When a democracy fights ideas with deportations, it confesses its weakness
By Raymond Aron
American universities, pressed by Washington and by donors, have discovered an old temptation: to restore calm by administrative opacity, police interventions, and, for foreigners, the shortcut of immigration power. The result is measurable, fewer protests, fewer arrests, more silence. One calls this “order”, but it is often only fear.
A constitutional, pluralist regime has the right to defend itself against movements that truly aim at tyranny, or that practice intimidation and violence. @Aron soutient qu’un régime constitutionnel‑pluraliste a le droit de se défendre contre les partis qui veulent l’abattre, y compris par l’illégalisation de formations clairement tyranniques, mais que, lorsque les dissidents sont trop nombreux, tenter de les réprimer par la loi risque de détruire le régime lui‑même ; il vaut alors mieux accepter une certaine paralysie tant que la légalité est préservée. Yet this right is immediately corrupted when it is exercised without scrupulous legality, without transparent procedures, without the judge. A university committee without appeal, a federal “task force” that blurs investigation and punishment, an ICE detention justified by elastic “national security”, these are not details. They are the method.
The essential distinction is simple and rarely made in public debate: to combat anti-Semitism is a legitimate imperative, to criminalize a political opinion about Israel or Gaza is viewpoint discrimination. Confusing the two is politically convenient, intellectually lazy, and civically dangerous.
Democracy lives by a fragile barrier, a mere silk thread, the legality that allows conflicts to remain verbal. @La valeur ultime d’un régime constitutionnel‑pluraliste réside dans le maintien de la légalité – « fil de soie » fragile mais décisif – qui, même en période de passions et de paralysie politique, préserve au moins la paix civile ; si ce fil est rompu, il est inévitable que le « fil de l’épée » (la violence) prenne le relais. Break it in the name of a good cause, and you habituate society to the sword as arbiter. Universities should be laboratories of argument, not rehearsal rooms for repression.
Comments (1)
Derek Parfit
I am sympathetic to Aron’s anxiety. A constitutional regime may indeed defend itself against movements that aim at coercion or violence. But the manner of that defence matters morally as much as its aim.
If a state relies on opaque procedures, selective deportations, or administrative shortcuts, it risks adopting a kind of esoteric justification: officials act on reasons that cannot be publicly avowed or scrutinized. A moral or political principle that cannot be publicly acknowledged without undermining itself is deeply suspect. On views that build a publicity condition into political morality, such self-concealment counts against its legitimacy @Whether a self-effacing moral theory can be acceptable depends on meta-ethical views about the nature of morality: on realist views where a moral theory can be 'quite straightforwardly true', self-effacement does not disqualify it, but on constructivist or 'social product' views that impose Rawls’s publicity condition—that an acceptable moral theory must be such that everyone ought to accept and publicly acknowledge it—self-effacing theories are ruled out; Parfit leaves this larger meta-ethical issue unresolved..
Silence achieved by fear is not stability. It is merely the appearance of order under opacity. And in a partly opaque world, citizens cannot reliably distinguish genuine security from intimidation.
The deeper question is this: does a democracy defend itself best by narrowing its public space, or by making its procedures so transparent and lawful that even its opponents must acknowledge their fairness?