Tip of the iceberg?

I had several ideas for posts that turned out to require more work than I expected, so here is a short one.   A few weeks ago, the New York Times had a story about the First Amendment that said "in 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va." The links just connected to stories about those events, not to information about public opinion.  However, I found a 1978 Roper survey that asked about the Skokie march (which had not yet taken place--1977 was the Supreme Court decision that found in favor of the right to march):  15% said it should be allowed, 73% said it shouldn't, 7% gave answers described as "yes, but it would be unfortunate if they did," and 6% didn't know.  Support among liberals was somewhat higher, but only 30% said yes or "yes, but" and 66% said no.  I guess you could call 30% "many," but the normal way to describe the distribution would be that a solid majority of liberals opposed the American Nazi Party's right to march.  As far as Charlottesville, I couldn't find any surveys that asked about the white nationalists' right to march, although there were many that asked about whether people approved of how Donald Trump handled it (of course, most did not). So there seems to be no evidence that liberal opinion moved against the right of extremists to hold marches. 

In fairness, the story was mostly about judges and legal scholars--the claim about liberals in general was just made in passing.  It's possible that progressive legal intellectuals have become somewhat less enthusiastic about free speech over the last 40 years--my not very well informed view is that they probably have.  And in the long run, major changes in opinion are roughly parallel in elites and the general public--for example, it's safe to say that there's more support for gender equality in both than there was 50 years ago.  However, it's not safe to say that the general public follows smaller or more subtle shifts in elite opinion. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]