The inherent tyranny of democracy

Michelle Malkin cites the news story of a Dutch minister who said, "It must be possible for Muslim groups to come to power [in the Netherlands] via democratic means." Well, Michelle is right to expose him as a dhimmy, but the minister is correct in what he said. If a majority of voters in a democracy decided they wanted Sharia law, that is in fact perfectly fine.

Some of you are probably wondering right now how I can claim to cherish freedom but directly oppose democracy. That's because democracy isn't freedom: democracy is the tyranny of majority, as many before me have stated. In a true democracy, a society of 100 people has at least 51 dictators working collectively to rule the other 49 -- hence the Founding Fathers' term "mobocracy." What I do support is the underlying democratic process of a republic by which voters choose who represents them in the government.

Democracy does not allow for the rights of the individual, because those are irrelevant. Democracy is all and only about the absolute rule of the majority, whether the majority is defined as "50% plus one person" or as a super-majority of two-thirds. The Dutch minister was halfway right, since what he should have said was, "The majority is all that counts. That is the essence of democracy." In a democracy, life, liberty and property are not an individual's rights, but privileges granted and revoked at the pleasure of the majority. That's why the Constitution's authors defined the United States as a republic, not as a democracy.

I've objected to "democracy" thrown around in the second Star Wars trilogy. Now that I think about it, Obi-Wan's line "My allegiance is to the Republic, to democracy!" in Episode III is self-contradictory. Does he support the Republic and its system of democratically elected Senators, or the principle of absolute rule by the majority?

John Kerry, of course, loves the word and the principle. As a Senator in the United States federal government, he of all people should know that we're not a democracy. However, he'll pander to the majority of voters who have no problem voting for representatives who will steal from the minority -- because it's a small minority of the population that pays the vast majority of taxes.

If the Netherlands' other leaders realize and emphasize that they're not a true democracy, they'll be fine. In fact, where government is limited by the people in some manner that protects the individual's rights, there wouldn't be anything to fear even if every elected official were a jihadist. I wrote a while back about conservatives' fear of immigrants "taking over":

But so long as government does not steal from my paycheck, and as long as the Constitution is still in force throughout United States jurisdictions, it would not matter to me if Los Angeles became 100% Hispanic, no more than it matters to me that Harlem is predominantly black. It does not affect me while my rights to life, liberty and property (including the right not to have government coerce taxes from me) are intact.

Under limited government, imams already have every right to refrain from shaking hands with women. So why do certain Muslims push for Sharia law anyway? Because Sharia law is naturally another manifestation of tyranny, and it's no contradiction that it can be established in a democracy by a majority of voters: 51 out of 100 can decide that adultery can be punished by stoning, for example.

We talk and worry about the danger of Islamofascism, but we amplify the threat when we understand our Western political processes so poorly.