are a large and complicit part of the problem, and the reason free speech is failing to achieve what the founders hoped: a stable, self-perpetuating democratic republic based on reason, not prejudice.

‘Christ-like’

The Trump true believers see their pompadoured paramour as a Christ-like figure wrecking the money-changer stalls in the sacred temple, but they fail to see that their modern-day savior is doing the same thing to their way of life only for self-serving political effect.

What clear, concrete benefits has Trump provided his base so far besides no health insurance?

But the issue at hand is free speech, the American version of which is arguably the most free in the world, limited only regarding such things as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Other Western democracies are far more circumspect in what unhindered speech they allow.

Roger Darlington of the British website Nighthawk, explains that American speech-focused free-speech traditions originated with medieval immigrants escaping dire religious persecution and slander in Europe for a new beginning in the New World. For them, speech was the thing.

But for stay-behind Europeans, who experienced centuries of bloody and bitter warfare that militant and corrosive religious speech unleashed, actions spoke louder, he says. Writes Darlington:

“[M]ost Europeans believe that words and actions are related, that the first can lead to the second and that, in cases of particularly bad speech one should not wait until it actually results in bad actions. Therefore, it is argued that certain forms of bad speech should be criminalised before it leads to bad actions.”

And common sense tells us they do.

Words can hurt you

But medieval Western European societies learned the hard way that words can hurt you and societies must be careful with them.

Anyone who believes what Donald Trump and his lock-step minions are not doing possibly irreparable damage to the republic are thinking only with their reptilian brains — the lobes that get lustily excited when the alienated or their leaders stick their thumbs in the eyes of purported oppressors, while the thinking lobes go dark.

In Germany, for instance, freedom of expression is granted by Article 5 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, which notably specifies that freedom of expression “may be limited by law.” Gratuitously or purposely insulting speech is punishable under the law (although satire enjoys more freedom if is respects “human dignity”), and malicious gossip and defamation are only allowable if provably true (journalists have wider latitude). “Casting false suspicion” is also a crime.

Trump clearly would have a hard time doing his thing in Germany. We should be so lucky.

The Convention on Human Rights

The Council of Europe in 1950 ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which includes freedom of expression but with specific caveats. Mirroring text in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ECHR holds that free speech and other freedoms, because they carry implicit duties and responsibilities:

“… may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”

Notably included in the ECHR is a specific allowance for “licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.”

The Fairness Doctrine

In American public broadcasting, before the proliferation of news media on cable and online, the Fairness Doctrine held sway. The Washington Post reported in 2011 that the doctrine, originally adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 1949 and rescinded in 1987 during the Republican Reagan administration:

“… required that TV and radio stations holding FCC-issued broadcast licenses to (a) devote some of their programming to controversial issues of public importance and (b) allow the airing of opposing views on those issues. This meant that programs on politics were required to include opposing opinions on the topic under discussion.”

In short, the doctrine was created to accommodate responsible political debate on the nation’s public airwaves, which the government owns. In other words, it was created to dilute partisan panderers like Fox “News.” (quote marks mine)

‘Extremely dangerous to democracy’

An incident earlier this year, caused some media-industry watchers to issue a stark warning of a “troubling trend” that’s “extremely dangerous to democracy.”

Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of America’s most dominant owners of television stations and a fervent backer of Donald Trump, had ordered its news anchors to present scripted commentaries denouncing “fake stories … that just aren’t true” on various media outlets.

In an article in the online magazine Salon, writer Michael Socolow wrote:

“This might sound like a media literacy lesson, offered in the public interest. But the invocation of ‘biased and false news’ so closely echoes charges from the Trump administration that many observers cried foul.”

Bring back the Fairness Doctrine?

Excessive news content favorable to Trump on Sinclair stations’ programming “provides additional evidence of partisan bias,” wrote Socolow, adding:

“So, is it time, as some commentators are suggesting, to restore the Fairness Doctrine, which used to require broadcasters ‘to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was fair and balanced?’”

Various Democratic members of Congress tried to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, in a push-back against what was seen as irresponsibly combative and disingenuously deceptive conservative talk radio, but the initiative was strongly opposed by conservatives and libertarians who view it as a First Amendment infringement.

Yet public support appears significant for requiring more balanced reporting by media, especially broadcast stations. A 2008 poll released by Rasmussen Reports showed 47 percent of 1,000 likely voters wanted government enforcement of balanced liberal and conservative commentary; 39 percent were opposed. Fifty-seven percent favored the same for websites and bloggers.

In the meantime, hyper-partisan news and commentary continue to fracture the body politic, while the U.S. president attempts to confuse the electorate with untruths in ways that he believes will help him get re-elected, but at the broad expense of the citizenry.

Unless free speech is able to proliferate in a fair and balanced manner, it promises to be prohibitively costly.

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