Author: Barnaby Raine, Chloe Haralambous, and Conor Dempsey

Conservatism is not just naked nastiness. It flourishes sometimes by appealing to instincts and interests, but often too by successfully presenting narrow agendas as vaunted universal ideals. Our contemporary free speech wars are an excellent case study. Free speech was once a demand pitted against repressive power, against the incarceration of dissenters and the suppression of pamphleteers. Prison walls prevented heroes and villains alike from organising against the powerful. Now with just a little cunning and duplicity the American right has transformed free speech into a means to advance suppression, not undermine it. By changing the demand from a...