Our American Bet: There is nothing "common" about the people.
" A Republic if you can keep it" -- B. Franklin
You say don’t censure conservative speech. Then you say remove books from public libraries that contain liberal speech. Or you, my liberal friends, do the same thing, but in reverse.
Do you only see free speech as a privilege for elites like you and me.
“In the marketplace of ideas,” I can judge and choose. I am not a prisoner to what I read and hear.” But others? I must protect “the folk,” “the people,” the vulnerable.”
I want freedom for myself. I can handle it. But, really, when I think about it, lots of people like you are “victims” of …. Well, of fake news, of MSNBC, of Fox news. Of liberal professors and the sophisticated manipulations of advertising campaigns. You need protection? My protection.
And so it goes. Not exactly hypocrisy. A higher form of benevolence, perhaps. Big Daddy.
Where does this leave us? Directly I think into the battlefield over education. Do we protect our children directly from “false belief” (as we see it), or do we teach them the skills to be powerful critical thinkers so they can protect themselves?
Democrats (ideological democrats not members of a party) have persistently accepted the free speech “risk” and depended upon our educational system to train the next generation to think for themselves.
They are people of faith, faith in the people. They don’t disparage the intellectual ability of ordinary people. In fact, in their view no one need be “ordinary,” in the sense of “brain dead” to complex ideas. Supporters of democracy have chosen to believe that self-government, at all levels, is the bedrock of humanness.
SELF-government, in the sense that no one gets to manage how I think, even when they are armed with the biggest megaphones or set apart by their “learned” authority and higher degrees of schooling.
I get to decide. And so do you. And with that comes the key and hard part. For this “democracy” to work, for us to be free, a large majority of us must chose to read, converse, consider, explore widely--thoughtfully, passionately and diligently--the breadth of ideas that are “out there.” And create new ideas and share them.
Can we teach the next generation to see this as both their duty as citizens and a way to realize their full potential.
Before you say “no way,” consider that this as the BET you make when you support a democratic form of government. It is what democracy is all about. When our leaders won’t make this bet and the majority lets them decide for us, democracy dies.
Majority rule ends when the majority no longer believes in the peoples’ ability to govern.