It's the practical erosion of Free Speech. Liberal (small "l" liberal) democracy and liberal science thrives on members: 1. Being willing to admit they may be wrong 2. Having access to a diverse information diet But the past two decades have shown erosion of not only legal Free Speech, but practical free speech: * Whereas previously they were just ignored (or even rebutted), today employees, students, and professors…
You're trying to blame something you don't like on something else you don't like, but it doesn't fit. The censorship and punishment you claim as new is plainly and obviously not a recent development, look at how socialist and capitalist ideas have been treated for the last century. Or how American evangelism has treated "dangerous" ideas for even longer than that. https://www.amazon.com/Scandal-Evangelical-Mind-Mark-…
The ruling class says whatever it wants with belief that there can never be any negative results for any action they take (max "freeness"),
the opposition can't talk about anything in a substantive way because all they do is react to the inane and random political grenades thrown by the ruling party (very constrained "freeness" really. Being forced to respond to propaganda-maximizing controversy after propaganda-effectiveness-maximizing controversy is a record that sucks to play and is definitely forced onto the air more than everyone wants -- and the targets of the propaganda blame the wrong people for why they have to keep listening to it ... )
the people are left with no meaningful political voice (0 freeness of speech) because there's virtually 0 correlation between anything being talked about in the political dances and anything that is actually sufficiently practical to talk about as to be worth the cognitive attention required to talk about it ... You can't have free political speech when there are no political engagements worth talking about ...
The "team sport" that is the current political landscape is not at all a fun or useful game -- some amount of fun and usefulness is gonna need to be found and introduced to the process of defining government to help move out of this ...