The Opposite of What I Wanted: Reclaiming the Public Square
The Dream That Wouldn’t Die Twenty years ago, I was trying to write the master’s thesis I wanted to write, not the one my advisor wanted. I was going to be a democracy theorist and study at Cornell with its eminent faculty. Fate intervened, and the thesis never got finished. But the ideas never left me. They’ve been bouncing around my head ever since. The outlines of a republic which could sustain honest speech without turning to coercion or chaos. Back then, I believed in something quaint: that there was such a thing as the public square . A shared civic space where people could speak, listen, and reason together. Even in the mid-aughts, that felt nostalgic. Now, it feels almost mythical. My goal wasn’t nostalgia. It was to imagine a model of the public square that wasn’t trapped between two dead ends: the absolutist “marketplace of ideas,” where speech is an unregulated free-for-all; and the authoritarian model, where the state decides what can be said. Both are failure...