Know Your Enemies
In an era of hyper-certainty, dialogue and humility are more vital than ever.
At the 2023 FIRE gala in New York City, the rapper Killer Mike gave a rousing keynote address describing how he learned the importance of free speech. He recounted once telling his grandfather that racists shouldn’t be allowed to use racial slurs. His grandfather disagreed, saying “I like to know who my enemies are when I walk into a room.”
This is a powerful point and a practical one. If only out of pure self-interest, we shouldn’t just be willing to hear the arguments of those with whom we disagree, we should be eager to. Without letting them speak, you can’t know where they stand, and, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill’s famous quote from On Liberty: If you don't know the other side's argument, you really don't know much of your own, either.
Of course, the problem is that many people think they already know everything they need to know. In fact, they’re certain of it. When you have moral certainty, you can presume the authority to shut people down. When your opponents are not just wrong but monstrous, and when their words are not just arguments but violence, silencing them becomes more than just a tactic—it becomes a moral duty. That’s why recent shout-downs of campus speakers like Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School and Riley Gaines at San Francisco State University seem not only justified to those doing the shouting, but righteous and necessary.
Unfortunately, certainty of this sort seems to be at a peak right now. We’ve always had difficulty communicating, but there’s something especially disconcerting about our current moment. Discourse is chilled and too much of our polity is siloed into fervent and immovable ideological factions. Times like these are precisely when the core liberal values undergirding the American experiment are most important. As our tolerance and appetite for dissent continue to plummet, we’re giving up more than we realize.
What we fail to see, when we are overly certain, is that our certainty is far more dangerous than any statements made against us, however wrong or misguided. Unchecked certainty is a calcification of cognition, a corrosion of curiosity. For all their talk of and desire for moral, social, and legislative progress, the certainty of those who want to stifle the speech of others kills progress. Without the ability to challenge and question ideas, without the tension between opposing viewpoints, we are dooming ourselves to stagnation.
Killer Mike put it well. Without free speech, we will never truly know our enemies because we will never hear them out. But there’s a still more important reason to value a culture of free expression: in addition to showing us who our enemies are, free speech also tells us what our enemies are not.
However monstrous we may consider our opponents’ ideas, opinions, or behaviors to be, they are not monsters themselves. Things would be far easier if they were, because monsters need not be listened to or empathized with. They need only to be destroyed.
Monsters are simple. People, however, are more complicated.
It is counterintuitive to the most zealously partisan among us, but a critical approach to navigating this era is to simply speak with and try to understand our opponents—to begin to see them as they see themselves. If we only stopped to listen we’d recognize that, for all our divisions, we share far more than we think. It turns out that not only do Americans share surprising alignment on the same core values—”equality, liberty, and progress”—but Americans as a whole are far less extreme than our news and social media feeds might have us believe.
A 2019 study by More in Common indicated that, more than polarization itself, the real issue in American political life may be a “perception gap.” When asked to describe the positions of their political opponents, both Republicans and Democrats vastly overestimated the numbers holding “extreme views.” “Overall,” More in Common reported, “Democrats and Republicans imagine almost twice as many of their political opponents as [in] reality hold views they consider ‘extreme.’”
A finding like that should give us pause. It is very difficult to have meaningful and productive politics, to say nothing of a shared society and national culture, if both sides have no clear understanding of what the majority of their political “opponents” actually believe. This division widens further when we indulge the idea that our opponents are monstrous, beneath contempt, and undeserving of dignity, compassion, or the right to speak.
In teaching his grandson the value of free speech, Killer Mike’s grandfather also told him about Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace has an ignominious place in American history for physically blocking the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963 and for declaring in an inaugural address—in a line written for him by a known Ku Klux Klan member—“I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” One might think that no one could be more impervious to, and undeserving of, reason and debate than Gov. Wallace.
But that’s not the end of the story. After an assassination attempt against him in 1972, Wallace was visited in the hospital by Shirley Chisholm, the only female African American representative of Congress at that time. In 1979, Wallace appeared unannounced at the church where Martin Luther King Jr. had once pastored and said, “I think I can understand something of the pain Black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain and I can only ask for forgiveness.” Later on, Wallace would express the same sentiments on television, and before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and, at an event, would hold hands with African American southerners and join in singing “We Shall Overcome.” Most importantly, in his last term in office, in the 1980s, Wallace appointed over 160 African Americans to state boards and agencies.
On Shirley Chisholm’s courage and forgiveness, read also: Lessons of a Black Pioneer
The “redemption” of Wallace occurred through a remarkable exchange: those who disagreed insisted on speaking with him; and Wallace agreed to listen.
By many accounts, we are at a particularly difficult moment in our politics and culture. A large number of our debates at the moment are not even about issues themselves but about whether our political opponents have the right to speak on them at all. This is the case for Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, banning ideas putatively connected to Critical Race Theory from college classrooms. It is the case for college students, who, in several incidents around the country, have drowned out or impeded speakers they disapprove of. And it is the case for school boards and city councils who have driven a disturbing trend of silencing critics in the name of “decorum.”
The tendency towards stifling speech occurs at the instigation of both ends of our political divide. The real issue, then, becomes less about finding fault with whichever faction is perceived to be trammeling on free speech—or which side is doing it “more” or “worse”—as it is about insisting on protecting the basic structures of discourse. The culture of free expression, communication, and civil disagreement is foundational to the American project. It’s why we’ve gotten this far at all. As we navigate our tumultuous times, the kind of communication that converted George Wallace can form a model for our civic exchange in general. The example of Wallace and others proves that even the most recalcitrant figures can prove to be “redeemable.” It also reminds us that we should take care not to be so morally certain ourselves, or else we might forgo the redemption that we don’t even know we need.
Angel Eduardo is senior writer and editor at FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression).
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I love this clear and wise analysis. It needs to be publicized more widely. I recently watched the amazingly well-documented and thorough PBS special about George Wallace and came to the same conclusion. And as Brian Stevenson demonstrates in his amazing work with death row inmates and his Equal Justice Initiative, "Each of us is better than the worst thing we have ever done." (or said, I might add.) We all need to climb down from our "high horse" (as my mother used to call it) and deal with each other person to person, as part of the imperfect human family.
A friend of mine had a big problem with a controlling wife who would melt over conflict. She was the epitome of passive-aggressive. She would not talk about their problems. She would not go to counseling. They ended up divorced. She has been divorced again. He is happily married with a second life.
Pushing uncomfortable speech down and out does not fix any problems nor change any minds, it just sends the people to check out and go underground with their views.