I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was
justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme
Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me
think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority
of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can
think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy
that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority
rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority.
The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and
tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This
was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from
tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative
government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect
representatives at the federal and local level to write the laws. A senator or
legislator is not bound by the will of the people he or she represents, but can
vote their conscience. Obviously, if they go against their constituents too
many times, they will find themselves voted out of office in the next election,
but the freedom is there for a representative to vote however they wish. Another
check against tyranny is that we have three branches of government: executive,
legislative, and judicial. If one branch goes too far, it can be thwarted by
one of the other branches. That only works if the branches are separated and
not all controlled by the same group of people. If the popular majority forces
their representatives to create a law that oppresses a minority, it could be
vetoed by the president or, failing that, be struck down by the courts.
Countries that don’t have strong constitutional protections,
could find themselves susceptible to all forms of tyranny. Yet sometimes even a
strong constitution cannot solve the problem. In the 1800’s there were states
in America where the majority felt that slavery was an acceptable institution.
In the states of the North the majority felt that slavery was an abomination.
There did not seem to be any legislative or judicial way out of this impasse.
The country elected an antislavery president. The South could claim they were
the victims of tyranny of the masses of the majority North, because they did
not want to lose their institution that they believed in. The North could claim
that each of the southern states were a tyranny of the masses, clearly
oppressing a minority. The South rebelled and we had the tragedy of the
American Civil War.
There has to be better ways of solving differences than war.
How do we avoid such an extreme? We could do worse that to heed Thomas
Jefferson (a southerner’s) words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
If we all believed that, and lived our lives by it, tyranny
of the masses would never be a problem. Unfortunately, the Civil War happened
even after those words were written. Ultimately, its about people. Government
is people. As long as people hold Jefferson’s words to be true, democracy
works. If they don’t, it doesn’t.
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