Alex Gourevitch is right: the right to protest on campus has diminished dramatically over the last two years. Administrators have forcefully and punitively shut down criticism of Israel, relying on rationales that echo progressive demands for safety and inclusion. But the robust free-speech consensus that Gourevitch prefers seems out of reach in light of the broader politics of free speech over the last decade. The reason is not a censorious left but the “free speech” alliance of liberals and conservatives, united against the left, that has unleashed the violent and repressive crackdown of the past few years. At the heart of this alliance is a cramped vision of speech and protest rights that declares universal principles—free speech for all—but extends them only to a select few.

The fact that the MAGA movement abandoned its free-speech pretenses the moment it took power comes as no surprise. But the continued devotion of liberals and centrists to this new alliance requires explanation. Eager to counter political polarization and demonstrate their broad-mindedness, liberals and centrists eagerly teamed up the right to hammer the left as the new McCarthyites over the last decade. The rise of pro-Palestinian protests transformed this casual alliance into a genuine partnership. Administrators at several universities rushed to adopt a strict definition of antisemitism that curtails criticism of Israel and have used anti-discrimination policies to remove student protesters, at the very same moment the Trump administration has seized on pro-Palestinian protests to engage in the most restrictive government censorship in modern times.

As a result, the self-professed defenders of free speech have become the most fervent advocates and agents of government censorship in the twenty-first century.

How did this happen? The story starts in the mid-2010s, when a round of social-media bans triggered the formation of new social media sites ostensibly dedicated to a freer internet. In August 2016, a far-right activist named Andrew Torba founded a new social media site called Gab. The landing page touted the platform as “a social network that champions free speech.” The description was both a branding exercise and an accusation: Gab would protect free expression, while since other social media sites hadn’t. By 2020, right-wing donor Rebekah Mercer was bankrolling the launch of Parler under the same premise: to be a “beacon to all who value their liberty, free speech, and personal privacy.” Then, in 2022, Donald Trump launched Truth Social, and Elon Musk bought Twitter. In less than a decade, the right had successfully built an alternative social-media apparatus, organized around the claim that the right was the true guardian of free speech in the United States.

But these right-wing activists were not the only ones creating new platforms as bulwarks against perceived progressive censoriousness. A group of self-identified centrists and liberals—people like Yascha Mounk and Bari Weiss—chose that same moment to found outlets like Persuasion and The Free Press. Citing increased polarization and a desire to signal civility and openness to ideological diversity, they reached rightward to build a bipartisan free-speech alliance. Universities joined the mix as well, creating centers and series dedicated to open dialogue and free speech.

That robust alliance of institutions and personalities may make Gourevitch’s ideal—consensus around robust free speech and protest protections—seem tantalizingly achievable. Isn’t this the values-based bipartisanship that Americans are so hungry for? Not really. These “free speech warriors” actually are partisans. The actual politics of “free speech” in the United States is not as a freestanding statement of values but a right-wing political strategy—one that advances polarization against the left under the guise of reducing it.

To understand why this strategy has been so effective requires understanding some things about the nature of polarization. Polarization emerged as a description of U.S. politics in the 1970s, characterizing the ideological sorting of the two major parties and the uneven slide of those parties away from an imagined political center. The process can be easily traced in charts and polls that show Republican and Democratic legislators retreating from common ground, and soon after, Republican and Democratic voters doing the same. Political scientists have shown that the retreat happened among Republicans first and most dramatically, and then slowly extended to Democrats as well.

In recent decades, Democratic politicians, political analysts, and mainstream commentators have zeroed in on polarization as the central villain of U.S. politics. The way out of our democratic malaise, their thinking goes, is to reclaim something like the spirit of the long-lost vital center, where moderation, bipartisanship, and compromise prevailed against the extremes of left and right.

One problem with this account is that it makes polarization seem like something that just happened to politics, sweeping up both parties in its wake. In reality, polarization was done to politics by conservative politicians and activists—and the leaders of the Democratic Party and prominent liberal pundits have steadfastly resisted it (even as Democratic voters have come to embrace it). In short, the polarization of U.S. politics was a deliberate project: over the past fifty years, right-wing activists within the GOP labored tirelessly to move the party to the right. After a brief flirtation with big-tent politics in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, Republicans developed a two-pronged approach to strategic polarization in the 1990s—with the goal of consolidating their base, disciplining their officeholders, and demonizing Democrats.

The first step was to purge the party of remaining moderates and liberals. GOP leaders had touted Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, but under House Speaker Newt Gingrich they began to hunt “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only), the term coined in 1992 to describe Republicans who lacked fidelity to a right-wing agenda. The second step was to turn Democrats from opponents into enemies. Both Gingrich and radio host Rush Limbaugh led that charge: Gingrich by teaching Republican candidates to use hostile language that described Democrats as “pathetic,” “intolerant,” and “sick,” Limbaugh by tutoring his listeners to do the same. Add to that new developments in obstructing rather than participating in governance—the Republican House caucus innovated in long-term government shutdowns, spurious congressional investigations, and unpopular impeachment trials—and by the end of the 1990s, the right-wing strategy of polarization had been fully developed.

Democratic leaders did not respond in kind. On the contrary, this kind of polarization affronted liberals, who prized bipartisanship not just as good strategy but also as a core value. Democratic politicians throughout the 1990s generally believed that laws developed through compromise, drawing from both conservative and liberal ideas, were better than partisan laws. This view had roots in practical necessity: even as the parties began sorting by ideology, the Democratic Party remained far more ideologically diverse than the GOP, and by the 1980s Democrats had lost their dominance in national politics. But it also sprang from an ideological commitment to technocracy and moderation.

By the time Barack Obama entered the White House, Democrats were even more wholly committed to bipartisanship. Obama’s own belief in the wisdom of consensus over contentiousness fueled his rise in national politics. His 2004 Democratic National Convention speech took direct aim at polarization, arguing that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” That consensus approach was not mere campaign rhetoric; it was Obama’s core political ideology. Even in the face of birtherism and the Tea Party and unprecedented congressional obstruction, Obama continued to assert that bipartisan compromise produced the best government, leading the administration to, for instance, spend much of its first year fruitlessly pursuing Republican votes for health care legislation first devised by the Heritage Foundation.

Polarization proved to be a highly effective political strategy in the Obama years and has remained so since, but it remains one that Democrats have never really embraced. As the GOP has grown more and more extreme in ideology and populist in rhetoric, Democrats have held fast to defending a supposedly vital center—both for moral reasons (compromise and moderation are who we are) and strategic ones (the misguided appeal to the mythical “median voter”).

Using “free speech” as a tactic for political legitimacy and ideological institution building likewise has a long history. From the start of the Cold War, right-wing activists used claims of censorship to explain why they lacked power and needed to build their own alternative institutions and media enterprises. Though they rarely framed the absence of conservative ideas in dominant press outlets as a “free speech” issue, they had started to sketch out one of the right’s core beliefs: that institutions, controlled by liberals, used their power to suppress right-wing voices and ideas.

By the 1960s, the free-speech framing became more explicit amid pushback against radio regulations that were alleged to stifle conservative voices. “Freedom of speech is something precious to all Americans—liberals, conservatives, and the uncommitted alike—for the right to speak your mind without fear of government reprisal is almost as sacred in a free society as our faith in a living God,” wrote right-wing preacher Billy James Hargis in 1963 after receiving a new notice from the Federal Communications Commission about a regulation called the Fairness Doctrine. Clarence Manion, another right-wing broadcaster, called the doctrine “the most dastardly collateral attack on freedom of speech in the history of the country.”

In reality, neither Hargis nor Manion were principled defenders of free speech absolutism for all Americans. Like most Cold War conservatives, they had launched their careers during the McCarthy era as staunch supporters of the efforts to silence left-wing voices in the United States, arguments they continued to pursue well into the late 1960s. They derided free-speech culture as a kind of liberal licentiousness, viewing it with deep skepticism. In response to a 1967 Supreme Court ruling striking down a law preventing people with ties to communism from teaching in public schools, National Review recoiled in horror at what the Court’s vision of free speech might mean: “Each citizen may believe and say whatever he thinks or feels about anything—war, revolution, perversion, crime, God, morality—and may associate himself freely with others who believe and say as he does. He may advocate Communism, sodomy, anarchy, fascism or slavery.” Such a regime “would be ideal for a society of angels,” the editors concluded, but not for the United States.

Cries against censorship and for censorship continued to mingle on the right into the 1990s, as conservatives began to organize in opposition to “political correctness” and on behalf of conservative victims of a newly censorious left, comprised of women protesting sexual harassment, gay men and women advocating for civil rights, universities diversifying curricula, activists experimenting with more inclusionary forms of language. So it was that, at the same time that social conservatives and the religious right sought to crack down on cultural liberalism, “free speech” became a rallying cry of the right.

The resurgence of the “free speech” right in the 2010s was simply a continuation of this history. Extending a political strategy deeply rooted in right-wing politics for decades, critics began to rail against the “cancel culture” and “wokeness” of universities, workplaces, and other institutions for being intolerant of conservative views. And with Republicans and Democrats now even more divided by polarization, right-wing free-speech claims have taken on a new role: now they aimed to attract liberals, uncomfortable with polarization and looking for shared political projects, into making common cause with the right.

Thus the “heterodox” movement was born, positioning itself as a movement of free thinkers, neither left nor right but motivated primarily by concerns over free speech. It quickly found institutional homes across the country: Heterodox Academy, The Free Press, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and countless programs and centers on college campuses across the country. Heterodoxy has accrued an especially strong appeal in a political culture defined by stark polarization: if the center had been voided by doctrinaire radicals, it now presented a tremendous political opportunity—a space of non-ideological, fair-minded reasonableness in desperate need of being defended. Of course, “centrism” and “moderation” are decidedly unsexy terms (though most Democrats still haven’t learned this lesson). “Heterodox” implied something transgressive: a willingness to reject conventional wisdom—to speak truth to power—while at the same time working to preserve a dominant and respectable order under irrational, indeed dangerous, assault.

The taxonomy—and to a certain extent, the mythos—of the heterodox movement was created in 2018 by Bari Weiss, then an editor at the New York Times. In a Times article inviting readers to “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web,” she introduced the paper’s readership to the idea of a clever, edgy group of dissident intellectuals. Her figures ranged from guru and former clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson to evolutionary biologist (and later ivermectin booster and COVID-19 vaccine skeptic) Bret Weinstein, podcaster Joe Rogan, and progressive-turned-conservative comedian Dave Rubin. Weiss presented each as someone willing to breach taboos. The effect was to lead a largely liberal audience toward a sense of relief at being able to take part in forbidden conversations—and to depict the specter of a censorious left that would refuse to platform these people wherever they had power. Every one of these men endorsed Trump in 2024.

Weiss herself did not—a move that would have compromised her position at the center of the heterodox movement. But after leaving the Times in 2020 over what she claimed was the paper’s refusal to see “the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society,” she launched her own platform, The Free Press. Now the top political newsletter on Substack, it echoes the line of early Cold War conservatives: the mainstream press blacklists views it deems politically incorrect, both reflecting and exacerbating the broader weakening of free-speech culture throughout U.S. society writ large.

Weiss is right the Times and other major U.S. newspapers are not neutral aggregators of information. But she is wrong that the bias is aimed primarily at conservatives. In truth, the major factor tilting these outlets away from accurate reporting in their desire to appear even-handed in their political coverage. At the New York Times,this bias appeared in the paper’s over-the-top coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 and more recently in its extraordinary hostility to Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Likewise, the Washington Post has proclaimed an editorial line devoted to “personal liberties and free markets.”

At both papers, free speech has become a go-to topic for strengthening their affinities with the right, a strategy they share with The Free Press and other heterodox activists. Adopting the conservative free-speech framework allows them to punch left and soothe right. In heterodox circles, the danger to free speech—indeed, the danger of authoritarianism more generally—is always and mainly coming from the left, while any concerns about the right are always overrated.

This framework, bolstered by the mild transgressiveness of the heterodox identity, holds enormous appeal for liberals. It promises an escape from polarization while appealing to important values. By accepting the free-speech line, liberals can demonstrate broad-mindedness and make common cause with heterodox and conservative activists in a political arrangement that bucks the pathologies of polarization.

What liberals cannot hope to protect in that alliance, though, is free speech. In actual practice, the heterodox movement has only functioned to sanitize and legitimize an increasingly extremist U.S. right, which for all its free-speech talk has shown vanishingly little commitment to strengthening the mechanisms and institutions of free speech in the United States. The Trump administration, with the complete backing of the Republican Party, has taken aim at protesters, academics, and journalists, pressing on every lever of executive power to erase websites and federal databases; to punish people and institutions who work on race, gender, climate change, Palestine, and LGBTQ rights; to revive laws like the Comstock Act and the Alien Enemies Act; and to overturn First Amendment protections from decisions like New York Times v. Sullivan.

In short, the liberal-heterodox alliance is what has eased the way for the most authoritarian, anti-civil liberties government the United States has seen since the McCarthy era. That outcome was not the result of a last-minute bait-and-switch; this dynamic was clearly visible to as it was emerging. Now that it has fully developed—now that the Trump administration has gone to war on the First Amendment—it is important for us to get the causation right. Not to settle scores, but to more fully understand the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, in order to find the best ways to effectively counter it.

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