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:

1. the absolutist “marketplace of ideas,” where speech is an unregulated free-for-all; and

2. the authoritarian model, where the state decides what can be said.

Both are failures of imagination. So I tried to sketch a third way. It isn’t a middle ground, but a different foundation entirely.

Three Norms for the Public Square

My younger self called them Reciprocity, Falsifiability, and Truth. I’d now restate them, slightly weathered by time, as Dignity, Contestability, and Integrity.

Reciprocity → Dignity

The first and most essential rule: you must presume the other person is worthy of respect.
Disagreement is not enmity. You don’t get to treat those who enter the public square as beneath you. This is the precondition for everything else; the civic version of the Golden Rule.

Reciprocity isn’t just etiquette. It’s the moral architecture of democracy. To speak publicly is to acknowledge that others share this world with you. Without that acknowledgment, politics collapses into war by other means.

Philosophers have called this by many names. Arendt’s plurality, Habermas’s communicative rationality, Fricker’s epistemic justice. But it boils down to something simple: the conversation only works if we all get to stay human inside it.

Falsifiability → Contestability

The second rule came straight from Rawls (good authors borrow; great authors steal). Any claim you make must be supported by evidence that others can access and interrogate. No invisible tablets, no private revelations, no “God told me so.”

I used to call this “falsifiability,” but that’s too narrow. It works for science, but not for moral life. So I now call it contestability, which is the willingness to have your ideas tested, translated, and possibly refuted.

If your argument can’t be shared, it can’t be public. And if it can’t be questioned, it can’t be democratic.

This doesn’t mean excluding religion from public life; it means inviting faith into the civic conversation through translation, the act of rendering your private conviction into reasons others can examine. That’s the bridge between belief and citizenship.

Truth → Integrity

And then there’s truth. The simplest and hardest rule of all: don’t lie.

You don’t get to make things up and call it debate. You don’t get to bend the facts until they’re unrecognizable and then demand to be taken seriously.

This sounds naive, I know. But it’s the core of the civic covenant. Without truthfulness, even in the small things, the entire structure collapses. As Arendt warned, the substitution of lies for factual truth doesn’t create a new reality, it destroys our capacity to orient ourselves in reality at all.

So truth here isn’t just about evidence. It’s about integrity, i.e., the commitment to speak in good faith and to correct yourself when wrong.

How It Was Supposed to Work

In my imagined model, the public square would be self-regulating. There’d be no laws about what could be said, no Ministry of Truth, no algorithmic referees. Instead, the square would be policed by its own norms.

If someone habitually lied or claimed divine exemption from reason, they wouldn’t be jailed. They’d just be ignored, an act of intellectual shunning.

Freedom, in that sense, wouldn’t mean everyone gets to speak without consequence. It would mean that attention itself becomes the scarce civic resource. You earn it by playing by the rules of dignity, contestability, and integrity.

I thought education and upbringing would be enough to sustain this. I was wrong.

The Inverse Realized

I couldn’t have imagined, sitting in my stinky apartment with an ashtray full of Marlboro Mediums and my Rawls paperback open, what it would look like when those norms collapsed completely. But that’s where we are.

Over the last decade, especially during and after the Trump administrations, we’ve been living in the mirror universe of the public square I once envisioned.

Reciprocity / Dignity: Gone

Disagreement is now treated as existential hostility. The MAGA right, in particular, has transformed debate into a moral sorting ritual: to disagree is to declare yourself evil.
And how can reciprocity survive when one side insists that certain people, trans women, refugees, entire communities, shouldn’t exist at all?

Contestability: Replaced by vibes

We don’t have arguments anymore; we have assertions.
“God saved Trump to be his vessel.”
“There are only two genders.”
“The left approves of violence.”
These are not propositions; they’re identity markers. They feel like arguments, but they’re designed to be unfalsifiable, to shut down contestation before it starts.

Integrity: An insulted memory

A president can say “Immigrants are eating pets” or “Portland is a hell-hole,” and no one even bothers to check anymore. Lies are not deviations; they’re strategy. The very idea of truth as a shared foundation has been ridiculed into oblivion.

The marketplace of ideas has rotted into a carnival of unreality.

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What My Younger Self Missed

My framework wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete.

I didn’t fully grasp power — that amplification itself is an act of dominance. A liar with a megaphone can’t simply be “ignored”. When attention is algorithmically weaponized, self-regulation collapses.

I didn’t yet understand that civic virtue doesn’t emerge automatically from education. It has to be cultivated, practiced, defended.

And I underestimated how lonely honesty can feel in a society where shamelessness is rewarded.

But I still believe in the model. I just think we need to re-engineer its supports:

• Media systems that reward accuracy over outrage.

• Education that teaches epistemic humility.

• Institutions — from libraries to local deliberative forums — that practice contestability and reciprocity in miniature.

Attention is the currency of democracy. We must learn to spend it wisely.

What Is To Be Done?

I’m not a politico. I’m a theorist with too many books and too much coffee in my system. But I know this: we can’t rebuild the public square by waiting for better leaders or better algorithms.

We rebuild it one act of moral reciprocity at a time.

Vote. Hug a trans person. Speak up for someone, especially when they aren’t in the room. Paint your nails the color you like. Be a good man. Be a kind person.

Because the only real punishment in a free society isn’t prison, it’s being ignored for bad faith.
And the only real hope is that enough of us still believe truth is worth the trouble.

If the mirror universe of lies and spite is all we see, then let’s start again. Be patient, defiant, and honest, until the public square becomes a place worth standing in.