This essay was originally published by The Hill on August 28, 2025.
On the first day of every semester, I open each of my classes with a line that has never lost its punch: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”
That’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a senator, academic, public servant and one of America’s last great public intellectuals.
In that now-famous line, he wasn’t saying other people had to agree with him. He was making an appeal to civic rationalism, or the idea that debate should be governed by logic and reason. It’s a compass point for civil discourse. Respect viewpoints, but insist on a shared reality. This is a guide for my teaching and an expectation for how my classes are conducted.
But every time I repeat that saying, almost no one in the room has heard it before. Even fewer can name Moynihan. That’s not just generational drift. It’s evidence of a broader civic erosion. We are losing the everyday language that sustains a free society.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and NORC at the University of Chicago, previously the National Opinion Research Center, have just given us a rare and quantifiable glimpse of this shift. Their 2025 Free Speech Idioms Survey asked Americans about familiar expressions that once formed a shared civic lexicon.
If we stop using the language of freedom, will we still defend the practice of it?
The results are striking. Most Americans still recognize the old idioms. Far fewer actually use them. The gap between recognition and use is the story. We as Americans still know these phrases. We’ve just stopped saying them. This is not just linguistic drift. These phrases are compact moral codes. They carry with them the habits of tolerance, humility and pluralism.
“It’s a free country” signals that disagreement is permissible. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” acknowledges dignity in dissent. “Sticks and stones” reminds us to meet speech with speech, not violence or censorship. Without such reminders, the civic muscle memory that protects a free society begins to atrophy. That last idiom in the table — “Address the argument, not the person” — may be the most telling of all. Only 30% of Americans even recognize it, and barely 1 in 10 say it often.
This absence shows up everywhere: in the pile-ons of cancel culture, the readiness to attack a person’s character rather than engage their reasoning and in why viewpoint diversity is so hard to come by on many college campuses. If you never learn the habit of separating people from their ideas, disagreement becomes personal and dissenters become enemies to be silenced.
And in their place? New slogans, often adversarial and absolutist. We hear “words are violence” or “speech is harm” far more than “defend to the death your right to say it.” The FIRE/NORC survey found that a quarter of Americans now say the “words are violence” framing describes their own view “mostly” or “completely.”
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Whatever the merits of critiquing certain speech, the wholesale abandonment of these older idioms suggests a deeper estrangement from the foundational norms they encode.
If we stop using the language of freedom, will we still defend the practice of it? The decline of these expressions parallels other troubling trends: shrinking tolerance for opposing viewpoints on campus, partisan sorting in neighborhoods and workplaces, and the growing tendency to treat disagreement as an attack rather than a challenge.
This is how a culture forgets how to live with difference. Not in one dramatic moment, but in the slow attrition of its everyday speech. The idioms are not simply disappearing, they’re being displaced by a different vocabulary of public life. In schools, workplaces, and activist spaces, the older language of tolerance and resilience is being crowded out by the vocabulary of fragility and offense.
Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on shared commitments, reinforced through culture and speech.
The shift is clear. Less emphasis on enduring disagreement, more appetite for narrowing the space in which it can occur.
And this shift is reinforced by other cultural patterns.
On campuses, surveys show declining tolerance for opposing viewpoints. In communities, Americans increasingly cluster among the politically like-minded. Online platforms reward outrage over persuasion. Disagreement increasingly feels like a personal attack rather than a normal feature of democratic life.
Student acceptance of violence in response to speech hits a record high
The sickening assassination of Charlie Kirk at a campus speech this week has brought attention to worrying trends in political violence and the public’s stated support for it.
The fix doesn’t require a federal program or sweeping reforms. It begins with restoration — small, intentional acts to keep this moral vocabulary alive. Educators can weave these idioms into their teaching, explaining their meaning and history so students understand that “address the argument, not the person” isn’t just a polite turn of phrase. It’s what makes genuine debate possible.
Leaders in civic life, business and on campus can choose these expressions over more divisive catch-alls, knowing that the vocabulary we reward becomes the culture we inhabit. And at home, parents can keep the language in circulation at the dinner table, passing it naturally from one generation to the next.
Repetition builds reflexes, and reflexes build habits — exactly what a free society needs to sustain itself. Moynihan understood that democracy is not self-executing. It depends on shared commitments, reinforced through culture and speech.
That’s why I’ll keep starting my classes with his reminder about opinions and facts. It’s not nostalgia. It’s civic maintenance and I intend to always begin my teaching with such an idea. I am focused on this idea because when we stop saying what matters, we risk losing the ability to mean what we say. And if that happens, the loss won’t just be linguistic. It will be democratic and existential.
If we want a sturdier civic future, we can start with something refreshingly small: speak like citizens again.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a scholar with the Sutherland Institute, and a member of the board of directors at FIRE.
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BRAVO! I commit to do better.
The line, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts," hasn't aged well because people weaponize "fact" to mean something incontrovertible when it isn't. Your follow-up definition of civic rationalism, debate governed by logic and reason, and a shared reality is much better for the current day and age.
Facts, maybe by definition, aren't controversial and so politically charged topics aren't likely to rest on them. The shared reality step in most political discussions needs to start with an acknowledgement of values or priorities instead of trying to define a "fact".