A couple of years ago, commentary editor Timothy P. Carney and I realized we needed a new approach to writing editorials about the Bill of Rights. Once upon a time, it had been possible to condemn policy or political rhetoric by pointing out how they traduced America’s founding values. Today, however, this is no longer sufficient; the Left and an increasing number of college-indoctrinated young adults resist persuasion. If you mention, as though making a killer point, that a sacrosanct right is being breached, their likely response is “So what?”
These rights are neither understood nor, as a consequence, valued as they used to be. It has become necessary to go back to basics and explain why they must be protected as bulwarks against tyranny. Free speech, the most important right, is also the most endangered. Left-wing Jacobins not only don’t want to hear views opposing their own, but also don’t want anyone else to hear them. It is an intellectually bankrupt philosophy — willful, dictatorial, contemptible — that cannot withstand even a zephyr breeze of disagreement.
