There is an often-cited correlation between being creative and being liberal, anti-traditionalist, anti-authority and anti-orthodoxy. So it’s hardly surprising that Soviet musicians opposed a system that was authoritarian and dogmatic. What is surprising is that their contemporary counterparts in the West today are queuing up to endorse and defend them.

So what’s the way out of this?

By returning to good-faith discourse. By rejecting package-deal politics (a phenomenon that James Mumford explores in his book “Vexed”). By rejecting the fallacy that the world is divided into goodies and baddies. And by remembering that the line dividing good and evil “cuts right through every human heart,” as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Perhaps a healthier response from Neil Young would’ve been for him to start his own Spotify podcast. More speech rather than less is the classical liberal tradition of getting closer to the truth. The new progressive tenet of less speech is a philosophy that shares a little too much in common with the darker societies of old. If Neil has the answers, let’s hear them.