The Case for Censorship

I want to welcome David Lowenthal to the Walter Berns-Robert Bork-Irving Kristol Club. Each of us has, in the last three decades, argued in favor of censorship, using some of the same arguments as David Lowenthal. Many of our friends and colleagues assure us that, compared with the anti-censorship crowd, we have by far the better case. But no one out there is listening to our case–and this includes a fairly large number of people who agree that, in principle, it is the better one.

“In principle” must rank among the saddest phrases in the English language. When someone says he agrees with you in principle, that is usually prefatory to his explaining that he disagrees with you in fact. Apparently the case for censorship is intellectually powerful but politically impotent. Why is that?

Well, what the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci advocated, “the march through the institutions,” has already happened in the United States. It is not a Communist march, of course, just a radical, anti-capitalist, anti-conservative march. Any “bold conservative” agenda on the issue of censorship provokes overwhelming and savage institutional hostility. How does one go about appointing a pro-censorship judge to the Supreme Court in the face of such hostility from the American Bar Association, the deans of all the law schools, practically all the federal judges–and, of course, the media? Any such appointee would be mercilessly and unscrupulously “borked,” so that even in the unlikely event he was nominated he would never be confirmed.

What is true for the law holds for just about every other area of American life. Any educator who writes a letter to the Weekly Standard expressing agreement with Lowenthal knows that he will never become secretary of education, dean of any school of education, superintendent of education in any city or town–indeed, if he does not have tenure, he will be lucky to hold on to his current job. One can go further. Any military officer who writes such a letter has, at the very least, set a ceiling on his military career. So censorship does exist, of an informal kind that is far more powerful than any official censorship the United States has ever known. Because it is censorship that takes the form of post facto, ad hominem punitive action against anyone who dares express such a view publicly, it is not thought to be censorship at all. After all, liberals tell us, one must expect to pay a price for expressing unpopular opinions. John Stuart Mill revolves in his grave.

For years now, conservatives have been waiting for “the people” to rise up against the institutional elites who have imposed their culture on us. But the people can’t be bothered. There are many reasons for this. They are too busy working, worrying, drinking, and watching television. Or they are simply intimidated by the learned academics who advise them to “go with the flow.” Or they really don’t mind a dash of pornography in their lives. (Topless bars are full of people who vote Republican.) Or they are God-fearing folk who are so busy insulating the lives of their families–and with a fair degree of success–against this decadent culture that they have no time and energy left to fight it.

A key event in the contemporary history of censorship was the Mapplethorpe case in Cincinnati in 1990. A jury of ordinary folk could see with their own eyes that his photographs, however fine as photography, were either obscene or pornographic. But it would have required a larger degree of moral fervor than most people possess to override and repudiate the testimony of the distinguished college professors, artists, and critics who informed them that it really was good for their souls to exhibit these photos in their local museum.

So is the conservative ethos dead in America? No, it survives–often quite comfortably–defeated but not dead. There are innumerable strategies of survival that are available, most of them directed at children. Television-free or television-restricted homes become more popular every year. So do religious schools and colleges. There are millions of families who wouldn’t dream of permitting their children to attend a hard-rock concert, and many millions of children who wouldn’t dream of asking. As a minority, conservatives are able to lead decent and fruitful lives despite our popular culture.

In the short run, it is certainly scary that moral libertarianism may be able to win this kind of culture war. But our moral intuition tells us that in the longer run it cannot govern satisfactorily. It goes counter to all we know of the nature of man and society. Now, if only we knew just how long this short run would be.

Irving Kristol is editor of the Public Interest and publisher of the National Interest.