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 do 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.

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.

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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? 

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Tom