At a recent discussion of his latest (and excellent) book, Yuval Levin deployed an interesting and arresting term: “strategic naivete.” He said that if you want to accomplish something that seems impossible — in his case, restoring Congress to its former place as the world’s greatest deliberative body — you must be “strategically naive” about the powerful headwinds checking your progress. Only with a little naivete can you summon the courage and character needed to do great things.   

In his own excellent book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, Jonathan Turley deploys just the sort of strategic naivete that Levin had in mind (Turley calls it “a certain optimism”). His task is to reinvigorate a culture of free speech in America, and that is a task facing powerful headwinds of its own.  

College campuses, which ought to be monuments to free speech and healthy debate, have become bastions of closed-mindedness “raising a generation of speech phobics.” The government and social media companies coordinate to ban speech that they disapprove of. The leaders of one of our major political parties have explicitly turned against free speech on the basis that government officials ought to be able to police “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech.” And all the while, Americans are all so caught up in what Turley calls our “age of rage,” that we are often happy to see our political opponents canceled for saying this or that, even though we rightly decry the cancellation of our allies. 

Despite these daunting headwinds, Turley believes that “this anti-free speech movement cannot …entirely extinguish” our impulse to free thought and expression. 

This is strategic naivete, but do not mistake it for ignorant innocence. Indeed, if there is one thing in common among people who have strategic naivete, it is a remarkable knowledge and savvy. Turley is one of the country’s most knowledgeable and thoughtful experts on free speech. He knows better than most just how daunting the task that he has taken on is, so we cannot call him an optimist blindly hoping to stumble to safety through a storm, but rather a realist who, through careful study has charted a course.  

Turley knows better than anyone the extent to which the impulse to suppress speech has gripped Americans. He knows too that there is really nothing new about the present moment. He recounts how, time and time again, America has betrayed its constitutional commitment to free speech as the impulse to censor gains strength from political rage.

Turley is not, however, a fatalist who resigns himself to the idea that free speech is subject to a pendulum that swings irresistibly from freedom to censorship and back again. Rather, Turley’s encyclopedic knowledge of our First Amendment history shows him a way that we can improve.   

In short, Turley argues that we must replace our “functionalist” defense of free speech with a “natural law or autonomy-based” defense.  

Turley argues that the reason America has often succumbed to the impulse to censor is because we typically defend free speech on functionalist grounds. That is, we defend free speech’s role in “fulfill[ing] the goals of democratic governance.” But if the goals of democratic governance are all that we care about, then it follows that “some speech can be barred as inimical to that function.”  

This functionalist defense, Turley argues, explains why so many people want to ban “misinformation” and “hate speech.” These, they argue, undermine democracy, so there is no reason to protect them. It also explains many of the Supreme Court decisions that Turley laments, like Schenck v. United States, which (until overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio) permitted government officials to ban speech when they believed that it would create a “clear and present danger” of bringing about “the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”  

But free speech, Turley argues, is about so much more than the inherently subjective weighing of pros and cons of speech for “the goals of democratic governance.” Free speech is “a human right,” he argues, and “it is the free expression of thought that is the essence of being human.” In other words, “free speech is not about perfecting democracy,” but “about perfecting ourselves.”  

These statements are the sort that the Founding Fathers would have called “self-evident,” but Turley feels that they need to be proved and defended given our “age of rage” in which people of all political stripes feel the visceral urge to silence their opponents. What he offers, therefore, is a deep and gripping history of the philosophy and practice of free speech.  

“Humans are more than talking bananas, despite our shared genetic sequencing,” is the sort of effective and often amusing style that Turley uses throughout. His book is packed with philosophy and history, but it is not made for the dusty shelves of an ivory tower. Each page forms part of a riveting story. We move from talking bananas to the story of Phineas Gage, who in 1848 survived having an iron rod blown through the parts of his brain responsible for creativity.Turley uses this story to give scientific support to his philosophical claim that expression is part of what it means to be fully human.  

Turley moves us from Gage to British common law, to the radical promise of the American colonists, and to the genius of the Framers of the Constitution who saw how unwise it would be to trust government officials with the power to weigh the pros and cons of speech and censor it according to their judgments. From there he moves into the modern era retelling fascinating, and at times hilarious, stories about free speech and the people who fought for it, like the little-known story behind Normal Rockwell’s painting The Connoisseur (I will not spoil the story here, but it was one of my favorites of all those in the book).  

The book is filled with stories of free speech advocates sure to both inspire and infuriate partisans of all political stripes. And that is Turley’s point: if you celebrate the freedom of some and decry the freedom of others, you have succumbed to our age of rage and have failed to appreciate that the right to speak freely transcends what makes us Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, and implicates what makes us all human. 

Embracing that higher view of free speech, Turley argues, is the only way to stop “the erosion of free speech” that has already damaged this essential human right in Europe and threatens to do the same in America. The task seems daunting, but Turley’s exhaustively researched and engagingly written history of free speech gives readers the knowledge and savvy they need to adopt the strategic naivete that will protect their indispensable right.