On the eve of the twenty-first century, free speech in this country is in danger. Not only do the majority of the population not desire it, but our leaders, who have so much benefited from it themselves, don't seem to understand it. Newt Gingrich's To Renew America , which longs for the age of Jefferson and De Tocqueville, does so because those were times of commerce without unions or government regulations. I looked through the book in vain for an elogy of speech, even in the chapter on the Internet. The indecency legislation about to pass Congress will again prove that the bad speech wins, for now, that people will have to face prosecutors and persuade judges and possibly give up their freedom before we will again have liberty of speech on the Net.
Free speech is a self-deception.
We believe we have much more of it than we do. The dean of boys surely never stopped to think that he was punishing speech. In order to attack speech in this country, we first call it action, or degrade it some other way. The triumph of the good speech is a self-deception. Good ideas sometimes lose, and sometimes an inhumanly high price is paid for victory.