"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
--Thomas Jefferson
Thursday, June 04, 2009
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2 comments:
John Stuart Mill also wrote about avoiding the "tyranny of the majority" in his Essay on Liberty. I make my classes read it.
Pretty words, yet impossible to maintain in practice. Our nation is imploding, and there isn't that much we can do to stop it. The core values have become too widely separated. The main model for this period is that of the 1840s to 1860. They even had an unpopular foreign war and their own versions of terrorists, these being the Indians that had yet to be forced into reservations. It would be entirely unsurpising to see some overzealous John Brown pop up in the next few years. America has failed to remember its own history, let alone general history.
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