The threats of the moment are increasingly brazen and clear, from the state surveilling people online, seizing them off the streets, and steering control of media organizations to regime allies, to using urgently needed social programs and revenue streams as leverage to intimidate schools, universities, nonprofits, and state and local governments. But what would it mean to imagine and secure these freedoms in the future? In this blog post, I want to suggest three propositions that should shape any larger project of reconstructing our system of free expression for a more robust, meaningful, and substantive democracy of the future.

1. Freedoms of expression are products of infrastructure. Democracy depends on infrastructure—the underlying structures that enable us to organize, associate, engage in speech, vote, and have an equal share of political power and influence. Conventional democracy reform addresses the more formal political institutional aspects of this infrastructure: voting, districting, campaign finance, and deeper structural questions about legislative malapportionment (e.g., of the Senate) and the like. But there is a vital civic and informational infrastructure that also is critical to enabling free expression. Individuals and communities need to be able to form civic associations—including through nonprofit and other legal formations—free of state intimidation and with affirmative resources to advance their missions. Individuals and communities depend on the free flow of information and ideas—both to learn and engage with the world around them, and to form their views and advocate for their aspirations. That flow of information itself depends on an underlying infrastructure: of media organizations, online platforms, and subject to political economic incentives and pressures stemming from the business organization of these entities.
2. The threats to freedom of expression and its underlying infrastructure stem from both public and private actors. As the events of the last year have underscored, these infrastructures that undergird free expression are vulnerable—to both the pressures of state actors and private actors. We have seen how the weaponization of governmental enforcement powers and government funding streams alike have been wielded to seek to discipline media companies, universities, and nonprofit organizations—all with the goal of chilling oppositional expression. These are threats to expression from an authoritarian, dominating state. But we also see increasingly the role of private power in asserting its own dominance over the free expression infrastructure: in the consolidation of media ownership through mergers and the rise of explicitly regime-friendly oligarchical control of information. More subtle but equally present is the role of private power in shaping the mediation of digital public opinion through the control and manipulation of social media platforms and algorithms.
3. Many of these threats predate the worst excesses of the current administration—and redressing them will require reckoning with laws and practices that have been accepted by both parties for the last 20-plus years. This is perhaps the most important premise for any project reconstructing free expression. The threats to our free expression infrastructure, while accelerating to the extreme in the current moment, long predate the current regime. And indeed, many of the attacks on our free expression infrastructure were already taking place, albeit in more localized and less visible forms. Attacks on civil society organizations have already been a mainstay of the modern policy response to recent moments of bottom-up civil society movement organizing. Prosecutors in Atlanta have used conspiracy charges in an attempt to dismantle the civic infrastructure enabling mass protests against the expansion of the “Cop City” development. Private oligarchs have systematically brought nuisance suits to intimidate and bleed dry independent journalism outfits that embarrassed them with muckraking coverage—as when Peter Thiel funded the legal campaign that ultimately bankrupted Gawker media almost 20 years ago. The concentration of private control over social media platforms and in context of broadcast and radio mergers was already a significant threat to free expression prior to 2025.

What then would a reconstruction of free expression need to look like in light of these three realities?

• First, we will have to dismantle authoritarian capacities. We must rein in the excessive power of the state to unlawfully intimidate, defund, or discriminate against individuals, firms, nonprofits, and the like. This includes the need to more systematically dismantle surveillance and coercive capacities—capacities that both parties have sought to expand and preserve since 9/11. And it requires providing for greater accountability for officials who abuse their office by attacking free expression.
• Second, and similarly, we will need to structurally limit private control of information, media, and other critical free expression infrastructures—for example through robust antitrust policies, common carriage policies, and similar structural interventions. This in turn will require rebuilt and redesigned affirmative capacities for state regulation of private power threats to free expression—and more permissive legal doctrines that enable more creative legislative and regulatory regimes that can govern our modern media and information infrastructures in ways that are democracy and expression-enhancing.
• Third, we will need to innovate new affirmative investments in a civic-minded information infrastructure, from future alternative models of public media, to independent production of knowledge and research including through public funding, to expanded resourcing for bottom-up civic organizing and engagement among ordinary Americans. Public financing of some form is crucial to such knowledge production—but it must be structured through institutions that are less prone to partisan weaponization than the institutions of the past.

In 2022, Congress came close to passing landmark democracy reform legislation addressing issues of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and money-in-politics. Those reforms remain essential. But any future reconstructed democracy will also require additional structural democracy reforms geared towards securing the infrastructures of free expression as well.