Hate Speech, Democratic Legitimacy and the Age of Trump

Should democracies punish hate speech? Eric Heinze, Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London, has written an important new book on this subject, Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship. At the center of Heinze’s book is a revolutionary idea: Instead of debating whether democracies per se can or cannot legitimately ban hate speech (which assumes all democracies are the same), we should only condemn hate speech as illegitimate in those democracies that are longstanding, stable and prosperous. In this essay, I show how Heinze’s idea frees the debate over hate speech regulation from the Europe vs. America dichotomy that has haunted it for years, while carrying a special poignancy for the United States in the age of Trump.