I suspect that the concept of democracy is doomed to fail when applied to actual people. That failure seems destined when the essence of the ideology is that majority rules. It seems to follow that if the majority rules then you will always have a minority that is ruled.
And ruled minorities are almost always problematic, primarily because of a tendency to become unruly minorities.
It’s reflexive to immediately think of the ruled minority in terms of a skin tone, and that presumption is understandable given the abundance of historical and present day examples. But racism in all of its manifestations is only one aspect of the majority imposing their will on the minority.
The actual imposition by the majority exists in every facet of democracy, and unless I’m misunderstanding the concept, then there’s nothing theoretically wrong with that imposition. If a democracy is composed of ten voters, and six or more of those voters think that women should be allowed to vote, then the four that were opposed have to accept the will of the majority.
Otherwise the system isn’t working.
However, there’s a different way to look at the how a healthy democracy should function. If I use the ten voter example from above then it could be argued that the minority should prevail four out of ten times. Granted, this idea isn’t very practical because it would mean that a minority rules forty percent of the time.
And that’s a violation of the majority rules premise.
So instead our democracy has evolved to where accommodations are made to the minorities. The larger the minorities become, the larger the accommodations become. This is a logical evolution in my estimation. Measured accommodation keeps civil wars from happening, and it makes sense to be aware and responsive to the needs of all the citizens that comprise a democracy.
But it’s a tricky situation for lawmakers and citizens of a democracy, because once the accommodation goes too far, then the silent majority will find a way to end their silence and reimpose majority rule. This reimposition is usually done with force of one sort or another.
And sometimes with sadistic exuberance.
The problem is identifying how much accommodation is too much accommodation, because that determination is very often an opinion. And if there’s one aspect of democracy that’s both a blessing and a bane, it’s the abundance of opinions.
An opinion is in of itself harmless. A sentiment that’s merely a preference until volition enters the picture. Then things change because the person or persons have determined that their opinion is a right, and they begin to fight for that right. Some fights are righteous, and some fights are just prejudice with vitriol and violence added as supplements.
The chosen enforcement tool of majority rule is the law. Sometimes the law is written to directly target specific minorities, like Jim Crow or the banning of the practice of a particular mythology. This is not always the case, but more often than not the targeting is an abuse of a legal system by the majority and will require redress. Functioning democracies will provide the necessary amendments even if that corrective action takes time and activism to enact. It’s always a struggle of some sort, but morally sound societies eventually get it right, assuming of course that the demands of the minority in question are also morally sound.
The struggle is always about defining what’s morally acceptable, and as a democracy matures so too does its sense of probity. Democracy is like an orchard and it thrives when all the fruit ripens at approximately the same time. The problem is that not all our apples ripen in unison. In fact, some apples refuse to ripen at all, and tend to get sour and then rotten. Other apples ripen too quickly and they too become mephitic before they can become beneficial to the orchard.
And those rotten apples fuck up the whole orchard. The problem is further compounded by the fact that those apples outwardly appear healthy but they’re rotten at their core.
If a democracy is to survive, then those apples need to be compelled to mature in relative unison, or they need to be harvested before they sour the rest of the garden, or vineyard, or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
The challenge for a democracy is managing the variety of fruit that grows on the vines. Because some fruit is too conservative and refuses to ripen, and some fruit is too liberal and ripens before it’s ready for consumption.
And almost all the fruit thinks the rest of the crop needs to look, feel and taste just like they do or it’s a problem.
Some of the produce is more fanatic about conformity in the orchard, and that’s how we get religious raspberries, Nazi nectarines and socialist strawberries. Fringe fruit then morphs into fruitcakes and then we’ve got ourselves a problem. And that’s enough of the fruit analogy. Another term is required for the human variant. Let’s call these people idiotholes.
It seems that there are always fringe idiots and assholes that are consumed with an obsession to impose their own fucked up version of correctness on to everyone else. And so the real targets of laws and enforcement should be those idiots and assholes.
Idiotholes.
They test my confidence in the survival of democratic ideals each time I’m forced to consider that the entire history of civilization is simply an effort to contain the idiotholes.
Some systems are designed to be better at idiothole containment than others. Democracy isn’t one of them as the protection of individual civil liberties tends to provide the perfect terrain for the idiotholes to thrive. And we have this tendency to let them run amok before we’re forced to vigorously rein them in.
Freedom of expression is a good example. It’s a wonderful concept until it’s abused, and I’m pretty sure that it’s being abused when a citizen or group does two things. They demand obedience to their preferred manner of expression, and they disregard accuracy and eventually reality.
And this shit happens to every society that humankind has ever put together. It’s inevitable, and we can’t seem to sort out how to prevent it from happening.
I think that every success story humanity has put together means that eventually the population grows to a point where the uneducated and ill informed become the majority.
And that majority rule is a recipe for disaster.