Will our nation peacefully ride out the oppressive, majoritarian impulses of dueling political adversaries locked in an existential struggle? To use a couple of timeworn clichés, we have veered off our path and are now staring into an abyss. 

Too many of us have forgotten our American selves, believing that, when the fate of the nation is in the balance, it is expedient to forgo some of our most foundational principles. This is a dangerous folly.

Time was, Americans considered freedom of speech, however imperfectly applied, as sacrosanct. Most of us old enough to remember the Cold War will recall the horrors perpetrated in unfree societies where all speech served the ruling classes; it conformed to “politically correct” narratives on pain of personal and professional devastation, or even death. It severely stunted the cultural and economic growth of those societies for generations. 

Yet our own First Amendment is now under fire from both ends of the spectrum. Hard-left thought leaders have dismissed it as an archaic principle that enables right-wing oppression, and they advocate for a “consequence culture” and compelled speech model that ensures fear-based conformity to pre-approved narratives. Right-wing “champions” of freedom, meanwhile, chafe against online censorship and campus cancel culture, but seek to control the content of classroom discussion with bans on divisive concepts and other disfavored forms of expression.

But misery loves company, and the First Amendment, threatened and shivering, is not alone. The concepts of equality and meritocracy are now openly derided by the far left, where we find not only an ironic desire for racial resegregation, but also a redistribution of goods, services, and privileges, portioned on a hierarchy of group identities and a thinly veiled hope for historical retribution. 

Those of us horrified by this idea, however, should find no solace in the far right, which seems disturbingly at ease with dismantling democracy itself to prevent that outcome. As the 2020 stolen-election lie and brazen gerrymandering gathered momentum, several Trump acolytes told me with eerie, chorus-like coherence, that “We’re not actually a democracy. We’re a republic.” (We are, in fact, both. We are a democratic republic.) 

This misguided attempt to diminish our democratic nature presumably justified voter disenfranchisement and paved the way for a not-so-secretly-aspiring dictator. So, we appear to have reached that point where any core principle may be sacrificed so long as it benefits our own tribe and stymies the other. 

Locked in a negative feedback loop, our two sides react to one another with increasing stridency and smug sanctimony, all the while losing sight of the very concepts that make us American — our anchors, our navigational fixes, our touchstones. This is not the way.

I argued here last November for the virtues of patriotism, that the left foolishly eschews the flag while the right abuses and claims it for themselves. Today I argue that, after recognizing we are all American, we must find our way back to our core principles. 

Freedom of speech is not some artifact of a right-wing plot to oppress. It is sacrosanct, and it is for everyone, even those we abhor. 

The word “equality” is not a dog whistle invented by white supremacists; it is an Enlightenment-era value critical to the extraordinary progress we have made as a society so far. And the concept of democracy, of course, is so essential to our identity that the United States would effectively cease to exist without it.

So, when staring into that abyss, step back. Check to make sure that, in the process of reacting to the scary excesses of our opponents, we don’t feed the problem and doom the Republic. Whatever the policy at stake, our guiding principles must be preserved, even if it means — oh, the horror — acknowledging the legitimacy of our opponents, compromising, or accepting a loss for the greater good. 

To preserve our values and to avoid potentially horrific strife, those who win the day must consciously preserve the rights of the minority, must exercise forbearance, and must not stifle or disenfranchise their opponents. This is the way!