I'd argue it gets worse the larger the group. Its very hard to change the direction of a large group because of inertia. Libertarianism has been around a while, but struggles to get traction when pitted against the established norms. Even if individuals are convinced, it's hard to convert enough individuals to matter.
>> or if everyone is subject matter experts
Again, a small group of experts doesn't necessarily create concensus. We saw that during the pandemic where each country, guided by experts, had such a variety of responses. Lock-out (new Zealand), lock down (China), carry on (Sweden), and innumerable random configurations (USA) all lead to different outcomes. Or did they? Sociologists will be dining out on this for decades.
Most functional democracies (I'm thinking company boards, member based clubs etc) understand nuance, and letting everyone win a bit, while finding compromises between majorities and minorities.
The explosion of insanity though (think QAnon) makes a mockery of the democratic process, and exposes the root flaw of group-think. What if the majority think Tom Hanks drinks the blood of sacrificed babies - what price democracy then?
I guess that goes back to my initial premise that “free speech” and “free expression” are poor descriptors, though I’m not sure what better ones would be.
People end up colloquially conflating them with absolute freedom , when outside of libertarians, most societies have rules around it.
I generally feel like codes of conduct are better than using terms like “free”. They denote nuance while allowing flexibility of the guidelines.
In smaller groups, you may only have one or two people vs tens of others on each end of the topic.
All those victories you mentioned were the results of decades of slowly convincing people to a more accepting way of thought.
But when you have classes with very few members of any given demographic , there’s a higher chance of a specific point of view being shut out completely without merit .