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Enabling peaceful change is part of living in peace. The problem is that not all changes can be made peacefully, nor should be. Some possible changes can only be peaceful to the extent that people submit themselves to victimization without complaint. Some changes may seem innocent from one perspective, but from another are an unacceptable threat to people's ability to secure themselves and their future, even if no immediate harm is visible: If I kindly insist that you step into my van and point on a pair of handcuffs, I haven't actually threatened you, but you would be wise to perceive the situation as threatening. The simple fact is that some conversations undermine peace simply by spreading common knowledge of what the people saying them actually believe and value.
In the first place, again, I must point out that there have been significant speech restrictions in every society I'm aware of, including American society. If toleration of any speech restriction leads inevitably to despotism, then despotism is our future because we always have tolerated restrictions, and likewise always will.
In the second place, your argument that free speech absoluteism protects from runaway speech restrictions cannot explain our own recent history. Our civilization embraced free-speech absolutism to a degree never before matched in scope or scale by any previous, even approximately comparable society. The result was that free speech absolutism gave birth to a new crop of virulient censorship which has now metastasized across our society. Free speech absolutism did not protect us from censorship; it simply allowed Progressives to achieve a commanding position from which their prefered censorship could be enacted.
The slope is slippery, but not infinitely so, and more to the point your anti-slip cleats don't actually work. There are going to be speech restrictions. There are speech restrictions right now, and you and your fellow absolutists have done nothing I can see to arrest their ambitions. You don't actually have a method for enforcing free speech absolutism even in a unified society, much less a fracturing one.
Nearly every country on earth has some form of speech restrictions in place. I don't think the speech restrictions actually drive the despotism. I think the despotism comes from despotic ideologies, and the speech restrictions are just one of the mechanisms of government used badly by those governments. Every government has taxes. Not every government has 99% taxes levied against despised minorities. What would you think if I claimed that taxation was likewise a slippery slope that led inevitably to despotism?
And again, you still ignore the fact that bad speech has in fact been restricted, in numerous places and in numerous ways, without compromising peaceful societal change. Every modernized country on earth has some form of speech restrictions. Your claims are simply incompatible with observable reality.
[EDIT] - I'm not trying to hit you with a gotcha here. As I've said previously, I don't think censorship is a silver bullet, or even preferable to other workable solutions. I do think some level of censorship is probably necessary for a society to function, and I base this theory on the observation that no society I'm aware of successfully avoids it.
Then I think we should enable free speech, so the would-be victims can complain.
That's the flipside: Censorship can be weaponized as well, and the only real protection is free speech. And censorship is less likely to protect the victims, because the group that has the power to enforce societal change against them likely also can apply censorship against them.
Apologies; "complaint" in that sentence is a euphemism for resistance, presumably violent.
Censorship can absolutely be weaponized. We had much freer speech, probably the freest speech ever, and the general group of people who fought the hardest for that acme of free speech then turned around and weaponized censorship, rolling back all their principles as soon as it was convinient to do so. The free speech principles we all agreed to didn't help at all when they did this.
Let me put it this way: there's no actual substitute for maintaining a healthy ecology of memes in your society. If you let bad memes take root, free speech ideals won't actually fix the problem. Letting Nazis march in Skokie and defending Larry Flint didn't actually do what it was supposed to do. The idea was that we defend scoundrels to keep good people from being attacked. But what actually happened was that, having defended scoundrels to the benefit of one side, that side gained enough power to impose its own values, changed the definition of scoundrel, and banned defense of those so labeled.
Defending scoundrels was a waste of time. The principles in question failed to achieve their stated purpose. Rather than defending the indefensible in pursuit of an impossibly paradoxical ideal, we should use power to preserve the good as best as we, as a society, can understand it. We should recognize that simply punting on the question of who gets toleration is no longer practical, and we should develop answers that lead to a livable society.
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