In tyrannical societies, the state uses its monopoly of violence to dictate what citizens are permitted to say, activities they are permitted to engage in, and cultural symbols they are permitted to celebrate or display. Anyone who violates such edicts can be arrested and imprisoned. Given the tendency of states to become increasingly dictatorial and to trample on their citizens’ liberties with impunity, Murray Rothbard argued that the state itself, by its very nature, is a threat to liberty. In The Anatomy of the State, he argues that the state is a predator: “The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property” including predation of all the liberties that emanate from self-ownership.
Even for those who support the minimal state, they would support state power only on the basis that the state’s monopoly of force will be limited to protecting and defending the rights of citizens, by designating violations of rights as crimes and taking the steps necessary to punish criminals. For example, in his book Restoring The Lost Constitution: The Presumption Of Liberty, Randy Barnett argues that the state has power to enact laws that are “both necessary to protect the rights of others and proper insofar as they do not violate the rights of the persons whose freedom they restrict.”
Western democracies have strayed far from these ideals of liberty. In many countries the state has conferred upon itself the power to tell citizens which heritage symbols they are permitted to display, and to punish them for celebrating any heritage that the state deems to be “hate.”
Anti-Hate Laws
Fueled by critical race theories and the concept of “antiracism,” many once-free jurisdictions are now trending rapidly towards tyranny, expanding their prohibitions of what they refer to in the relevant legislation as “hate.” This takes the form of laws prohibiting hate speech, hate crimes and hate symbols.
In the case of New York, the city has established an office for the prevention of hate crimes. Under “local laws on hate crimes” that office has power to designate hate crimes including the duty to:
Create and implement a coordinated system for the city’s response to hate crimes. Such system shall, in conjunction with the New York city commission on human rights’ bias response teams, the police department, and any relevant agency or office, coordinate responses to hate crime allegations.
The office for prevention of hate crimes designates certain symbols as “hate symbols.” Under Senate Bill S8298B this includes the Confederate battle flag.
Another example of a legally-designated “hate symbol” is the old South African flag. In support of an application to ban the flag, the South African Human Rights Commission argued that displays of that flag are analogous to displays of the Confederate battle flag:
Arguing in support of the ban, the South African Human Rights Commission referred to the case of Dylann Roof, the white man convicted and sentenced to death for the 2015 racist killings of nine Black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, as an example of how the apartheid-era flag retained clear connections to violent white supremacists. Roof once appeared in a photograph wearing a jacket with the flag on it.
On that basis, the South African Equality Court banned public displays of the flag. It was only by a narrow margin (following an appeal by the civil rights organization AfriForum) that South Africans avoided having private displays of the flag also being banned.
The ADL, an enthusiastic proponent of designating other people’s cultural icons as “hate,” also added the old South African flag to its hate list. The fact that this flag predates the apartheid era—having been adopted in 1928, two decades before the Afrikaner Nationalist government came to power—is deemed by these self-appointed hate-finders to be irrelevant. Also irrelevant is the fact that South African troops in WWII marched under the old flag to defend the allied cause.
How State Power Destroys Individual Liberty
While many have argued that the prohibition of hate symbols is within reasonable bounds as it only applies to selling or displaying such symbols on public property, the threat to individual liberty readily becomes apparent when it is recalled that the scope of “public property” has vastly expanded in recent decades. State power to regulate cultural displays on public property covers not just city offices, police stations, and fire stations, but also any location where publicly-funded activities may take place such as public schools or even street parades, parks, and fairgrounds. With the involvement of the state in so many aspects of daily life, it is increasingly difficult for citizens to avoid having any interactions that would be classified as falling within the public remit over which the state claims jurisdiction.
The important point in the context of defending individual liberty is that the edicts against hate symbols are not just people’s opinions on what amounts to “hate”—if they were mere opinions they could be challenged, dismissed, or simply ignored. But they are mandates backed by state force, accompanied by legal penalties. Thus, the issue in this context is not whether those symbols are indeed hate symbols, but whether the state should have power to ban such symbols and enforce their bans with legal penalties.
Organizations like ADL and SPLC also keep similar lists of “hate symbols,” and they may feel that they have good reasons for viewing those symbols as hateful, but these organizations are not backed by state force so they are at liberty to make lists of whatever they may love or hate. But it is one thing for left wing organizations to keep lists of “hate symbols” which, in their opinion as self-appointed hate-finders, have failed to uphold “our shared values”—by which they mean their own socialist and egalitarian values. It is a different matter altogether for the state to designate flags and cultural icons as “hate symbols.” Prohibiting “hate symbols” becomes a threat to liberty when it is enshrined in legislation and backed by state force.
The extensions of state power to the criminalization of historic flags and symbols misunderstands the meaning of liberty. Liberty includes people’s right to say things we might not want to hear, to wave flags we might not want to see, and to commemorate a history we might wish had unfolded in a different way. The state in a free society should not have power to crush individual liberty based on what they might consider to be “hate.” That many tolerate such encroachments on liberty is a sign that we no longer live in free states. As argued by the British journalist and politician David Frost:
At the root of all this, I fear, is a fundamental downgrading of freedom as a value… Yet you can’t long remain a free society if you don’t believe in freedom. And it’s no good just saying you believe in it: you have to live it. Sometimes that means politicians deciding “we would rather live with this injustice or this social problem than expand the state to deal with it.”
This means that while we might think people should not behave in certain ways or hold certain opinions that others might consider to be offensive, we should not expand the state to create offices with a bureaucratic mandate to eradicate “hate.” The dangers of bureaucratic excess are well known: if an office of the state is given power and money to wage war against “hate,” it has a perverse incentive to find hate wherever it looks.
