The American Right increasingly answers in the negative. In doing so, conservatives are staging their own version of the critical-theory doctrine deployed by progressives until recently to restrict speech.

The triumph of the Free Speech Movement appeared to accord students full rights to participate in the era’s public debate, which fit in with the broader dismantling of the in loco parentis paradigm, under which university administrators acted as parental authorities for students. Where the in loco parentis regime had consigned college students to a status of quasi-adulthood, the Berkeley protesters’ demands successfully redefined the campus as a space in which the full exercise of citizenship could occur; not coincidentally, the voting age was also lowered to 18 in many states during this period.

In more recent years, the campus Left became widely associated with an anti-free-speech stance, while the Right has often laid claim to the ideals of the 1964 Berkeley students. Hence in 2017, it was the Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous who attempted to hold a “free-speech week” on the Berkeley campus, after an earlier talk he attempted to give there was shut down amid violent opposition from progressive activists.

It might seem, therefore, that Trump’s crackdown has returned us to the pre-1964 status quo, with progressives once again defending speech rights on campus and conservatives trying to limit them. But this isn’t the full story. In reality, the approach taken by the Trump administration has far more in common with the progressive speech regime than its enthusiasts would have you think.

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The Left’s turn against free-speech maximalism is often traced to a text that appeared soon after the Berkeley protesters’ apparent triumph, under the byline of one of the protesters’ heroes, the philosopher and New Left guru Herbert Marcuse. I refer to the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, in which Marcuse expanded on the central argument of his hugely influential 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man: that the ostensible freedoms of advanced industrial society masked its fundamental unfreedom.

Revisiting the foundational 18th– and 19th-century struggles for freedom of speech, Marcuse argued that their aim was not simply to establish a neutral public sphere. Rather, “the tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan — intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo”. In other words, advocacy for unlimited freedom of speech was a tactic of opposition to dominant forces — a tactic that, according to Marcuse, had become obsolete. This is because unlike the ancien régime, the “repressive status quo” of advanced industrial society in fact benefits from a regime of “pure tolerance”.

This was because, as Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had first argued decades earlier, the 20th-century culture industry had become a regime of propagandistic mass deception that manufactured consent for what they called the “totally administered society”. Accordingly, arguments for free expression and other liberal rights now amounted, as Marcuse put it, to accepting “the toleration of the systematic moronisation of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda”.

In contrast to authoritarian societies, “totalitarian democracy” bestows formal freedoms on its subjects, but these freedoms are negated by the overwhelming force of technological mass communication that tip the scales in favor of dominant social forces. By this account, demands for free speech like those made in Berkeley might ultimately serve to reinforce this broader unfreedom.

Marcuse’s paradoxical response to this impasse was to replace the value of “pure tolerance” of all views implicit in free-speech protections with what he called “liberating tolerance”, which, as he stated explicitly, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left”. He characterized this proposal as “utopian”, since “no authority, no government exists which would translate [it] into practice”.

However, there was a way in which the approach he proposed was eventually put into practice. By gaining power and leverage within consensus-making institutions, especially universities and the media, the Left managed to tip the scales of tolerance against the Right, somewhat as Marcuse had counseled. The shift from an ostensibly neutral public sphere to one in which certain views coded as reactionary were subject to aggressive “intolerance” seemed to follow his prescriptions. Hence, Marcuse’s text has sometimes been read as a sort of ur-manifesto of cancel culture; the Left’s centrist and conservative critics have tended to fight back by reasserting “pure tolerance”.

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In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, however, conservatives dramatically shifted their criticisms of the progressive campus speech regime. From the Nineties battles over political correctness to the early 2020s wars over wokeness, their main concern was with universities’ censoriousness towards conservative-coded views. But their new focus is on the same institutions’ permissiveness towards extreme speech by Leftists — most notoriously, celebration of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.

In other words, the criticism directed at universities shifted away from the “intolerant towards the Right” side of Marcuse’s equation, and toward the “tolerant towards the Left” side. Meanwhile, the Left correspondingly pivoted from demanding “intolerance towards the Right” — keeping Milo off-campus — to “tolerance towards the Left” — letting pro-Palestinian protesters protest, even if their speech may offend some.

However, this reversal of positions was possible in part because it’s not only the Right/Left polarity that came to determine the range of permissible speech on campus in the post-Sixties era. Indeed, the unofficial campus speech regime didn’t so much legitimize itself in Right/Left terms as in terms of victimhood and oppression. A programmatic statement of this rationale can be found in the pioneering critical race theorist Mari Matsuda’s article “Public Response to Racist Speech”, published in 1989. In Matsuda’s account, it is speech by members of or on behalf of “historically dominant groups” and against “subordinated communities” that should be subject to “intolerance”, while speech going in the opposite direction, even if hateful or violent, should be subject to “tolerance”.

Matsuda offered, in effect, an update on Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”, processed through the classifications of civil-rights law. Instead of “the Left” being granted extra leeway, as Marcuse had demanded, it was members of oppressed groups who were to enjoy what Matsuda calls the “victim’s privilege”. In practice, this meant that when any speech generated controversy, the task was to identify oppressor and oppressed, then ensure that the latter is granted “the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from an experience of oppression”, whereas the former is subject to maximum intolerance.

This is how the attempts to shut down controversial speakers at the height of last decade’s Great Awokening were justified. For instance, in 2017, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued in The New York Times that efforts to prevent figures like Yiannopolous and Charles Murray from speaking on campus “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship”. Intolerance toward oppressors, that is, equals tolerance toward the oppressed.

Matsuda defined universities as a “special case” because college students are “at a vulnerable stage of psychological development”. Accordingly, “tolerance of racist speech in this setting is more harmful than generalized tolerance in the community-at-large”. Gesturing back at Berkeley and other Sixties protest, Matsuda reaffirmed support for the protesters’ speech rights, but not on grounds of “pure tolerance”. Rather, she appealed to the “power imbalance” between students and “university administrators, multinational corporations, the US military, and established governments”. In other words, insofar as students can be construed as victims, their speech must be protected — but once they can be construed as victimizers, they can no longer lay claim to that privilege.

The broader implication of the original Free Speech Movement’s demand was, again, that intramural speech be protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as extramural speech. The effect of this demand — like the other factors that eroded in loco parentis — was to merge the university with the broader space of rights-granted citizenship. But a further implication of this move, not necessarily evident to the student protesters when they made their demands, was to weaken the specificity of the university’s function within society: to form young adults.

It was perhaps an inevitable reaction to this drift and evacuation of institutional purpose that new forms of paternalism reemerged to substitute for in loco parentis, not least the differentiated speech regime outlined by Matsuda. This helped define a new moral, values-imparting mission for universities, which over decades became ever more explicitly oriented around social justice.

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Conservative and centrist critics of campus politics have documented the divisive and intellectually stultifying effects of this regime. Now that the Trump administration is attempting to force top-down change on the system, many who opposed it are celebrating.

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante. On the contrary, Matsuda’s basic idea that speech must be regulated on the basis of whether it causes harm to a “subordinated community” remains fully in force; it is simply that a different minority group is now asserted to be in need of special protection. In other words, Trump is merely adjusting the dials of the prior campus speech regime, applying greater tolerance here and greater intolerance there.

The real problem with this shift isn’t the apparent inconsistency with conservative opposition to cancel culture, but that the administration is leaving the deeper assumptions of the prior system for regulating speech intact. Universities need to be reformed, and reimagined, on a much more fundamental level. The post-in loco parentis integration of campuses into the broader realm of citizenship has failed to facilitate the responsible exercise of the citizenship. Rather, it has only succeeded at evacuating institutional purpose in favor of an incoherent mix of anything-goes consumerism and tendentious moralism.

Trump’s heavy-handed actions will succeed in suppressing some of the campus radicalism to which conservatives object. But they will leave intact the divisive and infantilizing speech regime.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the most vocal Left-wing critics of the tech companies’ actions, asserted that they “never wanted this role.” Instead, he said, “[i]t was foisted on them by people, led by journalists, demanding they censor.” And indeed, since the 2016 election, much of the Left-of-centre media has faulted social media platforms for what they see as overly permissive policies on political speech.

As many have previously pointed out, support for restricting speech is a sharp pivot away from principles once common on the Left. Notably, one of the most iconic protest events of the 1960s was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, a revolt against the University of California’s limitations on political speech. (In recent years, in contrast, student radicals have been more likely to protest their universities’ unwillingness to restrict expression on campus.)

What’s less well-remembered about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement is that then, as now, debates about the freedom of expression revolved around technology — specifically, information technology. A hint of this emphasis is apparent in the movement’s best-known statement: the famous speech in which activist Mario Savio proclaimed: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part”.

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Today, most would probably interpret Savio’s use of “machine” as metaphorical, but to its audience at the time, it would have also had a literal referent: the IBM computers that were increasingly central to the university’s operation in the 1960s. For course registration and other purposes, students were issued IBM punch cards, which were the prevalent means of digital data storage prior to magnetic disks.

The radicals seized on these objects as a symbol of the repressive institution they were fighting. As Savio put it in an interview with Life magazine, “[a]t Cal, you’re little more than an IBM card.” He elaborated: “the university is a vast public utility which turns out future workers in the military-industrial complex. They’ve got to be processed in the most efficient way to see to it that they have the fewest dissenting opinions.”

In line with Savio’s thinking, Berkeley militants turned the ubiquitous IBM punch card into the object of many gestures of rebellion. They burned piles of the cards in public spaces; they punched out the words “Free Speech” on them, then hung them around their necks and attached them to their lapels. They adopted the phrase “do not fold, spindle, or mutilate,” which appeared on IBM’s cards, as a slogan, putting it on placards to indict a system that valued the smooth functioning of the machine over the full expression of humanity.

In satirical cartoons, they represented the university as a factory flattening human beings into two-dimensional punch cards. An album of protest songs from the movement featured punch cards marked with slogans on its cover art. The Free Speech Movement activists, it would seem, intuitively viewed centralised information systems like IBM’s as inimical to freedom and individuality. For them, the punch card embodied the prospect of the “one-dimensional man,” in the phrase of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose book of that title appeared in the same year as the Berkeley protests.

Marcuse’s account of how advanced industrial society turned people into mere commodities profoundly influenced the 1960s Left. Computerisation, which seemed to insert individuals into abstract mechanisms subject to hierarchical control, offered a particularly vivid illustration of the dangers he identified.

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More than 50 years later, the coordinates of this argument look both strange and familiar. In the 1960s, people feared the reduction of their identities to the size of a punch card issued by an institution; today, most of us have willingly allowed ourselves to be slotted into flat, standardised profiles controlled by private corporations with far more reach and influence than IBM ever had in the 60s. Far from resisting this fate, we embraced it as a means of enhanced individuality and freedom — or so we imagined.

A shift in the popular perception of information technology made this possible. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner details the remarkable evolution by which California radicals went from rejecting computers as instruments of state oppression to hailing them as vehicles of collective liberation. “Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War and the fading of the American counterculture,” he writes, “computers somehow seemed poised to bring to life the countercultural dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community, and spiritual communion.”

By the time social media emerged in the early 2000s, this positive view of information technology, surprisingly in line with the values of the Free Speech Movement, had become default. We felt that slotting ourselves into graphically enhanced virtual punch cards was a new means of self-expression, rather than a danger to it.

As Twitter and Facebook lurch towards more extensive control over content posted on their sites, we are in the midst of a new and even more disorienting shift in public opinion. What has emerged lately is a bewildering synthesis of the techno-dystopian views of the old counterculture and the techno-utopianism of the later cyber-culture documented by Turner.

In recent years, plenty of voices across the political spectrum have decried the power accrued by the major tech corporations, echoing 60s-era anxieties about IBM. On the other hand, those on the Left in particular now worry less about the repressive capacities of new technologies than their excessive permissiveness. This puts them in the peculiar position of, in effect, wanting to grant more power and control to the same unaccountable corporations they might otherwise criticise.

Information technology does not enable either freedom or control: it facilitates both at once. Because they did not recognise this dual potentiality in 1964, Savio and his fellow activists could not foresee that that the insertion of human beings into technological systems would not be imposed by faceless, repressive power structures.

Rather, the public would eventually embrace this integration, ironically seeing in it the realisation of a countercultural dream of free expression and enhanced individuality. For their part, the techno-utopians who brought us the internet were naïve about the dangers of placing mechanisms that now govern much of human life under the control of large private companies.

As the inheritors of these two outlooks, we now suffer from both blind spots. Most of us can agree that big tech has accumulated too much power, regardless of how and to what degree it chooses to use it. But no one is in a position to challenge this power effectively, because we all still want what big tech promises us — for ourselves, if not for our political enemies.

Recent developments suggest that many are willing to cede far more power to Silicon Valley, under the impression that this will preserve the dream of the internet it once sold us. This view is just as short-sighted as the ones that preceded it.