Liberty Is the Right to Be Wrong

From Mill's On Liberty through West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Liberal thought has crystallized around a fundamental tension: genuine liberty requires defending not just popular ideas, but the strange, objectionable, absurd, and offensive.

Mill offered the now-classic defense: liberty is a precondition for truth to emerge from the cacophony of opinion. The Barnette ruling, issued during World War II, declared that the state could not compel schoolchildren to salute the flag. The judges wrote that no official could prescribe orthodoxy in politics, nationalism, or religion. You don’t have to agree with the Jehovah's Witnesses who brought the case. You just have to defend their right to differ.

That principle is far easier to defend in theory than in practice. It feels virtuous in abstraction. It feels less so when it means letting someone burn a flag, refuse a vaccine, raise their child in a flat-earth cult, or speak publicly in defense of views you consider malicious, regressive, or simply idiotic. Liberty is not a menu of comfortable affirmations. It is a model of chaos in which you must, at times, allow space for people you privately - even rightly - consider fools.

This is where the rubber meets the road for liberal societies. It’s not at the level of grand speeches or philosophical essays; it’s in the everyday, sometimes uncomfortable affirmation of the right to be wrong.