Yakoob on 8/8/2012 at 03:11

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I can actually dig out a whole bunch of academics from my masters program who criticized democracy for exactly that - marginalizing minorities, sometimes to the point of their eventual cutlural destruction. "Majority representation" vs. "minority rights" is a whole big debate of its own in the world of political theory.

DDL on 8/8/2012 at 08:48

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Papy: the problem with your argument here is that (as noted by yakoob), "tyranny of the majority" is pretty much the logical outcome of the basic definition of democracy: government by the people. That's pretty much all the definition says. Everything else is handwavy sub-definitions.

Now unless you're going to let each and every person set their own personal laws and policies (which is..well, anarchy anyway), it will always be necessary to arrive at compromises on issues that affect the entire populace (like war, taxes, laws). How best to decide where you compromise?

A)Have a vote? >Tyranny of the majority

B)Elect people to decide for you? >Tyranny of the majority by a single remove at best, tyranny of the select few at worst

C)Let a fringe group dictate policy? >Tyranny of the minority

D)Let papy decide? >Tyranny of papy

Now I think we can almost all agree that D would be awful, C makes little sense and is unsustainable, and both A and B are basically tyranny of the majority.

And yes, it's a flawed model, not least because the majority is generally pretty fucking stupid. Nobody is as stupid as EVERYBODY. It is however (arguably) the least flawed model that can be expected to be reasonably self-sustaining.

A dictatorship would potentially work better if you chose the dictator correctly, but would work far far worse otherwise.

A meritocracy would theoretically work better, except for the fact that the prime characteristic one needs to be skilled at to be in power is..staying in power, not 'actually making sensible decisions'. People who give press conferences saying how great they are (even if they do nothing) will appeal more than people who are quiet and just get on with actually being good at governing, so in practice would simply devolve into the sort of clusterfuck we have now. Plus how do you decide who's best for each job? Get a dictator to do it? :p

Democracy as it currently stands basically is tyranny of the majority (though admittedly the majority simply chooses which bad option gets selected), and while it gets things a bit wrong, all the time, it has a much lower risk of total fuckup than other options, and better options would by and large degenerate into something near-identical to it anyway.


So there's that.
Now what these other clever posters have pointed out (and as I pointed out myself), even taking all the above into consideration, there's a huge grey area when it comes to the concept of "rights". Basic entitlements that may well be minority issues (like the rights of homosexuals to be free from discrimination). How do we define these? Human rights are not after all inherent properties of the universe. They're rights because we say they are.
If the majority disapproves of gays, wants gays to be hanged, and elects a party that does exactly that, then that is still democracy. Horrible, but still democracy.
Democracy is a definition of a general property of a given system of government, not a defined political system in its own right. Hence the UK and US systems can be entirely different in general implementation, but both be democracies (ish).

So when you say "Democracy is not supposed to be tyranny of the majority", what you might more accurately say is "The democratic system I wish to be governed by would not be wholly a tyranny of the majority".

And on that, I'd agree with you. All we'd be arguing over here is the degree to which that tyranny element impinges (and note that as a democracy it pretty much has to impinge to SOME extent).

Edit: also, apologies for ranting longer than I expected. (political critiques appreciated, since it's hardly my specialist subject)

LarryG on 8/8/2012 at 09:25

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I find it interesting in light of the US Supreme Court decision re. money = speech that by the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy) Wikipedia definition of democracy as "... a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives ..." that the US is no longer a democracy. Since that decision, the wealthy have an institutionally granted greater say in those decisions. This is not to say that before the decision that the wealthy did not have greater influence than the poor, but it was, at least, considered a corruption of the ideals upon which the nation was founded. Now it is seen as part an parcel of those ideals.

On the other hand, the US remains a republic, in the sense that the government is still res publica, a public matter for the nation as a whole and not the exclusive domain of a predetermined set of rulers. At least in theory. But as the discussion above highlights, a significant and increasing portion of the population to whom suffrage is granted self-disenfranchise, placing the government into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of wealthy individuals who see an opportunity to increase their personal power. I wonder how much longer until the republican nature of our nation becomes as fictitious as its democratic nature?

What I wonder can be done to reverse this trend. What can be done to re-engage those who have tuned out and turned off? What can be done to rebalance political speech rights, to restore what the framers of our constitution clearly intended our nation to be: a republican democracy?

Jason Moyer on 8/8/2012 at 11:42

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I think the entire idea that the Founding Fathers were some sort of supreme authority on government is stupid to begin with. Mankind has made significant progress intellectually in the past 225 years, maybe it's time to actually sit down and come up with a better system. Checks and balances doesn't work; we place the vast majority of power in this country in the executive branch. The actual structure of the government, as intended by those who designed it, has been a failure.

Yakoob on 9/8/2012 at 16:59

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What most people don't realize is that "democracy" is a catch-all phrase that really doesn't mean much beyond "government ruled by the people" (which, in itself, is also meaningless). There are in fact different types of democracies, with the most common in the western world being the representative democracy, where citizens vote for public figures to represent them in the government. But even within that, differences emerge; the Polish government system is similar to the US, but because we have like 10 parties instead of just two, the dynamics are very different and it often forces parties to actually work together and compromise to achieve goals rather than "olol we got majority this election, enjoy republican rule for the next 4 years!"

Another interesting type of democracy that was proposed by Lederach exactly to counter the problem of minority marginalization in deeply ethnically/religiously/ideologically/etc. divided socities is the consociational democracy, often coined as "power-sharing." In very rough terms, establishes a grand coalition of elites of the different social groups, granting each equal power and other perks like mutual veto. This is used in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in North Ireland after the 30 years of the Troubles, pretty brutal fights between pro-Irish Catholics and pro-British protestants.