James Madison’s Lesson on Free Speech

[EasyAce]

For the people to rule wisely, they must be free to think and speak without fear of reprisal.
By Jay Cost
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451060/james-madison-free-speech-rights-must-be-absolute-nearly

. . . In Madison’s view, a free republic depends ultimately upon public opinion. A Constitution could
divide power this way and that, but in the end it is the people, and only the people, who rule. And for the
people to rule wisely, they have to be able to communicate with one another — freely, without fear of reprisal.
Thus, freedom of speech and press were not, for Madison, merely God-given rights. They were preconditions
for self-government.

Conversely, Madison believed that those who sought to restrict speech revealed themselves to be opponents
of republicanism. They wished to prevent public opinion from cohering, thus making it easier to counterfeit.
This is why Madison and Thomas Jefferson — Jefferson himself was a staunch republican — reacted so
strongly to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which restricted immigration and made it a crime to print
“libelous” comments about government officers. Madison and Jefferson’s Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions
called for state intervention to correct the abuses of the government (for Madison this implied “interposition,”
but for Jefferson it could include “nullification”). Decades later, their resolves would be repurposed for the
cause of secession, but they were actually an effort to prevent the Federalist party under John Adams from
undermining the very basis of the national republic itself.

Madison’s tenure as president — 1809 to 1817 — has come in for a good bit of criticism over the years. It
was, in many respects, an unspectacular administration, in no small part because of the disappointments
of the War of 1812. But it is easy to overlook that although Madison was managing a relatively unpopular
and difficult conflict, he did not sanction the abridgement of civil liberties. On the other hand, Abraham
Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt — all of whom tend to score higher in historical rankings
— did not show such restraint. This speaks well of Madison’s commitment to the importance of free speech.

None of this means that we should excuse the boorish and ignorant among us, those who seek to incite
popular unrest for the sake of their small-minded prejudices. Instead, Madison’s commitment to free speech
should serve as a reminder that, while people say things that we might find personally offensive, we should
never wish the state to squash their right to do so. Our First Amendment freedoms combined — freedom
of religion, of assembly and petition, of press and speech — give us the right to think what we like and say
what we please. And if we the people are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights, even if they are
misused by a minority . . .