A decade ago, when I was first starting out as a blogger, I wrote a post arguing that the libertarian idea of freedom is incomplete. Libertarians of the Robert Nozick variety tend to conceive of society as having only two levels — government, and individuals. In this conception, freedoms can only be taken away by the government. But I argued that there are key mezzanine institutions — corporations, churches, universities, schools, and so on — that sit somewhere between government and the individual, and hold real power over individuals, and that this power shouldn’t be ignored when we think about what makes for a free society. If mezzanine institutions oppress individuals, that’s real systematic oppression, and a real loss of human freedom, even if the government stands back and washes its hands of the whole situation.
I doubt I managed to convince many libertarians. But today, I see some progressives arguing for the old libertarian idea that if the government isn’t throwing you in jail, your freedoms haven’t been abridged. Conservatives’ complaints that their “free speech” is being stifled by social media platforms are often met with an invocation of the famous XKCD comic where a stick figure reminds us that “The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from criticism or consequences.”
And of course that’s perfectly correct. The 1st Amendment doesn’t shield you from social consequences. But is the kind of speech protection offered by the 1st Amendment the only protection that we could ever want or need? If the entire world stood ready to fire you, ostracize you, and leave you friendless and impoverished for saying you liked kittens, would you really be free?
[...] What the legal implications of that realization should be, I don’t quite know, but I think it’s important that we recognize the power of non-governmental institutions and the value of freedom from oppression by those institutions.
This is a standard instance of the problem of local bullies. Noah Smith has remarked on it: