Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: The Curmudgeonly Clerk, who missed an awful good career as a political theorist, I think:

"The commonplace retort to my content with majority rule is usually a longwinded lecture on the dangers of the Tyranny of the Majority.™ The immediate difficulty with this response is that it fundamentally distorts the concept of tyranny (i.e., "a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler") beyond recognition. "Tyranny of the Majority" is, in fact, a rhetorical flourish and nothing more. Majority rule, by definition, cannot constitute tyranny."

I first read that and objected that it was an attempt to get an easy out via linguistics, but what he goes on to say is quite good:

"Majority rule certainly can be tyrannical in the metaphorical sense of being oppressive where minority rights are concerned. But I am afraid that those who expect the law to correct such injustices would have it supplant the role of moral and political suasion (however that not fully rational process is understood to operate). Although we are in the midst of a celebration of Brown v. Bd. of Educ. at the moment, it is hard to say that Brown changed societal attitudes about racial arrangements so much as it reflected changing attitudes about race in America. In the South, it was met with open resistance. Although the relation between seminal cases like Brown and societal change is too complex to accurately characterize in a sentence, the later outcome of the Court's school busing decisions (which was white flight from urban school districts) indicates that the Court cannot lead where the populace will not follow. Yet that is precisely what libertarians would have the federal courts do: force march a stiff-necked people to their conception of the promised land."