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There are a lot of different ways to say "we should kill X". Some of them actually make it a whole lot harder to keep X from being killed, and to punish those who kill X. It is entirely possible to use speech to coordinate harm against people in such a way that, once you move from speaking to acting, the people being harmed have no effective recourse.
Free speech absolutism assumes that the above either can't happen, or is too remote a possability to worry about. Both positions are dead wrong, because they ignore the simple reality that humans are social mammals, not robots. Words have consequences, and can change the world in meaningful ways. Everyone who achieves large-scale responsibility is forced, sooner or later, to grapple with this simple, obvious fact. Occasionally, for a little while, times are good enough that some people can allow themselves to forget this simple reality. Sooner or later, though...
No, I'll bite the bullet here. Sometimes, people will coordinate and do something bad and you can't prevent it, only punish afterward. I do not assume it can't happen or is remote. I ACCEPT it as the cost of allowing free speech, and it is a cost worth paying because speech categorically must remain free for society to be worthwhile at all.
Many, perhaps most European countries have significantly less free speech than America has today. Are their societies worthless?
America has had less free speech in practice than it currently enjoys. Was American society worthless when speech was significantly less free? Marginally less free?
There are forms of "speech" that we currently ban, CP for example. Are we worthless now?
Was Britain worthless prior to the revolution?
Free Speech is a spectrum, and the more baroque end of that spectrum imposes costs that scale rapidly. Those costs are easier for a society to bear if it is rich in trust and cohesion. when it's running a cohesion deficit, it simply can't afford them. That doesn't mean speech restrictions are a super awesome best thing ever, it means they're going to happen out of necessity, as decaying societies struggle to keep the peace. This is not a bullet that can be bit. Standing up for free speech in a polarized environment won't actually secure freer speech, but only accelerate the polarization. What will end up happening is that your principles will be implemented unevenly, and thus thoroughly discredited. At the end of the day, you can't actually make fair implementation happen, and unfair implementation is worse. Or do you think that free speech principles are still valuable when they're unevenly applied? If I censor you today and ignore your appeals to free speech, and then tomorrow strike down an attempt to censor me by claiming the same principles I denied to you, is that better than nothing in your estimation?
Free speech is valuable because it helps people live together in peace. If they aren't actually living together in peace, what's the point? The principles you are arguing for have already failed. Expression has gotten drastically less free over the past decade. You and the other Free Speech partisans failed to prevent this, and have failed to correct it. I failed right there with you! The arguments you're making are arguments I grew up on, arguments I believed heart and soul! At some point, though, it's time to admit that what is, is, and attempt to find an accommodation with reality. The theory was beautiful, but it didn't work. We need something better.
The value of free speech is not allowing people to live in peace, it is enabling peaceful change. People may or not make use of that power, or they may otherwise be non-peaceful, but if you cannot advocate for [x], you cannot get x without violently taking it. Society will never be perfect, but it can get better IF (and only if) the people are allowed to ask for what they want.
This is what is valuable. And while not allowing people to say "twindlefrumst" is unlikely to get in the way of things, it sets a precedent that somebody is allowed to decide what you can or cannot say. If this is left unchecked then probability approaches 1 that eventually some other speech will be banned. No mob ever burned just one book. The slope is in fact demonstrably slippery, and every single despotic regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime. It is infinitely preferable to not risk anything like that by making speech restrictions categorically unacceptable, rather than hoping that THIS spot on the slope is firm enough to stand - and ALSO that everybody agrees with you and doesn't try to take one more step down.
We pay the cost of people sometimes misbehaving to guarantee we are still able to change. No other option exists. Either you bite the bullet of "bad speech" happening, or you risk the very concept of peaceful societal change - arguably humanity's second or third greatest achievement.
Enabling peaceful change is part of living in peace. The problem is that not all changes can be made peacefully, nor should be. Some possible changes can only be peaceful to the extent that people submit themselves to victimization without complaint. Some changes may seem innocent from one perspective, but from another are an unacceptable threat to people's ability to secure themselves and their future, even if no immediate harm is visible: If I kindly insist that you step into my van and point on a pair of handcuffs, I haven't actually threatened you, but you would be wise to perceive the situation as threatening. The simple fact is that some conversations undermine peace simply by spreading common knowledge of what the people saying them actually believe and value.
In the first place, again, I must point out that there have been significant speech restrictions in every society I'm aware of, including American society. If toleration of any speech restriction leads inevitably to despotism, then despotism is our future because we always have tolerated restrictions, and likewise always will.
In the second place, your argument that free speech absoluteism protects from runaway speech restrictions cannot explain our own recent history. Our civilization embraced free-speech absolutism to a degree never before matched in scope or scale by any previous, even approximately comparable society. The result was that free speech absolutism gave birth to a new crop of virulient censorship which has now metastasized across our society. Free speech absolutism did not protect us from censorship; it simply allowed Progressives to achieve a commanding position from which their prefered censorship could be enacted.
The slope is slippery, but not infinitely so, and more to the point your anti-slip cleats don't actually work. There are going to be speech restrictions. There are speech restrictions right now, and you and your fellow absolutists have done nothing I can see to arrest their ambitions. You don't actually have a method for enforcing free speech absolutism even in a unified society, much less a fracturing one.
Nearly every country on earth has some form of speech restrictions in place. I don't think the speech restrictions actually drive the despotism. I think the despotism comes from despotic ideologies, and the speech restrictions are just one of the mechanisms of government used badly by those governments. Every government has taxes. Not every government has 99% taxes levied against despised minorities. What would you think if I claimed that taxation was likewise a slippery slope that led inevitably to despotism?
And again, you still ignore the fact that bad speech has in fact been restricted, in numerous places and in numerous ways, without compromising peaceful societal change. Every modernized country on earth has some form of speech restrictions. Your claims are simply incompatible with observable reality.
[EDIT] - I'm not trying to hit you with a gotcha here. As I've said previously, I don't think censorship is a silver bullet, or even preferable to other workable solutions. I do think some level of censorship is probably necessary for a society to function, and I base this theory on the observation that no society I'm aware of successfully avoids it.
Then I think we should enable free speech, so the would-be victims can complain.
That's the flipside: Censorship can be weaponized as well, and the only real protection is free speech. And censorship is less likely to protect the victims, because the group that has the power to enforce societal change against them likely also can apply censorship against them.
Apologies; "complaint" in that sentence is a euphemism for resistance, presumably violent.
Censorship can absolutely be weaponized. We had much freer speech, probably the freest speech ever, and the general group of people who fought the hardest for that acme of free speech then turned around and weaponized censorship, rolling back all their principles as soon as it was convinient to do so. The free speech principles we all agreed to didn't help at all when they did this.
Let me put it this way: there's no actual substitute for maintaining a healthy ecology of memes in your society. If you let bad memes take root, free speech ideals won't actually fix the problem. Letting Nazis march in Skokie and defending Larry Flint didn't actually do what it was supposed to do. The idea was that we defend scoundrels to keep good people from being attacked. But what actually happened was that, having defended scoundrels to the benefit of one side, that side gained enough power to impose its own values, changed the definition of scoundrel, and banned defense of those so labeled.
Defending scoundrels was a waste of time. The principles in question failed to achieve their stated purpose. Rather than defending the indefensible in pursuit of an impossibly paradoxical ideal, we should use power to preserve the good as best as we, as a society, can understand it. We should recognize that simply punting on the question of who gets toleration is no longer practical, and we should develop answers that lead to a livable society.
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