Politics & Power Quote by Elmer Davis

Davis is doing something sly here: he praises American pluralism while quietly warning that it only works under harsh conditions we like to pretend are automatic. The line starts with civic scripture - “conceived in liberty” - then pivots to a less comfortable premise: liberty isn’t just freedom from coercion, it’s an obligation to tolerate disagreement without treating the other side as treasonous. “Honest men may honestly disagree” is both generous and limiting. It sanctifies dissent, but it also excludes bad-faith actors: demagogues, propagandists, the people who profit from confusion.

The real bite is in the middle clause, “if they all say what they think.” Davis is a journalist; he’s staking democracy on speech habits, not vibes. The subtext is that a public can’t “distinguish truth from error” when institutions or citizens are trained to self-censor, to speak in code, or to outsource conviction to party line. It’s a defense of a messy, noisy marketplace of ideas - and a rebuke to the authoritarian temptation to “settle” disputes by silencing them.

Context matters: Davis came of age through World War I, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and World War II, then watched Cold War paranoia harden into loyalty tests. His faith in the “majority” is not naive optimism; it’s conditional confidence. Give people a full record, let arguments clash in daylight, and the crowd can be wiser than any censor. Starve them of candor, and the errors win by default.