Shut up!(National Affairs) (freedom of speech)

• Author: Strassel, Kimberley A.

I LIKE TO INTRODUCE the topic of free speech with an anecdote about my children. I have three kids, ages 12, nine, and five. They are your average, normal kids--which means they live to annoy the heck out of each other. Last fall, sitting around the dinner table, the 12-year-old was doing a particularly good job at this with his youngest sister. She finally grew so frustrated that she said, "Oliver, you need to stop talking--forever." This inspired a volley of protests about free speech rights, and ended with them yelling "shut up" at each other. Desperate to stop the fighting and restore order, I asked each of them in turn to tell me what he or she thought "free speech" meant.

The 12-year-old went first. A serious and academic child, he gave a textbook definition that included "Congress shall make no law," an evocation of James Madison, a tutorial on the Bill of Rights, and warnings about "certain exceptions for public safety and libel." I was happy to know the private-school fees were yielding something.

The nine-year-old went next. A rebel convinced that everyone ignores her, she said that she had no idea what "public safety" or "libel" were, but that "it doesn't matter, because free speech means there should never be any restrictions on anything that anybody says--anytime or anywhere." She added that we all could start by listening more to what she says.

Then it was the five-year-old's turn. You could tell she had been thinking hard about her answer. She fixed both her brother and sister with a ferocious stare and said: "Free speech is that you can say what you want--as long as I like it."

It was at this moment that I had one of those sudden insights as a parent. I realized that my oldest was a constitutional conservative, my middle child a libertarian, and my youngest a socialist with totalitarian tendencies.

With that introduction, my main point is that, over the past eight years, we have experienced a profound shift in our political culture, a shift that has resulted in a significant portion of our body politic holding a five-year-old's view of free speech. What makes this shift notable is that, unlike most changes in politics, you can trace it back to one day: Jan. 21, 2010, the day the Supreme Court issued its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling and restored free speech rights to millions of Americans.

For nearly 100 years up to that point, both sides of the political aisle had used campaign finance laws--I call them speech laws--to muzzle their political opponents. The right used them to push unions out of elections. The left used them to push corporations out of elections. These speech laws kept building and building until we got the mack daddy of them all--McCain-Feingold. It was at this point the Supreme Court said, "Enough." A five-judge majority ruled that Congress had gone way too far in violating the Constitution's free speech protections.

The Citizens United ruling was viewed as a blow for freedom by most on the right, which had in recent years gotten some free speech religion, but as an unmitigated disaster by the left. Over the decades, the left had...