One of the big political challenges we face is deciding what to do about the explosion of disruptive speech. By disruptive speech, I mean speech that challenges or subverts widespread existing social and political norms. There are many kinds of disruptive speech, and not all of them are bad. In fact, as we shall see, some of them are indispensable to a healthy public sphere. However, fake news, where false or misleading stories are smuggled past our epistemic defenses under the cover of journalistic conventions, is one prominent example of what I shall call bad disruptive speech, and we can point to many others such as bald-faced lies, outlandish hyperbole, and hate speech.
We are learning just how corrosive bad disruptive speech can be. Increasing numbers of people appear to be turning away from core democratic principles. Foa and Mounk (2017, p. 6–7) cite evidence showing a precipitous drop in the numbers of citizens who believe that it is “essential to live in a democracy,” and, hardly coincidentally, a rise in the number of people who would like to see a strong leader “who does not have to bother with elections.” This chimes with the feeling that many of us have that society is becoming more polarized, and our political disagreements more fractious. Opponents cannot be persuaded or tolerated, and must simply be beaten.1 The label Foa and Mounk attach to growing skepticism about the value of democracy is “deconsolidation,” and this conveys the sense many of us have of something coming apart. Of course, there are many contributory factors that we might discuss. In particular, we might point to structural features of the global economy that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a fortunate few.2 Some bad behavior in the public sphere may seem of little consequence beside material conditions of inequality, but there are reasons to think that it does matter, even if there are other things that may matter more.
This paper addresses three questions. First, does it make sense to group the various kinds of bad disruptive speech together as a distinct family of related threats to broadly liberal representative democracies? Bald-faced lying and hate speech, for example, are clearly wrong for different reasons, so why treat them as if they are the same? Second, how can we distinguish bad forms of disruptive speech from good ones? If the former constitute a clear and present danger to democracy, then we will want to take action to curtail them, but we do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we are to protect and support good forms of disruptive speech, such as satire and the arts, then we must be able to tell which is which. And, third, what can we permissibly do about bad disruptive speech once we have isolated it? Facebook has appealed to the value of free speech as a justification for continuing to allow demonstrably false political advertising on their platform.3 Is b
Our interest here is in the fourth of these theories. It strikes us as particularly interesting because it differs significantly from what are perhaps the most familiar notions of ideology. While the most familiar notions of ideology are arguably those which focus on the process of how a belief is generated, Prinz and Rossi (2017, p. 341) “focus not on the process of belief acquisition, but on the formation of the meaning of the relevant concept.” Furthermore, unlike the second type, it does not, strictly speaking, presuppose the existence of any particular distorting form of power, even if power asymmetries “are likely to be part of the picture” (Prinz & Rossi, 2021, p. 121).
However, we also think that the full potential of this novel theory of ideology has yet to be realized. As the theory currently stands, or at least, as we understand it, it focuses exclusively on how a narrative is used by certain people in a particular instance. If so, it does not rule out the possibility of addressing the disconnect by controlling or revising the way in which manifest and/or operative concepts are used. As a result, its conclusions are confined to a particular local case.
As an example of this, Prinz and Rossi (2021) criticize the use of technocratic and moralistic narratives in debates about sovereign debt during the post-2008 financial crises facing Greece and other European states. They argue that the use of these narratives during this period was ideological because there was a substantial difference between the appearance and the reality of their use. If their argument is sound, it tells us that technocratic and moralistic narratives about sovereign debt were used ideologically in this particular context. It allows for the possibility that the use of these narratives could be plausibly regarded as nonideological in other times and places.
Our interest, then, is in the extent to which it is possible to extend Prinz and Rossi's method of ideology critique, such that we can bridge the gap between: (i) P being used ideologically in a particular context and (ii) having reasons to regard P as in some sense pejoratively ideological across different contexts. Our main aim in this article is to show how it is possible to bridge this gap.
Our basic idea is this: we can bridge the gap between the fact that a narrative is ideological in a particular context and the claim that it is ideological across different contexts by showing that it is resistant to various mechanisms that might otherwise prevent it from functioning ideologically. The crucial step between (i) and (ii) is thus to find some way of showing that P is resistant to the kind of reform or oversight that would bring manifest and operative concepts more closely into line with each other.
Our idea might be best illustrated with a contrast case. Consider the medical profession. Let us grant, as seems plausible enou
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