Free speech is essential to liberty, Elon, not ‘democracy’
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have both done a great service to the American public, but their ideas about what makes a free country still seem confused.
No one has done more to secure free speech in the United States in the past several years than Elon Musk. By buying X, the social media platform formerly known as “Twitter,” Musk has provided a platform where content that would be banned or suppressed in virtually every other online space, including Twitter before Musk owned it, can be shared freely among subscribers. That alone is a great service to this country.
But both he and Tucker Carlson do Americans a disservice when they argue “free speech is essential to democracy.” It is not. Free speech is essential to individual liberty, not democracy.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects free speech from the democratically elected Congress. Implicit in its protection is the idea that democracy is a danger to liberty in general and free speech in particular. Indeed, the entire Bill of Rights, along with all the so-called “checks and balances” (bicameral legislature, presidential veto, etc.) are there to protect us from democracy.
Musk’s own tweet of Tim Walz’s comments about free speech should make this clear to Musk. Democracy is what made Walz the Governor of Minnesota and the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee. It obviously wouldn’t protect us from Walz’s implied suppression of free speech should he achieve federal office. The anti-democratic First Amendment would.
This has nothing to do with the technical distinction between “a democracy” and “a republic,” either. Imagine a system where the people democratically elected representatives and those representatives could do anything they wished as long as they executed the will of the majority. That would be a republic, and it would be every bit as dangerous to liberty as a pure democracy.
That seems to be the system both Elon and Tucker have in mind when they refer to “democracy” and the importance to it of free speech. But it is not the system created in either the U.S. Constitution or any of the state constitutions. In all of those, the will of the majority is limited and not by their republican form but by their limits to the power of the government, regardless of the wishes of the majority.
This is no mere academic point. Implicit in virtually every statement by Musk or Carlson is the idea that as long as the people are well-informed, they can choose the right leader, and everything will be fine. They are both Trump supporters and, for them, a well-informed electorate would choose Trump and be far better off than if they chose Harris.
This may very well be true, but it reinforces what seems to be a general understanding among the public that democracy is an end in itself, that as long as the will of the majority prevails people are free. Our political systems rest upon no such assumption.
Democracy is an element in the American system but not the only element. To say “we have democracy in America” is correct. We also have anti-democratic institutions like bills of rights. To say we have “a democracy” or to refer to “our democracy” is dead wrong and not just in a technical sense. We have a system that seeks to ensure liberty, using democratic and anti-democratic means, not purely democratic ones.
Don’t take my word for it. Our founding documents make this explicit. Nowhere do they even mention the word “democracy” or suggest in any way the will of the majority is an end of our political systems.
The Declaration of Independence, makes the purpose of our system clear: “to secure these (unalienable) rights.” Period. It says nothing about democracy or the will of the majority. The government’s sole purpose is to ensure the inalienable rights of the individual are protected and when it fails to do that the people have the right to get rid of the government.
The Constitution presets a longer list of ends of the government, due to both the verbosity of its author and his party’s belief in a stronger central government, but in the end the longer list merely breaks down same purpose stated in the Declaration: “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” all amount to the same end as “to secure these rights.”
Promoting the “general welfare,” although misused later to justify invading the rights of individuals for collective or supposedly majoritarian ends, doesn’t mean anything of the sort. Madison himself confirmed it is not a power in and of itself. The general welfare means protection of the individual rights of all members of society, nothing more. No democracy there, either.
The fact that the entire imperial establishment is constantly referring to the United States as “our democracy” should be a warning sign to anyone who opposes it that this is an idea beneficial to the establishment’s interests and hostile to their own. One would think Elon and Tucker would instinctively use the word “republic” just to set themselves apart from their supposed political enemies.
Or are Elon and Tucker just one side of a war between elites who don’t give a damn about liberty for people in general?
At best, their ideas about what makes a free and prosperous country are far too rooted in establishment thinking. Tucker especially holds all sorts of illiberal economic views and sees nothing wrong with them being made into law as long as a well-informed majority wants it. He is also constantly guilty of referring to the American political system as “a democracy” (Elon more often refers to simply “democracy”) just as the Washington establishment does.
Both have done a great service to the American public in reporting on and providing an environment where can be published prohibited facts and opinions. But Americans should be wary of their limitations as philosophical leaders until they replace the word “democracy” with the word “liberty” or, better yet, “property” (in the Lockean sense) in their discourse.
Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?