Sarah Palin's First Amendment

Sarah Palin was on a right-wing news outlet today complaining that she was losing her First Amendment Rights. The crux of her complaint is that the mainstream media is referring to all of her accusations concerning Barack Obama and William Ayres as negative campaigning and convincing people that Palin is campaigning inappropriately.

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

The poor dear.

For Palin, the First Amendment means that she should be free to speak but that it should be unconstitutional for others to try to convince people that she's wrong or acting inappropriately. She should be able to speak but others should not be free to disagree with her in any kind of effective manner.

There's a substantive truth underlying Palin's argument. McCain, Palin, and the GOP media are de-emphasizing their own policy positions and proposals as they rely more very heavily on their accusations concerning Obama and Jeremiah Wright, William Ayres, Rashid Khalidi, socialism, and terrorism. If the Republicans are going to get hammered for negative campaigning every time they make these accusations, there's a sense in which they might as well not have a right to speak at all.

Why speak if what you say is not going to have an audience?

There's another problem as well. There's a certain way in which a person can not have free speech in the fullest sense of the word unless there is an audience to consider their views. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill worried considerably about the kind of "social censorship" in which the harsh moral judgments of mass audiences either discourage people from speaking. Mill viewed the social censorship of the 19th century United States as doing more to suppress speech than the kind of government censorship that was associated with absolute monarchy. The main punishment of social censorship was the moral ostracism of speakers from social circles or a generalized "respectability." Ostracism is a punishment in two distinct ways. It punishes through the pain and humiliation of being excluded and also punished through the separation of the speaker from any audience willing to consider her speech.

From Sarah Palin's point of view, media characterizations of her references to William Ayres as negative campaigning serve as a social censorship that deprives her of her First Amendment Rights. Indeed, there is a sense in which she is being censored in that she is being ostracized out of the political community and therefore kept morally apart from the audience which she is trying to convince. Obviously, Palin's references to the First Amendment are misplaced because the First Amendment addresses government censorship rather than the social censorship she is experiencing as a vice-presidential candidate.

But the effect is powerful all the same.

Ultimately however, Sarah Palin has no complaint. What she is attempting to do to Obama is the same thing she accuses the media of doing to her. In repeating the insinuations about William Ayres, referring to Obama as a socialist, etc., Palin is calling Obama's status as a member in good standing in the American moral community with the implication that no one should take Obama's policy proposals seriously because Obama is not "really one of us."

In this sense, the McCain and Obama campaigns have been engaged in a game in which each side appeals to the larger American community to decide which campaign is outside the moral consensus and should therefore be socially censored. The McCain/Palin campaign is losing the moral war in the mainstream media and is suffering some social censorship effects as a result. But Palin has no basis for complaining about a condition that she would have been glad to impose on the Obama campaign.