“It’s become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now and you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces—the fear is not that the government is regulating speech but that protesters are chilling speech, that Twitter mobs rove the land looking for an errant word or misfired joke. In our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we’ve lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of politics and, indeed, much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear.”