But even if conservative intellectuals were wholly consistent, one lesson of 2016 is that the pulse of the contemporary conservative movement is not to be taken in the high-minded arguments published in National Review, but in the crowds like the one that gathered in Alabama and cheered wildly as the president demanded black men be fired for nonviolent acts of political dissent against the unjustified killing of other black men by agents of the state.

There is no comparable push for the restriction of political expression on the left, and it’s not hard to imagine what that would look like: A demand for European-style hate speech laws and constitutional amendments, some sort of explicit legal defense of anti-fascist violence, legislation to allow the banning of conservative speakers from campuses or to codify campus speech codes into law, none of which a single major Democratic official proposes. Virtually the only thing conservatives can point to even remotely related to speech are attempts to regulate the nigh-unlimited ability of the ultra-wealthy to steer the course of elections and legislative battles to their priorities to the point of legitimized bribery, which is not at issue in the campus free speech battles.

By contrast, the campus threat-to-free-speech story survives in disproportion to its importance because it involves the children of financial and scholarly elites who drive press coverage; because it allows elders to sneer at a younger generation, and because of conservative media outlets which see these stories as politically useful and amplify such stories for their audience. But it also allows conservatives to frame the current argument over free speech as a conflict between people who are tolerant of opposing views and those who attempt to suppress them out of fear and weakness, a frame that elides the extent to which that describes their own movement.

Republicans are for more likely than Democrats for example, according to a recent YouGov poll, to support the silencing or fining of media outlets that publish “biased” stories, a practice that would necessarily involve a government censor (45 percent to 18 percent). A 2017 poll commissioned by the Newseum found that in 2017, “less than 16 percent of self-described Liberals agreed that the First Amendment goes too far in the freedoms it guarantees (15.8 percent) compared to about one-quarter of both Moderates (26.3 percent) and Conservatives (24.6 percent).” Republicans (37 percent) were more than twice as likely than Democrats (14 percent) to agree that “we have gone too far in expanding the right to protest or criticize the government,” according to a Marist poll taken shortly after Charlottesville.

But what about the violent protests at Middlebury and Berkeley? What about Nazi punching? Although support for political violence (particularly against Nazis) may be prevalent on Twitter, it is unpopular in general. Campus violence is rare, but it also hardly stifles conservative speech—more frequently, it backfires, enhancing the stature of conservative speakers, making them martyrs to right-wing audiences, and in some cases helping to sustain careers that could not thrive in the market absent support from wealthy conservative patrons. The irony of campus violence is that more often than not, it acts not as suppression of conservative ideas but as free advertising for them.