A Quote by Cornel West
Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102)
Related Quotes
In the South, prior to the Civil Rights movement and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, democracy was the rule. The majority of people were white, and the white majority had little or no respect for any rights which the black minority had relative to property, or even to their own lives. The majority - the mob and occasionally the lynch mob - ruled.
[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.
One of the benefits of a properly functioning democracy is minority rights and majority rule.
[James] Madison pointed out in the discussion of the constitutional debates - the constitutional convention - that democracy would be a danger. He used England of course as the model and said suppose that in England everyone had the free right to vote; the poor, the propertyless - who are the great majority - would use their voting power to take away the rights of property owners to carry out what we would call land reform.
In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.
Democracy is based on the majority principle. This is especially true in a country such as ours where the vast majority have been systematically denied their rights. At the same time, democracy also requires that the rights of political and other minorities be safeguarded.
Majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. Majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. People have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
[O]ur sages in the great [constitutional] convention... intended our government should be a republic which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism. The rigours of a despotism often... oppress only a few, but it is the very essence and nature of a democracy, for a faction claiming to oppress a minority, and that minority the chief owners of the property and truest lovers of their country.
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.
I believe that open criticism of any institution is necessary in a democracy, to safeguard the constitutional order.
England shouldn't have the real freedom of vote and we shouldn't either. Because as [James Madison] put it, one of the primary goals of government was to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, to make sure the opulent maintain their rights. The constitutional system was structured to ensure that outcome.
When an unpopular minority is denied the right to marry, it is indeed the role of the courts to protect the rights of that minority, especially when a majority would deny them.
The restriction of religion to private life therefore does not necessarily threaten the vital interests of the majority religion, if there is one, and it protects minority religions from tyranny of the majority.
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
We talk about democracy as if it's a safeguard for individual rights... Instead, it's become our way of intruding on rights, allegedly in the name of that most collectivist of concepts: The Common Good.
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