Pluralist Democracy Saves the United States and Invigorates Free Expression

Abstract

Why did the republican democratic regime collapse in the early-twentieth century? Why did a new form of democracy emerge in the 1930s? Laissez faire remained dominant in America and Europe during the early-twentieth century. Although laissez faire created social and economic instability, America and many European countries prospered in the 1920s. The economic foundations for this interwar prosperity, however, were fundamentally weak. Increasing wealth was not shared equally. When the American stock market crashed, European economies collapsed and unemployment spiraled out of control. Still, governments insisted on following laissez-faire policies. Economic collapse led to the downfall of numerous democracies. As authoritarian governments ascended in Europe, dreams of laissez-faire utopias dissolved into nightmares of suppression and violence.

American democracy proved more resilient than most European types. Yet, America was now urban, industrial, and heterogeneous. New democratic practices and institutions took hold: A pluralist democracy supplanted the moribund republican democratic regime. Mainstream and old-stock Protestant values, long the foundation for the republican democratic principles of virtue and the common good, were now to be balanced with the values of other Americans who constituted the demographically diverse population. The new pluralist democratic regime, manifested in the New Deal, repudiated laissez faire, at least temporarily.

The emergence of pluralist democracy engendered a new judicial understanding of free speech and a free press. The self-governance rationale emphasizes that no liberty or right is more crucial to pluralist democratic processes than free expression.