![]() | When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens' rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints. Corey Brettschneider is associate professor of political science and associate professor, by courtesy, of philosophy at Brown University. He is the author of Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government (Princeton). |
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