Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Free speech is an artefact of-, not a requirement for democracy. Tolerance is required, however. That seems like a pretty grand statement to make offhand and pretend like it's objective. Free speech is in the very first amendment. #1. Yet you feel so comfortable hand-waving it away. Freedom of Association implies just the opposite of your argument, that intolerence is specifically protected.
The first amendment only exists in the US and only started existing well after democracy was invented.
Democracy was nearly a foreign concept to them and it very gradually evolved in the US after the Bill of Rights passed.
"The Founding Fathers rejected 'democracy' as defined by the Greeks, preferring instead 'a natural aristocracy', whereby only the landed gentry were entitled to a place in Congress."