Since last year’s presidential election, we’ve tracked how the right, now that it’s back in power, has adopted some of the worst tactics of the intolerant left—from suppressing dissenting views to enforcing ideological purity tests. Few understand the irony of this development better than best-selling author and Free Press contributor Ryan Holiday—a leading promoter of modern Stoicism who once faced vociferous criticism from the left for focusing his work on overwhelmingly white and male philosophers. These days, he has his speeches canceled by the right for something eerily similar: speaking out against book bans ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Last week, Holiday released a new book, Wisdom Takes Work, about the importance of engaging with uncomfortable ideas in a culture that rewards conformity, and runs on outrage. This idea lies at the core of The Free Press’s mission. And in his piece for us today, Holiday explains why it matters: not only for the left, but for a conservative movement increasingly captured by the very same ideological fragility it once decried in its opponents. —The Editors
Slave owners tried very hard to justify themselves. In the early years of the 19th century, wave after wave of preposterous pseudoscience was published to help them rationalize what was obviously wrong but incredibly profitable. Soon, speech criticizing slavery was policed. Books were banned; possession of some, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were criminalized. Newspaper owners were targeted, their presses thrown into the river. Abolitionists were lynched and driven from the South. Slave owners’ sublimated guilt was so fragile that they needed soft and hard power—indeed, the entire force of culture and government—to maintain the specious lie that slavery was not only not bad, it was right.
This was the most exasperatingly difficult part of the political situation, as Abraham Lincoln explained at Cooper Union in February 1860. What would satisfy and calm the South? “This, and this only,” Lincoln said: “Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”
