Having spent years now covering the comprehensive effort to scale back individual rights in the US via censorship and surveillance, and the heavy traffic in places like the Twitter Files showing censorship advocates urging Americans to adopt a more European attitude toward things like speech freedom, I find these weird essays complaining about the American “illness” of “individual liberation” more than a little annoying.

Whether or not Americans could use a greater instinct toward community, we’re in a situation now where we need to fight hard to preserve our traditional legal rights, which are under intense pressure. In this area we absolutely have a superior tradition to Europe and it would be a disaster if we were to lose that part of our culture.