Over on Legal Insurrection, Cornell law professor William Jacobson catches a truly excellent guest column that Brown professor and alumnus Ken Miller published in the Brown Daily Herald. It would not be a hyperbolic compliment to say that, in the long run, if nothing comes of the Ray Kelly shout-down but consideration of Miller’s point, the incident will have been a net positive.

Miller describes a controversial lecture in 1966, when he was a Brown student, by then-American Nazi Party leader, George Lincoln Rockwell:

Once inside, a hushed crowd listened to the full range of Rockwell’s charismatic style. He was charming, funny and, frankly, disarming. He knew how to break the tension in the crowd, telling us “the last time I was in Alumnae Hall, come to think of it, I wasn’t sitting. I was hanging onto a girl about half-stewed at a dance.” Everybody laughed, and I did, too. But as the evening wore on, I learned a lesson. True fascism doesn’t begin with the shouting, fist-shaking tyrants we see in newsreels of the 1930s. It enters with charm and wit. Its strategy is to beguile and divide, to offer easy answers to problems like crime and poverty. Blame them on the “others” — the blacks, the Jews, the Commies who are spoiling our otherwise virtuous society. It then promises to heal those lesions by cutting them out, figuratively at first, and then literally once the masses are firmly under control.

For the first time in my life, I understood the allure of fascism, the reason that “good people” could have supported the likes of Franco, Mussolini and Hitler. I also understood why the notion that “it couldn’t happen here” is hopelessly naive. It could happen here, and it most certainly would happen if we forgot the lessons of history, lessons that Rockwell brought to life with a sinister smile that evening in Alumnae Hall. I’m glad I was there. I’m glad the talk was allowed to go on. And I’m glad Brown was an open campus where those lessons could be learned in the most personal way possible.

With this, Miller illustrates why we must allow others to speak. As I say on this week’s Wingmen, our own self improvement can advance as much based on what we find to be wrong as what we find to be correct. We learn from mistakes, after all, and it’s a blessing and a helpful shortcut when those mistakes are somebody else’s. Heeding abhorrent arguments that are sincerely given is the only way to encounter full expression of that which we would never think, ourselves, and potentially to see another side of our own beliefs and principles, if others take them where we never would.

Miller’s commentary also elevates the discussion from the localized incident at Brown, and the discussion of what kind of school it should be, to a matter of tremendous and immediate concern. It’s worth quoting the key part again:

[True fascism] enters with charm and wit. Its strategy is to beguile and divide, to offer easy answers to problems like crime and poverty. Blame them on the “others” — the blacks, the Jews, the Commies who are spoiling our otherwise virtuous society.

The words come to mind of U.S. Senator from Rhode Island Sheldon Whitehouse, to which I referred in yesterday’s criticism of PolitiFact RI, as he explained who was trying to stop the enactment of ObamaCare:

The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups, it is unbearable to them that President Barack Obama should exist.

Being a Democrat, Whitehouse was also among those repeatedly declaring the recent government shutdown to be the fault of “Tea Party Republicans,” who out of shadowy and questionable motives were not allowing our virtuous system of government to function. The hostage takers.

The quotes could go on, and across a wide range of issues. Our current president has made an institutional practice of such division, to the point that the IRS under his control targeted Tea Party groups prior to his reelection. And our current slate of watchdogs in the mainstream media have made an all but unmistakable decision not to bark — even as Obama’s park service drove people from their homes, if they were built on federal land, blocked veterans from their memorials, and stood guard over visiting foreigners lest they find a way to “recreate” during the shutdown, all to make the American people blame Tea Partiers for the pain.

As important as Professor Miller’s missive may be, though, I fear he may understate the “allure” of totalitarianism. It may not simply be something to which human beings can be attracted, but something to which we’re inclined. The latter emphasis increases exponentially the requirement that we be always watchful within ourselves, no less than of others, because it isn’t simply that the unenlightened may lure us in, making us forget ourselves, but that we (for all our enlightenment) may long to forget.

During a speech at the 2012 Portsmouth Institute conference on God and science, Professor Miller spoke as one who had been deeply involved in the effort to beat back, by judicial and other means, the encroachment of creationism and intelligent design theories on the public-school turf of evolution. In the course of his argument, he referred to notes he had gotten some years back that asked why a New England professor should so vociferously insist on a right to dictate curricula hundreds of miles away.

The opposing lesson plans could not be seen as a local decision, he said, because they amounted to an attack on “the place of scientific inquiry itself,” which apparently must be guarded jealously. The creationists, that is, were spoiling our otherwise virtuous intellectual society.

The key insight that makes (or made) the United States an exception in human history isn’t that politicians or certain forces cannot be trusted with too much power, but that they are we, and we cannot be trusted.  The corrective to that existential riddle is to allow everybody, to the greatest degree possible, space — both in terms of geography and civic structure and in terms of speech.

The more fully we allow others to live and to proclaim in opposition to our own worldviews, the better we can address that within ourselves that our nature requires us to oppose.