Listening to the Right Voice

Sitting on the outdoor terrace of UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Café last spring, Seth Norman gave every impression of being in his element. His arms were folded on the table, his legs crossed at the ankles. He hunched forward eagerly as he spoke, occasionally waving his hands in politician-like gestures for emphasis. From his body language, it was apparent that he might just as easily have been sitting at his own kitchen table.

His ease of manner is remarkable because Norman is a self-identified neo-conservative on one of the most notoriously liberal campuses in the nation. He is a member of the Berkeley chapter of the California College Republicans and was managing editor of the right-wing California Patriot for the 2002-03 school year. It was only a few days from graduation when we spoke; Norman’s post-graduate plans included starting up Moxy, which will serve as the state-wide publication of the California College Republicans, and joining the Army, because he wants to help in the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.

As if that’s not enough to set him apart from the majority of students on this campus, he is in the midst of expounding his view that he and Berkeley’s other conservative activists represent “the new free speech movement;” the old movement (the one that gave this café its name) was set off in 1964 when the university’s administration banned information and registration tables from one of the main campus crossroads, at Bancroft and Telegraph, in a naked attempt to curb political expression it saw as divisive.

Free Speech

There are plaques on one wall of the Free Speech Café commemorating the movement. One bears a photograph of its lean, hipsterish-looking leader above a dreamy quote about free speech being that which “marks us off from the stones and the stars… as just below the angels.”

The October 2003 issue of the California Patriot.

“The great thing about Mario Savio is that both Democrats and Republicans on campus look up to the guy,” Norman says. “In the 60s, they took this outstanding ideal, they fought for it, and they won the right to free speech. And now, 40 years later, they’ve one-eightied, and it’s ‘freedom of liberal speech.’ And it’s our magazines that get thrown away if we don’t distribute them by hand. It’s our magazines that get stolen and our office trashed. It’s our reporters who get spit on. It’s the exact thing that happened to them 40 years ago.”

It is bold indeed -- in a time when a conservative U.S. president is projecting America’s military power ever-more extensively across the globe in what some see as an attempt to protect the world from the enemies of the “free” (free to them, not to us) market -- for conservative students to claim they constitute a new free speech movement. Certainly it is inexcusable for anyone to get spit on, and it is never right to destroy something a group of people have dedicated much of themselves to producing just because you don’t agree with what they’re hoping to achieve with that product. I think anyone would agree that the responsible students should be punished. But is there really a stiflingly liberal atmosphere on most American college campuses, as conservative students claim? Has the political balance truly shifted so much in the past 40 years that conservatives can rightly claim to be the radical protectors of free speech?

“This campus, which prides itself on being the vanguard of free speech, is actually one of the most intolerant places I’ve ever been,” says Norman. “If you want to be a Green Party member, be a Green Party member. But you gotta let me be a Republican. And they don’t do that here.”