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The British House of Commons and its Prime Minister who comes from its ranks, IS the Tyranny of the Majority that you and our democracy fearing founders railed against. And yet the British have survived the 20th century without despotism, and without anarchy taking hold. In fact, they seem to have a pretty stable governmental system and society on the whole, while benefitting from more social programs than we do, with a less violent, more cohesive society, with a respect for civil liberties that certainly does not suffer by comparison with ours. Who rules in Britain? Any party with a majority in the House of Commons. The country's Chief Executive holds his rank by virtue of being the leader of the majority party in Commons, instead of being set apart in an adversarial relationship as in our separate Presidency and Congress. (or, if no majority exists, by the confidence of different parties) The House of Lords can't do shit to stop them. The Monarchy can't do shit either. The Courts have a fairly limited authority--mostly to arbitrate among existing laws. They are independent but their scope is limited by the fact that British Constitutional Law is organic, and not assumed to be an already complete and perfectly self-consistent logical system. Various legal instruments that correspond to our written Constitution are fairly scant and don't pretend to wield much power over what statue law passed by Parliament can or cannot do. The past in other words cannot preemptorily veto the future there, as it routinely does here. Parliament makes laws, courts mainly enforce them. As a matter of Constitutional Conventional, no Parliament may bind the actions of a successor Parliament, and the Monarch cannot withold assent to any Act passed by the Parliament. The Prime Minister can't come from the House of Lords, and Lords can't stop anything the Commons have received a mandate from the electorate to do. This is the result not of a constitutional plan but rather of an evolutionary process in which the legislative body closest to the people steadily stripped all the rival centers of power of their authority. All of which means, a majority party in the House of Commons can do pretty much exactly as it proposes in its electoral platform and campaign pledges, constrained only by what the voters will accept or may be construed as having endorsed in the latest election. Compared to America, this is pure Tyranny of the Majority.
How I wish we had it!
If a majority in Parliament decide one morning that for example, chattel slavery is to be abolished, then slavery is history by that afternoon. And so it was: simple majority in Parliament abolished the slave trade and slavery. By contrast the American system with its check on the popular will by entrenched interests represented in the Senate would have prevented any bill of that nature from being sent to the President's desk probably forever, necessitating a civil war to resolve the impasse. If by some freak of procedure, such a bill escaped Congress before the Civil War and a President had signed it into law, the (Taney-led) Supreme Court would then have struck the law down as unConstitutional by noon of the next day. Going the route of Constitutional amendment would have been fruitless, as the states most dominated by slaveholder elites would have to agree and they certainly wouldn't. There is always another line of defense or obstruction open to an mobilized, wealthy faction in the American system, even if they are badly outvoted by majorities.
Compared to that there is essentially no check on the will of democratic majorities within the British system. The last vestige of a check was abolished by reforms stripping the House of Lords of veto authority over Commons in 1911 (perhaps hastening the reform of the US Senate?). Britons apparently do not quail in fear at the power of majorities, (that is to say, at their own power) only Americans are that dumb.
American fear of the tyranny of the majority stems from ancient theories disparaging democracy, which were current among educated gentlemen of the 18th century (gentlemen like our blindly worshipped Founders and Framers) but which were old even then, originating in sources as old as Plato.
According to this theory, which has become an unexamined bit of dogma in American Constitutionalism, the situation of an unchecked Parliament that is elected by ordinary people must necessarily lead to, first, the unwashed majority using the power of government to strip all wealth from the propertied class and enriching themselves under the leadership and incitement of demagogues; then secondly, the consequent destruction of the country's strength (because as all rich people know, without them and their irreplaceable leadership, the country will implode); and thence the country experiences a descent into lawless chaos; and lastly, as the only antidote to this chaos left, the country will accept the imposition of Cromwell style dictatorship with no civil liberties at all left to the people whatever their station in life. In this endstate, only personal loyalty to the dictator brings privileges, but even so there is never any guarantee of liberty, not even for the inner circle of the Dictator's lieutenants. However, where Plato theorized an eternal cycle of forms of government decaying into, or arising from each other, with aristocratic commonwealth giving way to oligarchy, oligarchy degenerating into theh mob rule of democracy, democracy (can you tell he hated it?) giving way to authoritarian tyranny, and tyranny eventually breaking up, thus allowing the rebirth of aristocracy, the 18th. century version of the antidemocratic argument simply posited democracy as a brief waystation on the oneway road to Hell, with a permanent police state (PLato's tyranny) at the end of it. Tyranny would prove far too strong over the rights of its citizens, but also probably too weak to prevent or fight off a foreign invasion.
Much like Locke's ridiculous ideas about individual property rights, the counterexample totally disproving this theory of a democratic staircase to Hell was soon handy for anyone to see. Britain itself began to provide it not too long after the American colonies went their own way. The Lords and the King were progressively reduced to figure heads in the century following the Napoleonic Wars, and electoral reforms (abolition of the Rotten Borough system) began to make the House of Commons truly representative: by 1911 the transformation of Monarchical England into "tyranny of the majority" Great Britain was complete. However, just like Locke's idea of the preexistence before society of the individual and his property, the success of the antidemocratic "Mob Rule" polemic has had little to do with its relation to the truth, and much more to do with its usefulness to an ascendant class looking to justify and institutionalize their power, without the old props of a national church, a system of peerages, or a Royal family.
How do the oligarchs get ordinary people to denigrate a form of government in which they, the people, would at last become empowered--by hammering on this doctrine of the Tyranny of the Majority constantly, as if there could be nothing worse in the world than living in a democracy!
And what do the Republicans CONSTANTLY attack the Democrats over-what is their refrain? To boil their message of the past decades down to one paragraph, the Republicans say the Democratic Party is out to liquidate the rich and any middleclass family that is getting ahead through taxation, and that the Democrats intend to give away their hardearned money to undeserving minorities and the poor in order to obtain their votes thus perpetuating their party's power; and that this all tends to the destruction of the country's strength and productivity, simultaneously encouraging the abandonment of respect for law and order amongst the lower classes, making us an easier target for our enemies. They say what the enemies of the people and democracy have always said.
When Democrats raise alarms about "the tyranny of the majority" they are doing the Conservatives' work FOR THEM by using and reinforcing their favorite, well-worn themes. Majorities can be tyrannical with regard to minorities, but the ONLY minority whose protection concerned James Madison, namely the rich, is always tyrannical by nature. So I'll take my chances with the majority instead, thank you!
Traditional American dogma about the dangers of direct majoritarian democracy stem from theories so old they make nation-state monarchy look like a new-fangled innovaton, and this dogma makes predictions about democracy which are belied by FACTS. Even a casual glance at parliamentary democracies around the world such as Great Britain or postwar Germany disproves the idea that democracy leads to social dissolution and tyranny. But do Americans ever take notice that their theories are unfounded, disproved, obsolete, baseless--not to mention at odd with their own interests as average citizens?
Oh HELL no.
Why do ordinary Americans believe in this crap then? Because they've been carefully taught to and because they worship unquestioningly the ideas of a generation long dead (and which didn't necessarily wish them well). If the Founders believed it, it must be eternally so!
Now, you don't have to LOVE the British parliamentary form of government or propose replacing ours with theirs to see that the success of their system invalidates certain key predictions made by the theory behind ours. And on what specific point is our creaking dogma mistaken? That the people cannot be trusted to govern themselves. And what assumption underlies that? That the people are completely stupid, shortsighted and greedy, that is why they have to be prevented from controlling the government. But the only significant check on Parliament is what the voters will allow to pass without punishing the party in power. If their voters were stupid shortsighted and greedy Britain would collapse. So, either we are not the equal of the British people, or we could succeed similarly in governing ourselves, if only our form of government would allow it. Their system is optimistic about the people, ours is pessimistic: and this is getting into a subject for another debate, but if you think about it, the assumptions that govern the system that governs us, to a large extent is determining what we're getting out of it, and what kind of citizens we are.
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