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By Root 1027 0

by Jefferson and other early American statesmen. It was all but embraced, and for reasons that went well beyond a desire to maintain the peace. In keeping with the ethos of the Enlightenment, these thinkers grasped that truth and error are often unrecognizable as such in the moment. As a result, they concluded that all ideas must be permitted to flourish, regardless of their apparent merit. Here is Benjamin Franklin, just before appending his name to the most famous piece of parchment in American history: “I confess there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure that I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.” No speech could have been more appropriate for the founding of the United States, a nation established in no small part on the recognition that, for a political system to succeed, a tolerance for error had to be built into its very bones.

And so it was. The often frustrating but ultimately saving American political innovation is this: we are forced to govern in collaboration with people whose political beliefs differ from our own. We see this in federalism (the sharing of power between national and state governments) and we see it in the system of checks and balances (the sharing of power among legislative, executive, and judicial branches). In both cases, the right to govern is distributed across different entities, to protect against the consolidation of power and ensure that no single viewpoint can drown out the rest. We also see this tolerance for error in the very fact that our laws can be changed; we are free to disagree with our own national past. (This idea, so basic to us that we can’t imagine life without it, would have been anathema to most forms of government at most times in history.) Most of all, we see this tolerance for error in two of the hallmark ideas of democracy: political parties and freedom of speech.

Acceptance of political parties did not come easily to the United States. In the country’s early years, the necessity of embracing disagreement and error was at war with another founding notion: that America would be a political utopia, in which dissent would be unnecessary because perfection would be achieved. Those utopian aspirations prompted powerful anti-party sentiment. Although virtually every politician in the young nation belonged to a party (either Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists or Jefferson and James Madison’s Democratic-Republicans), all of them decried partisanship as dangerous and hoped to see it end—just as soon as their own party was recognized as the only legitimate one. As Hofstadter pointed out, the United States only stabilized as a nation when it gave up the dream of being a one-party utopia and accepted the existence of political opposition as crucial to maintaining a democracy.

Two and a half centuries later, it’s hard to appreciate how radical that shift really was—not just for America, but for the world. Before the emergence of democracy, political opposition was normally regarded as, in Hofstadter’s words, “intrinsically subversive and illegitimate,” and the usual policy was “to smother or suppress it.” This remains the practice in totalitarian regimes, in which dissident opinions are branded as dangerously wrong, and, accordingly, stifled by the apparatus of the state.* By contrast, multiparty systems are fundamentally error-tolerant. They do not merely permit but actually require competing points of view.

As that suggests, the existence of political parties goes hand-in-hand with the existence of free speech. Governments that refuse to acknowledge their fallibility have no need of (and in fact must destroy) dissent. But those that recognize their potential to err and hope to curtail or correct their mistakes must permit open expression—even if whatever is expressed seems odious, unpatriotic, or simply untrue.