HOLDING TOGETHER

A spirited defense of the political and civil rights that Americans enjoy—and that are constantly being chipped away.

In the middle of the pandemic in July 2020, a nationwide poll showed that 71% of Americans believed that “Americans have more in common than many people think.” By May 2021, that figure was 88%, a stunning supermajority. What holds these Americans together, maintain the authors, faculty members at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is our portfolio of rights, constitutional and agreed-upon and even some that we haven’t figured out yet. On the last point, the authors reveal that most Americans hold generous—liberal, even—views on the rights of immigrants, to say nothing of police reform, equal rights for minorities, and the like. The fundamental right is the right to vote, and that is precisely the one that the authors hold is most endangered by the rise of neo-authoritarian attempts to disenfranchise voters, “a direct assault on the voting rights of the electoral majority that had defeated [Trump].” Though the authors try not to evoke the former president too often, they lay many assaults on rights at the door of the previous administration, including the unstated right to have a civil conversation about politics without incorporating that administration’s “vast official landscape of disinformation and misinformation.” Though the authors add that “ideological tension is a foundation of a healthy democracy,” so, too, is a shared standard of objective truth. But the authors show how few institutions are invested in teaching people how to distinguish fact from lie. On that note, they conclude, perhaps controversially, that federal legislation should be enacted to regulate social media and “require algorithms to be used safely and responsibly to promote freedom of speech and protect against racial, gender, religious, disability, or LGBTQ discrimination.”

A provocative and well-considered argument stressing the necessity of maintaining the sanctity of hard-won liberties.