The current campus demonstrations are a reminder that of all the mossy clichés and puffed-up pieties of polite (and impolite) American discourse, the sanctity of protest is the hardest to question.

Doubting the loftiness of protest invites elite scorn more than any other skepticism about a constitutional right. Proposing limits on free speech, for example, attracts far less outrage. Indeed, people question free speech all the time: in debates about “hate speech,” campaign finance, social media, and more. (Let’s not even get into the fashionableness of questioning Second Amendment rights.)