We assume that democracy is a straightforward matter of giving everyone a voice, but this misunderstands how fragile communication really is. Philosopher Mary Kate McGowan argues that the legitimacy of our political system is undermined not by censorship, but by the “silent” barriers of internal suppression, misinterpreted meaning, and testimonial injustice. By exposing how communication across difference can go wrong and the patterns of who this affects, she argues that democracy’s crisis isn't that we cannot speak—it’s that we cannot hear each other, and often don’t try.

A healthy democracy relies on communication. We each need to be able to freely discuss issues of public concern, criticize the government if we so choose, and tell our elected representatives what we want them to do. Arguably, the legitimacy of a democracy depends on these communications flowing smoothly and effectively. Any significant barrier to these communications would undermine the very kinds of political participation that justify the democratic enterprise. Some of these barriers are obvious; others, quieter and more pervasive, distort the conditions of speech in ways that are harder to detect but no less harmful to democratic life. We ought to be aware of them, consider how to remedy them, and evaluate their import for the legitimacy of the democracies in which they obtain.

There are familiar—and it seems justified—forms of speech regulation all around us. In the U.S., for example, where we have a very strong commitment to free speech, the law nevertheless prohibits communicative acts that constitute crimes (e.g., criminal solicitation and insider trading). Speech is also implicitly regulated in many areas of life. Consider the workplace: if a waitress were to routinely scream at her customers for requesting a water refill, she would be reprimanded and perhaps even fired. We do not expect a surgeon and a layperson to have an equal say in the operating room, nor do we expect every voice to carry equal weight in a physics lab. In these specialized domains, we rely on epistemic authority to decide who is worth listening to. Job performance is measured in many ways by what you say and how you say it. For the most part, though, we take these barriers to communication to be warranted and hence unworrying.

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We don’t tend to notice what doesn’t happen, what isn’t said, and what results from internal cost calculations in the minds of other people..

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Democracy, however, presents a unique challenge to this logic. Unlike medicine or physics, democracy is built on the premise that there is no “expert” in the lived experience of citizenship. It assumes a straightforward equality where everyone has a voice. And when dissidents in authoritarian regimes remain silent, they do so not out of a lack of expertise but in order to avoid things like prison or death. This kind of speech interference is decidedly anti-democratic; it also involves a choice, even if it’s not much of a choice: remain silent or face extreme punishment. Fortunately for us, this doesn’t happen (much?) in liberal democracies, but there are plenty of other cases of speakers deciding to hold their tongues (in order to avoid the anticipated negative consequences of speaking) that do. They matter, and they can be somewhat hidden from view.