Tyranny of the Majority
Sagacious Swarthmore professor Tim Burke has written a post which accuses the Bush administration of threatening a "tyranny of the majority," meaning that a majority of the population bend the country to their will while trampling on the rights and sensetivities of the minority:
This sort of argument has a troubled history, as it was famously used before the Civil War by southerners defending the right to slavery against the abolitionist north. Against the need to compromise is the need to stand by principle, and the key is perhaps to determine which principles are worth fighting for. Still, Burke's argument in the present context is powerful, and points toward the idea that this election is not merely about "the next four years" but what sort of democracy we might become in the forseeable future.
"This is about more than Bush. One of the reasons I chide people on the left for not seeking dialogue and consensus, one of the reasons I am constantly looking for the presence of reason and the possibility of connection across the political spectrum, is that if we get ourselves into a situation where 51% of the voting population or a narrow majority of electoral votes is imposing a total and coordinated social and political agenda on the almost-as-large minority who has a radically different and equally coordinated social and political vision, we’re staring at the threshold of a very scary future, regardless of whom the 51% is or what they stand for.
"In this respect, we have to see past George Bush and his poor leadership for a moment, and see the people who strongly stand behind him. It is they who really matter, their choice which will shape the next four years. It to them that I make my most desperate, plaintive appeals, my eleventh-hour plea not to pull the trigger. To choose Bush is to choose to impose the starkest, most extreme formulation of the agenda that Bush has come to exemplify on a population of Americans to whom that agenda is repellant. To choose Bush is to choose Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority (or even, judging from the popular vote in 2000, tyranny of the almost-majority). To choose Bush now—not in 2000, when he plausibly could have been many things--is to aspire to tyranny, to ruling your neighbors and countrymen. That some on the left have had or even achieved similar aspirations from time to time doesn’t change things: it’s wrong whenever it is the driving vision of political engagement, for whomever holds it."
This sort of argument has a troubled history, as it was famously used before the Civil War by southerners defending the right to slavery against the abolitionist north. Against the need to compromise is the need to stand by principle, and the key is perhaps to determine which principles are worth fighting for. Still, Burke's argument in the present context is powerful, and points toward the idea that this election is not merely about "the next four years" but what sort of democracy we might become in the forseeable future.
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