“It’s a free country” signals that disagreement is permissible. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” acknowledges dignity in dissent. “Sticks and stones” reminds us to meet speech with speech, not violence or censorship. Without such reminders, the civic muscle memory that protects a free society begins to atrophy. That last idiom in the table — “Address the argument, not the person” — may be the most telling of all. Only 30% of Americans even recognize it, and barely 1 in 10 say it often.
This absence shows up everywhere: in the pile-ons of cancel culture, the readiness to attack a person’s character rather than engage their reasoning and in why viewpoint diversity is so hard to come by on many college campuses. If you never learn the habit of separating people from their ideas, disagreement becomes personal and dissenters become enemies to be silenced.
And in their place? New slogans, often adversarial and absolutist. We hear “words are violence” or “speech is harm” far more than “defend to the death your right to say it.” The FIRE/NORC survey found that a quarter of Americans now say the “words are violence” framing describes their own view “mostly” or “completely.”
Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
