In The Atlantic: The Limits of Free Speech

At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own. – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation

Abraham Lincoln fought not only to defend America's physical integrity (by preventing its split into two nations), but America's spiritual integrity—its soul:

Lincoln wrote of the plantation owners' denial of the principle of equality in the Declaration:

The principles of Jefferson ["all men are created equal," etc.] are the definitions and axioms of free society.  And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.  One dashingly calls them "glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident lies."  And others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior races."

The above was from an article in this blog responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' claim, in The Atlantic, that a wish to degrade, debase, and enslave another people was the hidden essence of the Founding. We cited numerous instances in which Abraham Lincoln documented the actions the Founders took to set in motion the elimination of slavery in the United States.

In "The Limits of Free Speech," The Atlantic continues its disingenuous sabotage of the soul of America. Kent Greenfield writes (March 13):

We are told the First Amendment protects the odious because we cannot trust the government to make choices about content on our behalf. That protections of speech will inevitably be overinclusive. But that this is a cost we must bear. If we start punishing speech, advocates argue, then we will slide down the slippery slope to tyranny.
If that is what the First Amendment means, then we have a problem greater than bigoted frat boys. The problem would be the First Amendment.
No one with a frontal lobe would mistake this drunken anthem for part of an uninhibited and robust debate about race relations. The chant was a spew of hatred, a promise to discriminate, a celebration of privilege, and an assertion of the right to violence–all wrapped up in a catchy ditty. If the First Amendment has become so bloated, so ham-fisted, that it cannot distinguish between such filth and earnest public debate about race, then it is time we rethink what it means.

The sort of cowardly abandonment of liberalism represented by this thread in The Atlantic was skewered last April by a writer possessing the courage of her liberal convictions:

“Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote. “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own,” – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation.

Justice Holmes rejected Greenfield's suggestion that the First Amendment has become "bloated" more than eighty years ago, noting, in United_States_v._Schwimmer, that freedom of speech is "freedom for the thought we hate":

Surely it cannot show lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution that she [Rosika Schwimmer] thinks that it can be improved. I suppose that most intelligent people think that it might be.

Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.

"As our Constitution provides," Firmin DeBrabander asserted, "liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be."