Free Speech Isn't The Problem. Democracy Is.

At the heart of the problem is that Americans want consensus without making any of the necessary trade-offs to achieve it.

Free exchange of ideas is necessary. It’s also not enough, far from it.

Today’s newsletter will be a short one, based on something I read this morning, finding it interesting enough to write on it.

Pollster

Daniel Cox

wrote an interesting essay on the challenge of bridging the political divide in America, in the context of the Charlie Kirk assassination. While he lauds the late conservative commentator for being willing to engage in the arena, especially with those who strongly disagreed with him, Cox says that this is woefully inadequate for a productive democracy.

He explains:

Disagreement is a necessary condition for a healthy democracy, but it is hardly sufficient. Our ability to express discordant or disagreeable views is a cornerstone of a vibrant political culture. But arguing about politics should never be the goal; rather, it is a means to an end. It’s an opportunity to refine our thinking, to better understand the reasoning of those who hold opposing views, and, most of all, to find places of common purpose or shared values. Without working towards some common end point, these public displays are simply political performance art. In this way, Kirk’s brand of performative politics was not a productive model of civil discourse, even if it was a successful one.

Cox isn’t criticizing Kirk nor his methods. He’s just saying that what Kirk engaged in was more for entertainment than anything else. He’s not wrong. This might be a personal opinion, but nobody who listens to Kirk banter back and forth with ideological opponents learns anything particularly useful in the process. More important, it misses the point: as Cox says, the point of exchanging ideas is to come to a consensus. Without consensus, democracy cannot succeed. In fact, democracy relies more on consensus than any other form of government, because consensus is what “lubricates” the entire process, reducing friction, since everyone needs to agree that the outcome ought to be implemented, even when they don’t agree on the outcome itself.

We’ve come to take it for granted, but it’s a tall order. It’s a lot to ask. I think we’re finding out right now.

Cox goes on to explain how the way in which Americans engaged politically underwent a major transformation in the last half century. Where as politics used to be engaged at a local level, meaning with the people closest to you and in your community, they then came to be dominated by single-issue advocacy groups such as NARAL, a pro-choice organization, and the notorious NRA.

This wasn’t Cox’s take, but my own is that the takeover of political discourse by these single-issue advocacy groups had the effect of atomizing politics, something entirely personal instead of something you engaged with your family and community on, and the extent of community was like-minded people whom you had no real connection to beyond politics. As you might imagine, this has an alienating effect.

The Internet and social media deepened this trend, along with exacerbating the divide:

In the decades that followed, the Internet further fueled a breakdown of civil discourse. Social media platforms are particularly known to promote extreme political views. Our online personas are frequently more political and less nuanced than our offline selves. Online, we more readily signal our political allegiances, seek opportunities to vent frustration, and argue. One result is that we come to see people we disagree with as political caricatures representing little more than an objectionable opinion. Often, we end up arguing with professional political provocateurs.

Cox goes on to say, despite it all, Americans aren’t an overly politicized people, hard as it might be to believe:

The reality is that most Americans are not defined by their political views. In a survey we conducted a few years ago, political identity was far less important to people’s sense of self than other personal characteristics, such as their gender, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation. Only 27 percent of Americans said their political views were a very important or one of the most important aspects of their identity. Yet we have come to despise our political opponents based on a facet of their identity that is not all that important to them.

I tend to trust polling data than most on the Right, so I’m going to accept the results at face value. However, I think Cox misses a glaringly obvious fact, which is that gender, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation are all politicized. This means that these identities further imply political identity. For example, women tend to be more liberal, the LGBTQ+ more leftist. Religious is more of a mixed bag, as Christians tend to be more right-leaning, other religions and atheists more left-leaning, but even there, you can clearly see a correlation between religious and political identity.

The lesson is that Americans may think they don’t define themselves along political lines, but they in fact do, unconsciously so. I often make the point that in civil wars, most of the population stays out of the fight, tries not picking sides, but ultimately, everyone falls on one side of the line or the other by default. When everything in life is politicized, it doesn’t matter if people think politics don’t define who they are.

This here is Cox’s most critical point, in my opinion [bold mine]:

The age of social media has not only created a culture where contentious and mean-spirited disagreement generates engagement, but these platforms also encourage opinion-sharing. We are accustomed to providing immediate feedback, especially when something displeases us. That is every American’s right. However, we now have an overabundance of opportunities to share our grievances or express agitation. Not every feeling or thought deserves public expression—and there are times when remaining silent is a virtue. In the age of oversharing, suggesting that we communicate less is countercultural. We’ve made the act of personal––often combative––expression an unassailable virtue. It’s more important for me to share every fleeting feeling rather than consider how that expression stands to degrade the quality of public discourse and undermine common understanding.

The question is: how do we get Americans to value silence over expression? If a society encourages expression as a virtue, which America most certainly does, then nobody should be surprised that people choose to express their views more liberally (in a functional sense, not in an ideological sense). Whether culture is downstream of politics or vice-versa is a question we’ll be debating until the end of time, but whatever the case may be, when both our culture and politics regards expression as an unassailable virtue, as Cox so astutely put it, then you’re going to have an overabundance of opinion, most of it not useful for civic engagement.

Herein lies the dilemma of democracy: for it to work, it requires an engaged body politic, engaged electorate, whatever the preferred term might be. At the same time, you need that electorate to not only share useful opinions, but to also understand when it might be better to keep their mouths shut. This is an impossible demand in a society that values free expression above all. What are we to do here?

Democracy is defined as the ability to vote and to express oneself freely. At the same time, it’s unnecessary to have one to have the other. There are many countries out there where suffrage is universal, but freedom of speech doesn’t exist - Britain, much of Europe, in fact. I don’t know of any country without universal suffrage that still practices freedom of speech, but it’s very possible for such a society to exist. So which is more critical to democracy? The right to vote? Or the right to free speech?

It’s both, but as Cox implies, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. He was referring to speech specifically, but I think this logic can be extended to voting. If you don’t know what you’re voting for, you probably shouldn’t be voting. Here, we run into the same problem we do with civic engagement. We want people to speak freely and openly, but we don’t want to fill the air with unnecessary, unproductive opinions. We also want people to vote, but we don’t want people voting when they have no clue what they’re voting for. Democracy demands civic engagement, but of the right sort.

However, you can’t make such demands in a society where participation in politics is entirely a matter of free choice, where the choice itself is considered virtuous. You can’t, on the one hand, say “Everyone Should Vote!” and, on the other, say “Only Informed Voters Should Vote!” The two are irreconcilable, becoming reconcilable only when one sentiment is decisively privileged over the other. If you decide that universal suffrage is worth the risk of stupid, uneducated, uninformed citizens voting, that’s at least a consistent, honest position versus deeming universal suffrage as unassailable while wondering why we can never come to a consensus or why nobody votes as you think they ought to.

Readers familiar with my views should know by now that I’m not a democrat (small-‘d’). It’s not that I’m anti-democratic, it’s that I don’t view democracy as the best form of government, and I most certainly don’t view democracy as some sacred cow. The Founders of the United States didn’t do so either, no matter what lies we were taught in school or the intelligentsia propagates today. If you want to get down to brass tacks, the Founders were aristocrats, they just didn’t want a monarchy.

I’d go as far as to say most Americans aren’t all that emotionally invested in democracy, either. If most Americans don’t feel that strongly about politics, then it suggests they’d be perfectly content with prosperity, order, and stability; anything beyond that is for the extremists. Speaking for myself, my ability to impact governing affairs is next to zero. It’s always going to be that way, no matter where I live. If given the choice between chaotic democracy, where nobody is in charge, and an orderly authoritarianism, where someone is clearly in charge, guess what I’d pick?

If we’re to honestly tackle the issue of political divergence and engagement in America, it begins with ending this stupid worship of democracy. There’s no reason for it to occupy such a hallowed position in our culture. It’s nowhere near a part of our national fabric as people think it is. I think what happened is that democracy came to replace Christianity as our national religion, hence the worship of it.

It’s interesting that the issue currently is free speech, not voting. This is clearly because nobody’s being killed over voting, not yet, anyway. But speaking out is also the only real form of civic engagement there is. Voting, by contrast, is an exercise in political authority, which is force, which is violence. Voting is also not something anyone does daily, while speaking out is. In that sense, being able to speak up is more important than voting. There’s a much stronger argument to be made for limiting suffrage than speech, because whether we vote or not, we still need to communicate with one another.

But if we also want to keep the political discourse productive and oriented towards arriving at consensus, not all opinions can be considered equal. Some opinions have to matter more than others. How do we enforce that? One way is through culture. We already live in that world; only liberal opinions are considered valid in the public arena, everything else is just considered noise. It’s why Charlie Kirk was killed; he was saying things we wasn’t suppose to be saying.

But it’s not really a democracy then, is it, when only one ideology prevails in the public discourse? How exactly is the line drawn, then? Perhaps the answer is to just quit trying. Instead of attempting this obviously impossible balancing act, we must make up our minds: either everyone participates or only some of us do. These are the only two choices, because the third choice is for nobody to participate.

I’ve explained my logic on restricting suffrage in the past, so I won’t go into too much detail, except to summarize by saying that voting is too serious a matter to be done by everyone. Not all of us are invested in governance the same way and it shouldn’t be taboo to say so, because it’s true. Business and property owners, parents, war veterans, they’ve all invested more into society than the rest of us. It doesn’t mean they’re better people, but it does mean they have more to lose than those who aren’t. We pretend all voters are all equally invested because that’s what the ideology demands, not because it’s true.

If we restrict suffrage, then only the opinions of those able to vote matter at the end of the day. This is hardly some infringement on free speech, either. It’s quite possible to have free speech and also restrict the vote. This wouldn’t be all that different from how things work right now, anyway. Turnout in elections rarely exceed 60 percent. There are millions of Americans who don’t participate in every election. Some never do.

Apathy has been a consistent feature in American politics. I often think back to what Cass Elliot of The Mamas & the Papas once said about what a struggle it was to get people to vote even back in the tumultuous early 1970s. It’s only our obsession with civil rights which leads us to support universal suffrage, while also lamenting the fact still so many people choose not to participate in the political process.

Going back to Daniel Cox, his bottom line was this:

We don’t come to consensus by arguing better or more often. It requires a purpose. Political exchange should be predicated on the desire to build something, even if that is simply a better understanding of why people believe what they do.

In other words, people need to express themselves with the understanding their free speech must serve a higher purpose. This means free speech in it of itself isn’t a virtue, because what’s being said and why matters. Again, we can’t say that, even though we know it’s true, because our national ideology demands we pretend all views are worthwhile, even as liberals of all people don’t believe this to be true, and that self-expression is the whole point of democracy, which it clearly isn’t.

In a democracy, power rests with the people, while authority rests with the state. Authority is the ability to exercise power, which is determined by the body politic. This means both the act of voting and participating in the political discourse is a matter too serious whittle down to a mere “civil right.” Governance is an act of legitimized violence. Having millions of people vote without any clue what they’re voting for isn’t democracy, and if just offering one’s opinion was all that mattered, then there’s no way to build anything, as Cox put it, since expression itself is self-serving.

There’s no other way: if we want our politics to be less dysfunctional, if we want consensus, if we want political exchange to be predicated on the desire to build something, then we need to recognize that not everyone has a place in either the political discourse or practice. Again, in a democracy, power rests with the people, but authority rests with the state. The people decide how much power to render onto the state, the state has to employ that power. It’s not only a serious matter, but if the body politic cannot agree on how much power to render onto the state, the state will either do nothing - anarchy - or decide for itself what its powers are - tyranny.

Americans aren’t ready to face the harsh reality of politics, unfortunately:

Too often, the goal is to prove that your opponent’s views are based on faulty logic, a morally compromised worldview, or simply ignorance. We’ve become inured to this type of political engagement because compromise and conciliation seem either out of reach or undesirable. Polls have found that Americans are losing faith in our ability to find common ground with our political opponents. Pew found that, in just over a year, the percentage of Americans who said Democrats and Republicans can find common ground on key policy issues has plummeted. On issues like abortion, gun control, immigration, and foreign policy, fewer Americans believe that it’s possible to find consensus. Yet the public still wants its elected leaders to seek compromise.

The problem is that much of our political differences are rooted not in policy differences, but philosophical ones. We’re not arguing politics so much as we’re debating the nature of reality, in other words. It shouldn’t come as a surprise compromise and common ground has become impossible to achieve, because these things are impossible when two competing versions of reality collide.

There’s no way to reconcile the belief there are only two genders with the belief there are not only an infinite number of genders, but that a person can become another gender. There’s no way to compromise on the belief that the country’s immigration laws should be enforced with the belief that the longer someone stays in the country illegally, the less reason there is to deport them. There’s no way to come to a consensus on the belief that Americans, Whites in particular, should allow Blacks to have their own communities and spaces, but refusing to live with Blacks is also racist.

You can only arrive at a consensus when you agree on a set of underlying principles. You cannot arrive at a consensus when you don’t even agree on what the nature of reality is. To use a milder example, someone who wants higher taxes can reach a compromise with someone who wants lower taxes, but it’s going to be much harder to do the same with someone who wants to abolish taxes altogether. The window for achieving consensus is much narrower than people think it is.

This is exactly why the scope of political participation also needs to be narrower than it is. Achieving consensus in a small group is already a challenge. Trying to achieve consensus in a country of over 330 million is impossible. The only alternative is to limit political participation to those who objectively have a greater interest in the outcome, something to lose. There has to be a tangible cost to voting. Otherwise, it’s an utterly meaningless gesture.

The fact that our politics are so utterly lacking in obvious costs is such a big part of the problem. If, for example, it was blatantly obvious that Democratic politicians are responsible for entirely avoidable deaths at the hands of criminals, I think less people would be willing to vote for them. Then again, politics have become so ideologically partisan, that most people still vote for them, anyway. But that’s another example of how our mass liberal democracy doesn’t work. People would rather vote for their own deaths than for the other side. Voting has become, as many characterize it, a head-count.

On a side-note, this is why I’ve always considered complaints, mostly from the Left, that Americans vote “against their interests” to be hollow. The system simply isn’t structured in such a way to incentivize voting purely along material concerns. The system encourages voting along competing value systems. As we see with crime, the Left will, often knowingly, vote for policies and politicians who make their communities less safe, all because they share the same ideological and partisan priors. If you want people to vote in favor of their supposed interests, everyone needs to be on the same page value system-wise. Nobody’s going to vote for someone who hates them just because they hand them free money. Americans, Whites especially, have more pride than that.

At the heart of the problem is that Americans want consensus without making any of the necessary trade-offs to achieve it. We view voting and free speech as human rights, meaning placing limits on them is regarded not just as un-democratic, but inhumane. At the same time, we expect people to vote and voice their opinion responsibly, or at least with a purpose in mind, without any incentives or mechanisms in place to ensure compliance. The whole thing operates off an honor system, but America has no honor because it lacks both trust and a means of accountability. If voting and exchanging ideas are human rights, then conditions cannot be placed on their exercise.

Many will read this and claim that these problems all stem from the philosophical underpinnings of classical liberalism. They have a point. After all, as someone observed recently, “Woke” leftism dominates in societies that believe in things like universal justice and morality. But it must also be remembered that both classical liberalism and democracy as we understand it in the West aren’t universal ideals. They’re in fact quite unique to Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization. The only reason so much of the world adopted the ideals in shades is because Britain conquered the whole world. And it was all Britain: Spain didn’t bring liberalism nor democracy to its colonies. It brought authoritarian governance instead, which is why former Latin American colonies still exhibit authoritarian tendencies, even as they’ve all transitioned to democracy.

The lesson is that liberal democracy wasn’t meant for the whole world. Maybe the British should’ve known better. But that doesn’t change the fact it was a form of government made by a particular people for a particular people. Nor does bringing the whole damn world to your country mean everyone suddenly becomes liberal democrats. In fact, democracy as it exists in the West today, but especially throughout the Anglosphere, is far from liberal in a classical sense. It’s quite illiberal, actually.

It’s also that we’re arguing about the limits of free speech that shows it’s a dead end. For free speech to contribute to the political process, you can’t have, for example, people like Jimmy Kimmel lying so flagrantly on air and not paying a price for it. The defenders of free speech are assuming that we live in the high-trust, virtuous society necessary for free speech to contribute to better governance. Instead, it seems to be a detriment.

We’re not turning back the clock, however. And this is why it’s just not worth it to be so emotionally wedded to “our democracy.” It could’ve worked only along a particular set of circumstances which are no longer present. As our country evolves, so should our governance. It’s liberals who understand this least, strangely enough. Everything must change except our democracy, they believe. Of course, we know why, because they’re the beneficiaries of the status quo, and would like to keep it that way. It’s at least a rational thought.

My preferred political order of restricted suffrage, but more or less free expression, will never happen. In all likelihood, what we’ll see is even more mass democracy, but greater restrictions on free speech. I’m not entirely against speech restrictions, mainly because I view no right as absolute, but the problem is that these restrictions will be inconsistent, based on which administration is in the White House. Henceforth, our politics will become even more dysfunctional, which is hard to believe, but it’s a long way down.

The trend lines are headed mostly in the Left’s direction - more voting, less free expression. The Right’s response ought to be to ensure only eligible voters - citizens - can do so, through policies like mandatory voter ID, and to hold the Left to account when they resort to lying to try shaping public opinion. The Right must be careful to not lie, either, but the point is that no benefit of the doubt can be given. Trust is too low and the stakes too high to regard anything in good faith.

Daniel Cox titled his essay “How Do We Practice Politics the Right Way?” The answer is “you can’t.” Not in this system. I have no doubt Cox is a good-faith interlocutor, but I also think he’s asking something of the American people our political order cannot provide. This isn’t a society that’s in any way geared for free and open debate, because the Overton window is both still stuck on the left and still too small to entertain the wide range of thoughts necessary to have real debates For example, Cox calls Charlie Kirk’s views on the Civil Rights Act as “willfully offensive.”

According to whom, though? Black people? Liberals? Do they set the parameters of debate? If so, we’re clearly not on equal ground, are we? As I so often explain, we can’t even begin to have a productive conversation on race, crime, and a whole host of other issues unless we first dispense with some dumb and unnecessary taboos. If the founding of America and everything else in our history is fair game for critique, so is the Civil Rights Act. Nothing can be considered so sacred that there’s no criticizing it.

Again, I don’t question Cox’s intentions. But whether he knows it or not, he’s reinforcing the very norms and taboos that make it so difficult to have free, honest, and open debate. Yes, democracy needs consensus. Consensus requires a shared worldview. But if a society doesn’t have a shared worldview, we at least need to be able to recognize, come to terms with it, and find some other way of doing politics besides pretending like democracy is the best system. That’s the only way forward.

That’s enough for today. What did you think of Cox’s essay? What did you agree or disagree with? How can we practice politics the right way in this moment, in this version of America we are living in today? Finally, let’s be provocative: what’s the future of democracy in our country?

Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

If you liked this post from We're Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here, why not share? If you’re a first-time visitor, please consider subscribing!