With candidate filing behind us, the partisan politicking of election season is officially here. The beginning of such electoral politics signals the imminent arrival of attack ads, hyperbole and unhinged partisan hatred toward “the other side.”
To be sure, it’s exhausting — but it’s also instructive. As mind-numbingly grotesque as some of the rhetoric will be in the remainder of the year, we should nonetheless celebrate the fact that we live in a society liberal enough to tolerate such diverse views in the public square… regardless of how hostile we might find much of it to our sense of decency.
And yet, many Americans seem to feel we don’t actually live in a world where such freedoms still exist. As The New York Times recently put it, there’s clearly “a dissatisfaction with free speech as it is experienced and understood by Americans today.”
To a large extent, such dissatisfaction is well founded. The propensity to censor, shame or silence the demagoguery that counters our own ideological leanings has grown among swaths of the American public — with an increasing number of people on both the left and the right growing intolerant of speech they consider abhorrent. (Of course, they also disagree on what constitutes “abhorrent” speech.)
Indeed, we live in a culturally censorious time, where one’s virtue is seemingly determined by who one chooses to vilify and malign, rather than any adherence to liberal principles — principles such as the basic freedom to voice stupid, absurd or even injurious opinions.
Colloquially referred to as “cancel culture,” the trend has become so ruinous to our public discourse, The New York Times recently penned an editorial lamenting both the progressive and conservative assaults on free expression — assaults that have had tangible and real-world implications.
Just this month, for example, a Federalist Society event at Yale Law School found itself the target of such an assault. Dozens…
