by Alan Wolfe

"Still," writes Bret Stephens in response to John Judis, "were it up to me Judt, Mearsheimer, Carter et al would be run out of polite society. What's wrong with that?" Let me try to answer. On second thought, let me allow John Stuart Mill to answer. In On Liberty, Mill addressed the application of what he called "the social stigma" to unpopular ideas. It is true that stigmatization "kills no one" and "roots out no opinions," Mill argued, but, he continued, "the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind." Like deTocqueville, from whom he borrowed the argument, Mill was persuaded that explicit, formal censorship was not the only method, nor even the most effective method, for suppressing ideas. Attaching invidious labels to those ideas, as a way of trying to isolate them from polite company, represents an insidious form of illiberalism of which we ought to be wary. Critics of Judis such as Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovitz argue that no censorship is taking place when people are accused of anti-Semitism because the ideas of those under attack get plenty of hearing. This confuses consequences with intent. To call someone anti-Semitic because you disagree with them intends to stifle. It is a testimony to the vibrancy of our democracy, but not, alas, to the liberal sensibilities of those who wildly throw around charges of anti-Semitism, that they fail to do so.

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