Not too long ago, Republicans were the party of free speech. Tired of being shut out of debates and shut up about everything, they styled themselves as free speech champions while trying to claw back some traction in the groves of academe and the halls of political power. But then came October 7, 2023, and suddenly many Republicans were not so keen on free speech anymore. Pro-Hamas protests on college campuses, especially when those “protests” are being ginned up and led by outside forces, are a bridge too far, many Republicans sensibly suggested. Free speech absolutism, a position many in the GOP staked out when Democrat gag tactics chafed, turned into free speech with asterisks attached when the political winds shifted.

After Charlie Kirk was murdered on a college campus trying to speak freely to the captives, I mean students, there, Republicans tried shutting down the nasty comments about his assassination. Yes, it is creepy and tacky and wrong to celebrate anyone’s death. The loons who run college campuses did it in droves. But if someone is really a “free speech absolutist,” then even that kind of gutter-level discourse should be protected.

It isn’t, though, and probably shouldn’t be. So what explains the tendency to raise the banner of free speech only until you can crack down on speech you find disagreeable?

Take a broader look at free speech and you’ll see that this same thing keeps happening, mutatis mutandis. Mario Savio, one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, spoke in 1964 of throwing his body on the gears of the “machine,” the organizations and institutions that ground people up and treated human beings as exploitable and expendable raw material. Good old Mario Savio. Free speech champion!

It wasn’t long, though, before the left wing had taken over college campuses across the country. Apparently, being part of a machine wasn’t so bad, as long as it came with tenure and good health insurance. At any rate, the left began to busy themselves purging anyone to the right of Trotsky from his or her teaching position. Mario Savio? Never heard of him. Say, you didn’t vote for Barry Goldwater by any chance, did you?

Political principles are what you pretend to uphold while you scheme to get your hands on political power.

This truism goes far beyond the scope of free expression. Republicans in 2024 ran on anti-war, anti-interventionist, law-and-order slogans. A few wildcat bombing runs and political abductions later, and, shazam, here we are in Bidenworld again. One man’s warmonger is another man’s peacemaker, I suppose. Andale, andale, on to the next adventure in Tehran.

Take a look at the Hyde Amendment if you don’t believe me. Donald Trump has never been a particularly solid pro-lifer. In fact, it always seemed as though he was mouthing words that he thought would get him and his ticket elected. But Republicans believed — maybe they had to believe — that Trump was going to pull through in a pro-life pinch. Well. In early January, President Trump told Republicans they needed to be “a little flexible” on the Hyde Amendment, the legislation that restricts the use of federal funds for abortion (see here). There isn’t much flexibility in death, which is what is waiting for babies if Republicans follow Trump’s advice on Hyde. Either children will be dismembered in utero, or they won’t. But in the gap between real-world consequences and political rhetoric there lurks something revealing, and troubling, about our world.

The ineluctable conclusion, the iron rule of society, seems to be that you gotta serve somebody. In the political world, the world of organized states, you do this facetiously, no matter how much you might like to profess your sincerity. If you want to get by in politics, or as a citizen in a “democracy,” then you have to make obeisance toward some absolutism, which you will later fudge (or may already be fudging). You must pretend to stand firm on some principle, no matter how many times you have backed down from that principle. You must act as though there is some unmoved mover among human ideologies, some rock of Gibraltar against which all other ideologies are leveraged — even if, when push comes to shove, the Gibraltar-like ideology you’ve been lauding moves around like a lawn chair in a hurricane. You have to pretend that this time you really mean it, even if everyone knows that nothing is going to hold up in court.

This is odd, isn’t it? Why do we lie so freely, but also pretend to be so dead-set on our political beliefs? The answer to this riddle is not in the political arena, not in society at all. Peel back the human frailty. Look past the hypocrisy. What do you see when the anthropological sheetrock is separated from the epistemological studs? We live in a world of lies, that’s what. The ruler of this world is a liar. We compromise to get by. Nobody holds fast in politics. Everyone keeps a little slack in the line.

This world we fight over, this world we kill for, is not heaven. Not hell, either, but closer to the latter than the former.

So what the hell is this place? In Romans 13:1, St. Paul says, “Let every soul be subject to higher powers, for there is no power but from God, and those that are, are ordained of God.” In the Gospel of St. John, 19:11, Jesus tells Pilate, “Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it were given thee from above.”

The Christian view is a deeply realist one. It is better, in this fallen halfway house, to have order than chaos. But to have order in this world, one must live under authority. You gotta serve somebody. Worldly authority often acts arbitrarily, though, cruelly, unjustly. People in power, in other words, act as though they have given in to the temptations of the one who has been given temporary sway over the world of men. Which is exactly what they have done, in fact. We, the little people, pay taxes and “vote” on election day. The people in the big chairs pretend to honor democracy and the rule of law, but the real object of their servitude is not any ideology or any statute.

If you’ve been following the Epstein saga you know what I mean. You’ll find out when you reach the top that you’re on the bottom…

Christian eyes go upward instead. Let Caesar be Caesar. Let the chasers of worldly glory go their own way. As for Christians, we make no idols to leaders, or to the principles they claim to hold dear. And we ought not to fight in their wars if we can help it. It’s best not to pledge allegiance to any flag, because when that flag gets carried into battle so that corporate profits can go up then most of us will realize, too late, that we’ve been had. In the end, there is no principle that can save you. Fools fight for that which is already dead.

Christians have another option, though. Gotta serve somebody. Whom it will be is the only question that matters.