In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square. They monopolize it by silencing dissent. They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news.
Twitter and NBC are the poster children for this assault on free discussion. Their suppression in the name of “social justice” betrays the idea, best articulated in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” that competing, divergent views lead to greater understanding.
The idea of an open forum, so basic to democracies, already lies a-moldering in the grave of academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine applying for a job in gender studies and saying you oppose abortions after, say, week 38. The term for such a person is “unemployed.”
Imagine merely calling for a discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, taking the negative side, and hoping to win tenure. Bad career move.
University administrations are equally rigid. Rejecting affirmative action, questioning the implementation of Title IX or opposing Black Lives Matter would end your chances of being hired at nearly every U.S. university. Yet all of them proudly tout, with no sense of irony, their “office of diversity and inclusion,” fully staffed and generously funded. For them, of course, diversity never includes diverse viewpoints. It’s all about DNA and gender identity.
Modern universities are now well-oiled machines to stamp out dissenting views. That’s been true for decades. What’s new, and disturbing, is seeing this orthodoxy spread to K-12 education, corporate HR departments, churches and newsrooms.
The “thought police” are on patrol, twirling the twin batons of guilt and moral superiority. Dissent from their views is not just considered an error, much less an innocent one. It is considered immoral, illegitimate and unworthy of a public hearing.
Although both left and right have moved steadily toward this abyss, the worst excesses today come from the left, just as they came from the right in the 1950s. Opponents are seen as apostates who deserve to be symbolically burned at the stake.
The last time we saw this frenzy was during the dark days of Joe McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist. People flocked to Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible,” because it likened the moment to the Salem witch trials. Today’s audiences would be appalled to hear the critique applies to them. Alas, it does.
Suppressing free speech is not the same as violence, but the two are invariably intertwined. The threat of violence not only underscores the intensity of particular views — it heightens the danger of voicing disagreement.
Large-scale violence, whatever its source or purpose, undermines social stability and assails democratic procedures. It won’t stand for long because the public won’t tolerate it. They will demand leaders who restore order. The only question is what kind of order and at what cost.
The first duty of any government is to establish order and safety, ideally with popular support. Constitutional democracies have procedures to establish order, enforce it and administer penalties for violating it.
In the U.S., we have one additional constraint, a fundamentally important one: personal rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, cannot be overridden, even by large majorities. This social and political order is not static — it is always evolving — but there are well-established procedures to make those changes, ensure all voices are heard and protect each citizen’s inalienable rights.
Calls to “defund the police” attack the very idea of establishing this peaceful public order. Cities foolish enough to attempt it will unleash violence and predation and meet a predictable backlash from citizens determined to protect their lives and property. They will either stand and fight or flee to safer spaces.
Although mobs are not always violent, rule by mobs is always a threat to constitutional democracy. Even peaceful protests can morph into mob rule when they stamp out dissenting voices or quash democratic procedures.
We are seeing some of that today, where peaceful protests, guaranteed under the First Amendment’s rights to free speech and assembly, attempt to suppress speech, topple symbols they claim to hate and smear anyone bold enough to disagree.
To preserve our democracy, we must resist the mob. That begins with understanding the gravity of the threat. Yielding the public square to this “thought police” is the road to tyranny. It leads away from our hard-won achievement of ordered liberty and constitutional democracy.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago. This article is reprinted with permission from Real Clear Politics, where it first appeared.

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