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I just re-read Scott Alexander's Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness, in which he argues that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition on restricting people's freedom should be that you should first get societal consensus that restricting freedom in that way is desirable (e.g. by passing a law via the appropriate mechanisms).
In a sufficiently polarized society, there could be two similarly-sized camps that each want to restrict each other's freedom. Imagine a country that's equally divided between Christians and Muslims, each of which wants to ban the other religion. Or you could imagine a country that's equally divided between vegetarians and meat-eaters, where the meat-eaters want to ban cell-cultivated meat while the vegetarians want to ban real meat (thus restricting the other group's freedom).
In such a situation, if each group values their own freedom more than the ability to impose their values on the other side (as is almost always the case), it would make sense for the two groups to commit to not violate the other side's freedom even if they gain sufficient power to do so.
I imagine that people in this community have thought about this. Are there any good essays on this topic?
Vox has a post about this a little while ago, and presented what might be the best counterargument (emphasis mine): link
[...]
(I think the argument is shit, but when the premise one is trying to defend is patently false, this might well be best one can do.)
2Shankar Sivarajan
James Madison's Federalist #10 is a classic essay about this. He discusses the dangers of faction, "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community," and how one might mitigate them.