Threat to Liberal Democracy or Protection of Free Speech? The First Amendment of the American Constitution.

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

For me as a citizen of the old colonial Empire that was rightly rejected by the American colonists in an insurgency in the late eighteenth century, it has always struck me as unsound that offensive and racist language and racist acts of intimidation and violence and threatening behaviour have been allowed to take place upon the streets of American towns and cities under protection of the American Constitution.

Marches and demonstrations by the KKK and neo-Nazi groups have been allowed that have from a European perspective seemed utterly idiosyncratic and bordering on the bizarre, given the history of the United States in World War Two, the history of slavery and the ongoing fight for African-American civil rights. In Europe similar marches would have been allowed, but with strict regulations in place. However, the language and rhetoric being promulgated within these marches would have undoubtedly been prosecuted for incitement to hatred under Article 17 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

However, in America of course the right to free speech (and expression) is Constitutionally…