For at least the past half-century, Americans have been committed to a “free speech principle,” holding that speech is to be encouraged because it serves to produce knowledge, to enable the development of personal autonomy, and to facilitate the self-governance of the nation. In this essay, I argue that any such abstract free speech principle is fundamentally misguided. The value of speech is instead the value of the social practice within which speech occurs. Speech is to be encouraged when it advances the purpose of the social practice in which it is embedded. For constitutional purposes, the most important social practice established by communication is the public sphere, whose development in the eighteenth century made possible democratic self-governance. The health of a democracy depends upon whether its public sphere can produce a public opinion capable of legitimating the state. This turns on the quality of a nation's politics, not on the quantity of its speech. Americans who conceptualize the current crisis as requiring rededication to the free speech principle thus essentially misdiagnose the nature of our contemporary emergency. We need to repair our politics, not our speech.