Lesson 3: Beware of O'Sullivan's Curse

How does FIRE stay nonpartisan? Part 3

Back in September, Ryan Enos published a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education lauding FIRE’s record of being a principled, nonpartisan defender of free speech. He added, “We should ask what accounts for their admirable consistency.”

This series has been a response to that question, and a to-do list for any organization hoping to do the same. Lesson 1 was about a steadfast commitment to consistency and even-handedness, illustrated by FIRE’s unofficial motto, “We’ll drive this bus into a wall before we compromise our principles.” Lesson 2 was about promoting, preserving, and ensuring viewpoint diversity among staff.

And that leads me to the next lesson I want to share with you, which is closely related to both of the previous ones: Beware of O’Sullivan’s First Law — or as I prefer to call it, O’Sullivan’s Curse.

Coined by National Review editor John O’Sullivan in 1989, O’Sullivan’s First Law states that “all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” The effect of this drift leftward will be a distortion and possibly even an inversion of the organization’s original purpose.

I’m often asked, “Couldn’t an organization with very little or even zero viewpoint diversity still do a great job being genuinely nonpartisan in defending freedom of speech? Isn’t it possible to stay principled even if everyone shares the same politics or ideology?”

I’ve heard this question posed by great professors and free speech champions over the course of my career. And my answer is, in short, “Probably not, and certainly not for very long.”

The chief reason for this relates to group polarization, a mechanism explored by Cass Sunstein in his paper, “The Law of Group Polarization.” Put simply, if you’re in a group that leans in one direction or the other, you tend to hear more arguments which confirm your biases and fewer that challenge them. And if you know 15 arguments that affirm your group’s preconceived notions but only three arguments which challenge them, it may appear obvious to you that your side is correct. Over time, this can trick you into thinking your side is always smart and good, and that the other side is always stupid and evil.

I love Sunstein’s work, but it’s also a very right-brain, hyper-rational way of explaining the phenomenon. This can make things hard to grasp because humans are, to put it mildly, not entirely rational. We are social animals with hardwired tribal peculiarities. One problem that makes this worse is that even if there are dissenters in your group, they are still likely to self-censor out of fear of conflict, a desire to be polite or, more gravely, concerns for their job security. Another problem is that there is a very strong human inclination to strongly empathize with people perceived to be part of your in-group and to “other” people perceived to be in the out-group. This phenomenon is obvious in everything from politics to sports.

Ever since my “Coddling of the American Mind” co-author Jonathan Haidt and I began writing on this topic in 2015, countless leaders from both the nonprofit world and the private sector have reached out to us to confirm that runaway political polarization has had a devastating and dysfunctional impact on the efficiency of their organizations or businesses. This has been particularly true when it comes to progressive organizations. Back in 2022 Ryan Grim made this case, supported by various examples, in a piece called “The Elephant in the Zoom” which he wrote for The Intercept. The title cleverly references the fact that this phenomenon is commonly known to be a problem, but people are too scared to talk about it. And though it’s been over two years, Grim’s points remain relevant to our current moment:

Another leader said the strife has become so destructive that it feels like an op. “I’m not saying it’s a right-wing plot, because we are incredibly good at doing ourselves in, but — if you tried — you couldn’t conceive of a better right-wing plot to paralyze progressive leaders by catalyzing the existing culture where internal turmoil and microcampaigns are mistaken for strategic advancement of social impact for the millions of people depending on these organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way,” said another longtime organization head. “Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.”

Getting back to Lesson 2, if any of these organizations had meaningful political diversity, there would have been at least some bulwark against the trends described in Grim’s piece.

People have been warning me about O’Sullivan’s Law since before I became president of FIRE back in 2006. Since then, I have been clear with critics who bring it up that FIRE will be the organization that breaks O’Sullivan’s Law. It’s been nearly 20 years since I took the helm and I’m proud to say that we’ve done an exceptional job with this overall. And as I outlined in Lesson 2, there is absolutely no way we could have done it — and there’s no lasting way any other organization can do it — without making political diversity among staff an explicit imperative. It has to be a deep-seated cultural value in your organization to make it work.

It’s critical to have a situation like we have at FIRE, where even people who might be more left-leaning actually want more right-leaning people in the room when we are discussing politically charged matters. This desire is sincere, because we know it’s valuable to hear from people who disagree with us. It helps point out our blind spots. It brings arguments we haven't thought of to the table. It can even uncover points of agreement that we might not have thought existed.

Many of you may not know that I was hired as FIRE’s new legal director in 2001, in part to serve as an ideological counterbalance to our executive director at the time, who was a conservative. (Yes, I still consider myself a liberal, but not a progressive — which I think is where the real tension on the left is). I thought this was a brilliant model, which is why I later advocated for David French to become FIRE’s president after the previous executive director left.

People tend to think, “Well, I would never let my biases get in front of my decision making” but this is exactly the kind of wishful thinking I described above, which goes against our hardwired tendencies as irrational social creatures. It’s hard to see our own blind spots without someone there who thinks differently to point them out. As John Stuart Mill wrote in his brilliant book “On Liberty,” we are best served by hearing arguments “from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.”

The consequences of our failure to do this are real, and I’m ashamed to say I have seen them manifest in my own work.

Way back in 2003, a professor at a small community college in North Carolina took 10 minutes of her technical writing class to talk about why she opposed the war in the Persian Gulf. The class had nothing to do with politics — and because of this, her contract was non-renewed. We took the case.

At the time, others made the point that the professor’s speech was not protected because it was a substantial disruption and not germane to what she was hired to teach. I argued that free speech needs a breathing room in the classroom, and I still very much believe that. But to digress for 10 minutes on a topic not at all germane to the class is precisely the kind of behavior that case law shows you can be fired for.

Why did I get this case wrong? After doing some soul-searching, I realized that it was because I was biased. Firstly, I thought other organizations, especially those who tend to focus more on cases of left-leaning people getting in trouble for speech, would call us hypocrites if we didn't come out strongly in favor of this professor. Second, I myself was critical of the war and could relate to the professor’s sentiments. Because of that, I liked the case and I let my own bias lead me to the wrong decision.

As I have mentioned before, FIRE’s founding came from a partnership between someone on the left and someone on the right, and we maintain that identity to this day. But even with this in place it’s easy to succumb to O’Sullivan’s Curse. It requires a conscious, consistent effort to consider and incorporate the political diversity of our organization in our decision-making and our staff. It’s not always easy, and given our present cultural challenges it may actually seem harder than ever. But we need to be the change we want to see in the world — and boy, does the world need more examples of people from different perspectives working together.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

2024 was not an easy year for a genuinely nonpartisan, principled free speech group and, as the culture war winds blow ever stronger, there’s no reason to believe 2025 will be any different. If you’ve found this Substack valuable then chances are you appreciate the work FIRE is doing. As the year comes to a close I hope you’ll consider a gift in support of FIRE or becoming a paid subscriber (all proceeds go directly to FIRE). Without your support we wouldn’t be able to defend clients like Jeff Gray, Kimberly Diei, Mary Hall Rayford, Adam Martinez and so many others. And to those of you who already do give, thank you!