Contemporary concerns with democratic backsliding and contestation of democratic institutions, even in consolidated democracies, have reignited longstanding debates on how democratic societies should respond to perceived anti-democratic threats and what a principled "democratic self-defense" should look like (Kirshner, 2014;Müller, 2016;Malkopoulou & Norman, 2018; cf. Loewenstein, 1937). The core dilemma in these debates concerns the extent to which restrictions on anti-democratic speech, actors, and their associations can be justified in the interest of protecting the integrity of democratic institutions and strengthening democracy's guardrails.Variations of this dilemma, traditionally concerned with the protection of democratic institutions, have increasingly come to the fore in other arenas of democratic societies. Public sphere institutions such as schools, universities, and public broadcasting organizations, as well as social media platforms have become deeply entangled in discussions on the limits of speech and political action. These institutions are expected, either by convention or legislation, to uphold and reproduce core liberal democratic values while also remaining open to a plurality of views, allowing for the free formation and expression of political ideas. Yet, the existing literature has had less to say about what values should guide decisions to restrict or call out speech deemed to challenge liberal democratic norms in the context of these public sphere institutions.Our concern in this article is to clearly flesh out what core dilemmas of democratic self-defense in the public sphere consist of and theorize the democratic values at stake in this context. Seeing human dignity as a fundamental value for liberal democracy, we argue, helps us to more precisely identify the character of democratic threats in the public sphere, the various ways in which democratic values may be undermined, and in light of that, how public sphere institutions may respond to these challenges.Crucially, the assumption that human dignity is a basic democratic value allows us to identify how legally protected speech can still be highly problematic from a democratic perspective. This is important, we argue, as many of the challenges to liberal democracy involve individual-level harms, instances where the human dignity of individual people isThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
