Does tyranny stem from too much democracy?
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html#(very long article)
Plato made that argument and I will try to make a similar one.
Imagine a population with democracy and lots of freedom and tolerance.
Life is good. There are few problems and so many ways to choose from how to live your life.
Actually, there are so few problems, that people start complaining about minor and inconsequential things, e.g. what your genetic ancestry says about you as a person.
People have forgotten what life was like WITH problems such as insufficient freedom and insufficient tolerance. So, now they turn their attention to First-World-Problems, e.g. women and doctors daring to make medical decisions about women without input from male non-doctors.
In this climate, a demagogue comes. He rallies the people to combat the perceived problems.
While combatting the perceived problems, the people forget to preserve the freedoms they had fought for in the past.
The people have taken their freedoms for granted and they have forgotten that these freedoms even exist and could be lost again.
With the demagogue's aid, the people got rid of the perceived problem, but they accidently brought back real problems.
What if tyranny gets born from laziness?
What if tyranny gets born from people taking for granted what they have or have been given by their ancestors?
It's easy to prejudge other people if you have never suffered from prejudice.
It's easy to demand less rights for other people if you have never had your rights taken away.
It's easy to give up privacy if you are unaware that you do have privacy.
It's easy to join the demagogue in his fight against perceived tyranny if you have never experienced actual tyranny.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Ours is representative. Both count as democracies in English.
One problem with democracy--and the OP can be correct, democracy can even lead to tyranny while remaining a democracy--is that 50% + 1 can dictate to the others. You can enslave a group or execute a group under the guise of democracy if 55% of the population votes to kill or enslave the other half. US slavery was entirely democratic by that measure, a nasty but true fact. Roe v Wade was undemocratic by that measure.
Lynchings (or "necktie parties"
were often "democratic." The majority of a locale would essentially vote to hang somebody.
Representative democracies are supposed to put a buffer between mobs, majorities with emotions that don't think things through for the long term. Liberal democracies tend to have a set of laws that are very difficult to get past even with a majority to keep such excesses from happening. Still, given enough of a motivation, a liberal or representative democracy can be reduced to a majoritarian democracy, where 50% + 1 has absolute power.
Of course, representative and liberal democracies have their own drawbacks, and we have to be able to weight which set of problems is less bad and how to mitigate the problems. Many don't--they pick and choose which they like given whatever the current situation is.
