When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality

by Corey Brettschneider

How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints.


Distinguishing between two kinds of state action--expressive and coercive--Brettschneider contends that public criticism of viewpoints advocating discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities as speaker, educator, and spender. When the state uses its expressive capacities to promote the values of free and equal citizenship, it engages in democratic persuasion. By using democratic persuasion, the state can both respect rights and counter hateful or discriminatory viewpoints. Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Corey Brettschneider is a professor of political science at Brown University, where he teaches constitutional law and politics. He has also been a visiting professor at Fordham Law School, The University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School. His writing has appeared in Time, Politico, and the New York Times. His new book is The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.

Reviews

[Nick Geiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brettschneider's ambition in this book is to find a middle way between "neutralists" (who oppose content-based restrictions on speech) and "prohibitionists" (who support content-based restrictions) in free speech debates. His primary move is a distinction between what he calls the state's coercive function and the state's expressive function. The state should be neutral between different speakers' points of view when it exercises coercion, but it should not be neutral when it expresses its own view. His distinction draws on Locke's contrast between state coercion and state persuasion in the Letter on Toleration

Brettschneider calls this free speech regime "value democracy." Value democracy defends the value of liberal democratic concepts like free and equal citizenship through techniques of state speech and public persuasion, but without coercively restricting non-liberal viewpoints. For example, the state can publicly condemn illiberal speech even while protecting their right to speak.

As with all books that attempt to find a happy medium between two conflicting camps, this book attracts criticism for going too far and not going far enough. For those closer to the "neutralist" camp, one question for the book is what the limits of the state's expressive power are. The state's expressive power after all rests upon its coercive power. State expression is an exercise of political power, which requires justification. Those closer to the "prohibitionist" position will raise concerns that value democracy does not do enough to fight speech by illiberal groups and leaves democracies vulnerable to subversion. Measures like constitutionally entrenched bans on certain political parties, which Brettschneider does not contemplate, should be on the table.