The First amendment is not a self-declaring statement and will assume the form given to it by powerful and authoritative interpreters. And the moral that follows from that one is that the First amendment does not in and of itself (finally a meaningless phrase) direct a politics but will display the political "spin" of whatever group has its hand on the interpretative machinery. "Free speech" is thus just like "fairness" and "merit" -- rather than a concept that sits above the fray, monitoring its progress and keeping the combatants honest, it is right there in the middle of the fray, an object of contest that will enable those who capture it to parade their virtue at the easy expense of their opponents: we're for fairness and you are for biased judgment; we're for merit and you are for special interests; we're for objectivity and you are playing politics; we're for free speech and you are for censorship and ideological tyranny. It is a wonderful (not here a word of approbation) strategy, and if it is pursu as successfully as it has been in recent years by the neoconservatives, the result is to place the opposition in the difficult position of having not only to respond to arguments but to dispute the very vocabulary in which the issues have come to be framed, a vocabulary which, because it occupies the rhetorical high ground, stigmatizes counterarguments ("you mean you're against fairness") even before they are heard.

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