I. Introduction — How “Free Speech” Became a Side to Root For

If you only learned about free speech from American politics in the last 25 years, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a partisan brand rather than a constitutional principle. One election cycle, free speech is a conservative rallying cry against “cancel culture” and “Big Tech censorship.” Another cycle, it’s a progressive slogan against government surveillance, bans on books, or gag orders on teachers. The banners keep changing color, but free speech is supposed to live in the rulebook, not on one side’s uniform.

Underneath those shifting slogans, though, something quieter has been happening. Both major parties have grown increasingly comfortable with the idea that certain kinds of speech are too dangerous, too destabilizing, or simply too offensive to tolerate. What changes is not the impulse to restrict, but the justification: national security, public safety, preventing harm, fighting disinformation, protecting children, defending democracy. The list changes, but the move is the same: carve out one more exception when speech cuts against your own side.

The irony is that the legal First Amendment regime in the United States remains, historically speaking, very strong. Supreme Court cases like Cohen v. California—the one that protected a guy wearing a jacket that said “Fuck the Draft” in a courthouse corridor—are still the background law of the land. In that case, the Court held that the state could not punish him just for a four-letter word that offended people; offense alone was not a sufficient reason to criminalize speech. (Legal note: Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971).)

Why Left vs. Right Doesn’t Cover Me Anymore

I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.

You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.

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Where the Left Loses Me

Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.

But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:

1. An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.