And so I’ve come to think we should talk less about free speech as a right, and more about free speech as a truce. As with any truce, it will not be honored in the breach; if you try to silence your opponents, expect them to silence you just as energetically. No matter how exquisitely logical your argument, you will never induce them to unilaterally disarm.

At the moment, we have the opposite of a truce. The right birthed Donald Trump, who has never met a civic norm he wouldn’t trample. The left, which at this point basically has total control over the centers of cultural production, has managed to get media, academia and a lot of large corporations to adopt a narrow progressive orthodoxy. Those institutions don’t just endorse that orthodoxy, but enforce it — on employees, customers and even local governments.

Just as the right should never have expected the left to calmly pretend things were business as usual while Trump was ripping up the old social contract, the left should never have expected the right to leave them alone while they used their cultural and economic power to drive conservative viewpoints out of the public square. Conservatives were going to use whatever levers they could find — including their outsized political power — no matter how sincerely the left insists that no, that’s not fair, government power is different.