BECAUSE of our long-running romance with American-style democracy and the guarantees of the Amendments to the American Constitution, we shirk at the proposal that some ideas just cannot be tolerated and that some expressions of opinion will not be allowed any place in the public sphere. But in Germany and in other countries, denying the Holocaust — no matter that it may don academic vesture — is punished as a crime.

And Germany is not alone in this respect. We then have democracies — thriving very well as democracies — that make certain ideas when expressed in the public sphere actionable criminally.