Democracy is under assault by people who don’t believe in it
The New York Times article a friend circulated shocked me, which doesn’t happen often. I hadn’t expected the Times to be on the side it was.
I was raised differently. My favorite high school social studies teacher liked to invoke the famous line, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” Everyone had a voice and a right to speak and our disagreement with what they said didn’t matter.
This was a foundation, an unquestioned assumption, of the liberalism in which I was raised in a liberal-lefty New England college town. The right to speak freely was essential to democracy. Without free speech, no democracy.
Practicing democracy
We agreed with Thomas Jefferson, that government can regulate “overt acts against peace and good order,” but that it could not “intrude into the field of opinion.” Speech, even radical speech, like burning the American flag (a thing at the time), was by definition not an act against peace and good order.
Most of my teachers let students talk and argue, and generally responded to their students with Socratic questions rather than rebuttals. When the school hosted panel discussions with outside speakers, it frequently invited a local member of the John Birch Society, a rightwing conspiracy group.
He was a very nice man, if a little crackers, who on economic issues could give as good as he got. He believed the market did more for more people than the government could do. No one else spoke for a market economy the way he did, and he often scored points against the other panelists’ welfare statist or socialist views.
That was important for us to hear, since we were all on the left on these matters. He at least problematized the arguments we accepted, helping us see that the matter could be understood in other ways by people who wanted the same good things we did.
Limiting democracy
This formation helps explain my shock. Reading an article titled “How Trump’s allies are winning the war over disinformation,” and it was clear that the reporters thought the government needed to restrict speech. People were saying dangerously wrong things and other people were believing them. They must be stopped.
I was shocked because no one I knew growing up, certainly no liberal or leftist, would have spoken so blandly about the government trying to control citizens’ speech. The New York Times I’d started reading in high school would not. Everyone would have called this, automatically, “fascist.”
The government? Trying to keep people from speaking? What the hell?
The Times reporters do try to be objective, but within the limits of the Times’ commitments. The experts, they explain, “noted that government officials were not issuing orders but urging the platforms to enforce their own policies.”
That “noted” should have been “claimed,” and that “government officials” should have been “administration officials.” Nothing to see here, in other words, just a benevolent government asking people to do better.
But even if that were true, and no one should trust politicians that much, what did they want removed; and was the material really objectively wrong, a matter of reasonable contention, or simply an idea or claim they disagreed with; and did they disagree with it because it was politically harmful to their candidate or cause? And who were they to decide for the rest of us anyway?
Protecting democracy
“The arguments,” the two reporters wrote, “strike at the heart of an unsettled question in modern American political life: In a world of unlimited online communications, in which anyone can reach huge numbers of people with unverified and false information, where is the line between protecting democracy and trampling on the right to free speech?”
You may have seen what they did there. Protecting the right to free speech is the primary act of protecting democracy, which is defined by the ability of everyone to participate and the inability of anyone to exclude them. You may think you’re right, that someone else’s ideas are as objectively dangerous as the Russian army landing in New Jersey, but you are still only you, one voice among many and with no right to use the power of the state to silence others.
All the demos, the people, however wrong one may think them, have the constitutional right to have their say as full and free citizens, to have their opinions counted just as much as anyone else’s. Who’s right is battled over, and negotiated, through the political system.
Yes, the technology makes democracy even riskier, even more likely to fail. But that’s a continuous risk of the American experiment in representative government. We don’t avoid the risk by giving up on the experiment.
The answer, as it was for Thomas Jefferson and my teachers, is to respect people’s right to be incredibly wrong, and win the arguments and beat them at the polls.