One reason I wanted to bow out is that I felt like people were getting bogged down in the details and missing the big picture. The amount of effort it takes to compile sources and refute the specifics usually isn’t worth it, and whatever examples I select are usually just one of hundreds of other possibilities.
The big picture can be summarized in a single word: telos. It is the Greek for the “end goal” or the “purpose.” Contrast this with a “form,” which is concerned with external rules or actions.
Liberalism presents us with common forms like “free speech,” “free association,” “freedom of religion,” and so on, but the difference between left and right on the telos could not be further apart. They are virtually opposites, where the left’s definition of good is the right’s definition of evil and vis versa. Whatever common purposes are shared between left and right are incidental and fleeting.
Most on both sides express agreement with the forms but subject them to their own contrary telos. This is why you hear people who claim to love free speech celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck. It is why you have people who claim to love free speech endorse legislation against “hate speech” whether against blacks, immigrants, Islam, or Israel. It is why “free association,” does not apply to the majority of relationships that make up your life as you cannot choose to freely not associate with people because they are another race, another religion, or another sexuality.
The American founding saw civil liberties as a means to achieve the good, whereas those beliefs have morphed into a quasi-religious dogma about “rights” as the good. The “rights” are the grounds of themselves.
For example, “freedom of speech” could be viewed as a means to the good by ensuring that those with good ideas have the capacity to put them forward and defend them, where the risk is that society might not obtain the good because people were not free to defend it. Whereas to make this into a good in itself is to make free speech its own end, where free speech is to be defended at all costs, even in the sacrifice of the good. The people once feared that we might be subject to soviet-style suppression of the arts and thus destroy the telos where men seek beauty, meaning, and truth with art. But the absolutizing of this concept became the rationale for pornography legalization and proliferation, directly contrary to the good intended by free expression.
Consider “freedom of religion.” The founders didn’t seriously envision this applying to any religion whatsoever, they just wanted to avoid British-style wars of religion over the details of Christian theology. They saw freedom of religion as a means to achieve the good — a stable unified nation where Christian worship was protected without Christians jailing or fighting against one another. However, this too morphed from being a means to an end (a cohesive nation) to an end in itself such that you have people adopt an entirely artificial and satirical religion like Satanism in order to deconstruct the political life of actually religious people. It is also why people zealously defend Islam, a religion whose core teachings are fundamentally incompatible with a liberal society, and which represents a fundamentally contrary and hostile way of life to traditional American or European life. These are two examples of the form being elevated to the telos, such that it undermines the true telos. The government protecting Satanism or Islam strikes against the original telos of freedom of religion.
This is why ultimately talk about being “principled” for free speech is never going to work and will never be more than a pragmatic, temporary allegiance against a momentary enemy. It is obviously in the interests of both sides to oppose and obstruct the government from imposing “chat control” and ban encrypted chats, but this is not because we have shared views about “free speech” as an absolute. We agree that we don’t want to be spied on by government or corporations, but for different reasons.