Most people have at least some family and friends with whom they disagree about religion, politics, and other neuralgic topics. We maintain relationships with these people because some commonality encourages us to look past our disagreements with them--because we have some basis for trusting them and their good will towards us, notwithstanding our differences. We may even engage now and then with these friends and family in a reasonably civil way (though, if surveys are correct, more and more Americans drop friends and family members because of politics, mostly liberals dropping conservatives, apparently, rather than the other way around).
It would be silly to expect the level of trust we have for friends and family to extend to society at large. Yet, social trust has a very important role in public discourse. It allows us to engage our fellow citizens without expecting the worst of them, without thinking they are out to get us--in short, without personalizing debate in a way that makes everyone defensive and angry.
In a review of Jacob Mchangama's new book, Free Speech, at the Law & Liberty site today, I argue that this social trust has frayed greatly, and that Americans' problems with free speech result more from social breakdown than from a failed commitment to abstract ideas about expression. Here's an excerpt:
