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Now, in response to this, some critics will insist that despite whatever benefits democracy might produce at the societal level, it still poses a fundamental threat to liberty at the level of individual citizens which, while perhaps not as overtly oppressive as a typical autocracy, nonetheless constitutes its own kind of oppression. They’ll argue that because democracy relies on a system of majoritarian voting for its decision-making, in which everyone must obey the will of the majority regardless of whether they actually agree with it themselves, it still allows for the powerful to subjugate the weak, by mere virtue of outnumbering them – the so-called “tyranny of the majority.” If (say) there are an overwhelming number of voters of one particular demographic who want to enslave or exploit a smaller minority of another demographic, there’s nothing that smaller group can do about it; all anyone can do is hope they aren’t in that minority. A popular way of expressing this is to say that “democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner” – with the point being that it’s unjust to leave matters up to a majority vote when what’s at stake are people’s most fundamental rights (or their very existence).

Of course, this slogan doesn’t really work when it’s being used to try and discredit democracy in favor of a more autocratic system; after all, if the goal is to protect people’s rights, it doesn’t exactly help to switch from a system of majority rule to a system of minority rule (especially if it’s a minority of one). That would be like going from a system in which the wolves can vote to eat the sheep if they outnumber them to a system in which the wolves can vote to eat the sheep even if they don’t outnumber them – or more accurately, a system in which a single wolf makes the decision for everyone. Tyranny of the minority isn’t exactly an upgrade from tyranny of the majority.

Still, that doesn’t mean that the whole idea of the tyranny of the majority is completely baseless, or that we should just dismiss it out of hand – because protecting the rights of the individual against the collective really is an important concern. A powerful majority voting to repress a less powerful minority really would be an unjust outcome, and we should obviously want to avoid it.

Luckily, though, this is something that (here in our relatively liberal society) practically everyone realizes and understands at some level, which is why practically no one favors the kind of crude majoritarianism that would just allow for the majority to do whatever it wanted at all times without any protections for individual rights. Most voters understand that while they might sometimes be part of the dominant majority on certain issues, they won’t always be in the majority on every issue, so it’s important to have explicit rights carved out for people who are in the minority to protect them from unjust subjugation. That’s why the system that nearly every voter favors is “majority rule with minority rights” – a system that operates by majority vote as a general rule, but makes exceptions for government actions that would unduly violate individuals’ most basic rights (e.g. their freedom of speech, their freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures, etc.). That’s the kind of system that people are actually talking about when they argue in favor of democracy – not pure 100% majoritarianism – and accordingly, it’s what our whole legal system here in the US, with the Bill of Rights and everything else, is built around. (Other democratic countries use slightly different systems – in the UK, for instance, they don’t have an official Constitution or Bill of Rights like we do – but they still have a tradition of common law that largely serves the same function and accomplishes the same things.) So when critics try to argue that democracy is nothing but sheer tyranny of the majority, they’re really just attacking a straw-man caricature. Commenter ThatLanguageGuy provides a voice of reason against these kinds of arguments:

I get it, direct one-for-one vote democracy without any built-in protections for the individual are dangerous and, get this, don’t protect the individual. But surely it’s recognized that there aren’t any major institutions that operate in that way, right? Surely it’s acknowledged that a system by which individuals have some say in the direction of their governance is better than a system by which a handful of appointed-by-birth or conquering individuals rule over the population with no feedback whatsoever?

And it’s true; despite the critics’ assertion that democracy can only ever result in competing blocks of voters trying to oppress each other all the time, the reality when you actually look at real-life democratic institutions around the world is that they’re in fact set up with the specific function of helping people amiably coexist in a way that’s just and fair for everyone. And this principle can even be seen at the level of individual voting patterns; when you look at how citizens vote on various issues, what you find is that they mostly aren’t just selfishly voting for whichever policy would personally benefit them the most – they’re instead basing their votes more on their actual principles about what they think would be most fair and just for society as a whole. (Certainly if you consider your own reasons for voting the way you do, you’ll no doubt find that this is the case.) As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson put it, quoting Haidt:

The literature on voting makes it clear that people mostly don’t vote for their material self-interest, that is, for the candidates and policies that would make them personally better off. Jonathan Haidt provides some examples in The Righteous Mind:

Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens; young men subject to the draft are not more opposed to military escalation than men too old to be drafted; and people who lack health insurance are not more likely to support government-issued health insurance than people covered by insurance.

Obviously, there are sometimes exceptions to this – and occasionally, they may even be major exceptions. One of the biggest objections critics will raise against democracy, for instance, is “But we still had slavery in this country even though it was democratic!” And that’s true; prior to America’s founding, slavery had been the norm for centuries, so when the country was founded, it had slavery as well – for a bit. But what’s noteworthy here is that despite the fact that slavery had been the norm for centuries up to that point, once American democracy was established in 1776 slavery was abolished within a single human lifetime – first with northern states abolishing it in the late 1700s, then with a national ban on the importation of slaves in 1807, and finally with total abolition in 1865. A practice that had persisted for thousands of years under autocracy ended in a matter of decades only once democracy entered the picture; and that’s not a coincidence. Oppression of that magnitude simply can’t be sustained in a liberal democracy the way it can under autocracy.

In a similar vein, another argument critics will sometimes use against democracy is “But the Nazis were democratically elected!” And again, this is totally true; before Hitler seized absolute power and became a dictator, he and his Nazi cronies were ordinary politicians working under a democratic system (although he himself was technically appointed, not elected). What’s worth noting, though, is that during this time, they weren’t invading other countries and committing genocides and so on; it was only after they did away with Germany’s democracy and began ruling autocratically that they could commence with those atrocities. So if the argument being made here is just that it’s possible for democracy to be overthrown in favor of some other form of government, then yes, of course that’s true, just as it is for every other political system. But if the contention is that democracy is therefore the problem and ought to be done away with, then that just seems like a backward argument; if Hitler’s example demonstrates anything, it’s the importance of not allowing political leaders to turn democracy into autocracy – which is exactly the point I’ve been arguing for here.

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