Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously saw the First Amendment free speech clause as requiring a "marketplace of ideas".  In his view, as expressed in his dissent in the 1919 Abrams v. United States decision, the right way to respond to dangerous, extreme speech is not to criminally punish the speaker but, instead, to respond with more speech.  If someone says health care reform will create death panels, the right response is to explain that this is a lie. In Holmes’s view, the marketplace of ideas will ferret out bad ideas and good ideas, the truth, will win out.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen when it comes to the business world, markets don’t always function properly (to say the least).   The same is true for the marketplace of ideas.  Holmes’s vision only has the potential to work when people actually respond to bad ideas, to lies, by calling them out.  In order for the marketplace of ideas to function properly, elected officials must not hesitate to denounce wildly false claims that come from their own party.  (Proper functioning of the marketplace of ideas also requires a functioning media, as I’ve discussed in other posts).

I am sure that Rep. Michele Bachmann is familiar with Justice Holmes’s theory, but, for some reason, she has been reluctant to play her role in making sure the marketplace of ideas functions properly.  For instance, last week, Bachmann and other elected Republican members of Congress spoke to an unhinged mob waving signs that included one reading "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, 1945" above a pile of corpses from a Nazi death camp.  Bachmann had helped organize the rally (officially called a "press conference") and urged people to attend.

It took Bachmann nearly five days simply to issue a public comment on the ugly, deeply offensive sign displayed at the event she helped organize.  When she finally did say something, she acknowledged that images of stacked corpses from a Nazi death camp have "no purpose in a policy debate about health care."  Agreed.  So, what did Bachmann think of people who graphically suggested millions of Jews were murdered, not by deranged Nazis, but by modest health care reform?  She concluded that "these unfortunate instances are inappropriate."

Inappropriate is when someone wears white to their friend’s wedding or breaks a dish without offering to pay for it.  It doesn’t quite describe the sign displayed at last week’s "press conference".  Comparing the public option to mass murder is foaming at the mouth, unhinged crazy. 

Rep. Bachmann isn’t the only Republican unwilling to denounce radical, deeply offensive (and hardly isolated) right wing nuttiness.  Rep. Eric Cantor’s spokesman also called the sign "inappropriate."  Rep. Boehner, who also addressed the assembled worthies last week, claimed, also through a spokesman, that he didn’t see the sign (which, I guess, renders him incapable to comment on it at all).

There have always been crazy ideas, there have always been fools who will say anything to advance their political goals or to give voice to their unhinged fantasies.  Responsible leaders have a duty to denounce such idiocy, in no uncertain terms.  Leaders have sometimes understood and acted on this duty–for instance, in 1995, when the first President Bush resigned his NRA membership after the group suggested federal agents were "jack booted government thugs" and Nazis.  Republican leaders–and it’s not just the ones named here–have a responsibility to speak out against the dangerous rhetoric that keeps showing up at their rallies and coming out of the mouths of their supporters and even their elected officials.  Calling the Dachau sign "inappropriate" falls well short of the standard these leaders ought to live up to.