Traitors and the Advantages of Criticizing Your Side – BCB #117

Also, bad news about the reality of free speech on campus.

Earlier this week, Dick Cheney made headlines with an announcement: George Bush’s former Vice President has pledged to cast his vote for Kamala Harris in November. Cheney follows in the footsteps of his daughter, former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, who made a similar pledge last week. After voting for Trump in 2016 and 2020, she became a vocal opponent of the former president after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, a decision which cost her her position within GOP leadership and ultimately her seat in the House.

Whether or not you agree with the Cheneys, one could argue that they’re demonstrating a crucial polarization-reducing behavior at a particularly divided moment for our country. Many conflict experts have pointed out that one of the best ways to diminish partisanship is to start with criticizing your own side when you don’t agree with what it’s saying or standing for. While Liz Cheney in particular may be on the outs with the MAGA strain of the GOP, she is still a Republican, which positions her well to reach other Red-leaning Americans who are disenchanted with their party’s nominee (the so-called “double haters” who won’t vote for Kamala either).

The Cheneys are the latest in a string of Republican politicians who have switched sides. Former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, former Pence advisor Olivia Troye, and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham were among those Republicans who actually spoke at the DNC about their intentions to vote for Harris, and urged other disenchanted Red voters to do the same. Even Pence has declined to endorse his former boss for president, though he also said he wouldn’t rule out voting for the Republican ticket. 

In the other direction, former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard endorsed Trump earlier this summer. More broadly, the last few years have seen increased Blue criticism of some of the more problematic parts of the left, such as cancel culture and the institutional dysfunction caused by prioritizing social justice politics. More recently, the conflict in Gaza has brought forth intense debate among American liberals. This is a difficult schism, but has also spurred an overdue conversation about the contradictions of identity politics and renewed appreciation for free speech principles (previously somewhat disowned by Blue).

It can feel counterintuitive to speak out against your own side, a behavior which seems most likely to help one’s opponents. But in fact, criticizing your tribe can improve the tenor of the entire political landscape. As author and polarization expert Zachary Elwood put it:

Because the other side’s anger and fear is based on their perception of the more extreme and unreasonable people on our side, in making our group more reasonable and more persuasive, we also reduce the fear and anger of people on the other side, which in turn reduces the fear and anger of people on our side.

We act as a model for people on the other side, to show how it can be done. We encourage others on the other side to do the same thing we are doing, to show how one doesn’t have to fit the stereotype of one’s group…

And a point I think is very important here: we can really only affect our own side. We can righteously judge and castigate the other side all we want (and we do) and clearly those things don’t have an impact. (In fact, I think many people would agree that a lot of the most angry and righteous moral judgments about political stances seem to only add to the judged group’s grievances, and thus our polarization.)

An outstandingly bad year for free speech on campus

Last week, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) came out with its 2025 College Free Speech Rankings and, as you might expect, the findings are pretty bleak. The organization surveyed over 58,000 students at 257 different institutions and found that “free speech has been threatened in historic ways since the Israel-Hamas war began.” All five of the schools ranked best for free speech were state schools with the University of Virginia coming in at number one, while Harvard, Columbia, and NYU were ranked the worst. 7 in 10 students said they would be uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic.

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Some readers may be uncomfortable with FIRE as an organization because they have tended to criticize Blue institutions and policies in recent years. Yet in the last year, free speech has suddenly become a priority for a big part of the left, as some universities have taken a heavy-handed approach to pro-Palestinian protests. These crackdowns are a big reason why FIRE’s ratings are worse this year than last year—a pointed reminder that free speech is a principle for all of us, even if, at the current moment, it’s being used to defend someone whose speech you feel is harmful.

FIRE’s latest report also discusses what the top-ranking schools did well this year. Many of these schools had encampment protests last year, but administrators at those institutions largely avoided punishing students and faculty for simply expressing their views. Deplatformings and sanctions of faculty and students were also rare.

The report notes:

Colleges and universities can do a lot to set the tone of the expression climate on campus. For starters, they can maintain clear policies that defend expressive rights, not ambiguous ones that administrators can apply arbitrarily whenever they see fit. With that said, maintaining clear speech-protective policies is not enough. Whether a school truly holds free expression as a core value is revealed when that school is tested by controversy.

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