Tyranny of the majority
refers to any scenario in a democracy where a majority of citizens votes to oppress a minority. For example, if 80% of the people in a country vote to enslave the other 20%, that constitutes a tyranny of the majority. The outcome is a democracy with the brutality of an oppressive dictator.
Tyranny of the majority shows that it's insufficient to justify governance solely on the basis that what a majority wants it should get.
Governance ought to require both a majority's will and moral justification for the act. But people will vote immorally on occasion. To protect against this, modern democracies have in place limits that minimize the possibility and impact of a tyranny of the majority. For example, the United States has a Bill of Rights as well as other constitutional amendments that guarantee personal liberties from the government. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude; along with our country's separation of powers, which (among other features) grants the courts the power to strike down unconstitutional legislation, it's unlikely for a majority of people to get away with enslaving the remaining minority.
Nevertheless, tyrannies of the majority happen every year. For example, many non-Arizonans decry tyranny of the majority
against Arizona's constitutionally questionable enforcement against illegal immigration, just as non-Southerners decry tyranny of the majority
when some Southern states force their public schools' science textbooks to give equal credit to evolution and creationism as scientific doctrine. Conservatives tyrannize reproductive rights, and liberals tyrannize fetuses. Democracy turns us into little tyrants who carry voter registration cards.
There are two ways to stop a tyranny of the majority. The first is for the majority to see the errors of its immoral ways and to stop oppressing the minority. This is great when it happens, but it's far from inevitable. Usually, tyrannical majorities keep on with their tyrannizing until they're forcibly stopped—often by a larger, encompassing majority. This is the second way to stop a tyranny of the majority, and it's called kicking the problem upstairs.
It's what happens when, say, the federal government imposes uniform civil rights laws on all fifty states: smaller, individual majorities are swallowed into a larger, centralized majority—one that supports equal civil rights. The smaller, anti-civil rights majorities are diluted into powerlessness.
The United States has a long history of kicking problems upstairs to the federal level. It's a tactic underlying many progressive causes. Just as puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time, progressives fear that someone, somewhere might be taken advantage of. The progressive fights for a good cause, and many of the benefits we enjoy today are due to progressives' victories, but as with most benefits there are costs. The act of forcibly ending a regional tyranny of the majority by kicking the problem upstairs brings about its own problems—often ones that don't manifest until later. Much later.
One problem is that tyrannies of the majority don't end merely because problems have been kicked all the way to the top. Tyrannies of the majority still happen at the federal level, owing to the same kinds of democratic pressures that cause them to form at regional and state levels. Only, once a problem has been kicked to the top, there's nowhere left to go—except possibly to war.
We ought to consider the act of kicking problems upstairs to be a nonrenewable resource. Like other nonrenewable resources, its use confers a benefit. But like other nonrenewable resources, its use is finite and produces waste. The benefit is that we resolve tyrannies of the majority affecting us now. The waste is that we're left with governance that's more centralized, and it's inevitable there'll be larger majorities tyrannizing larger minorities later. And because future people suffering those problems won't have an upstairs to kick their problems to, they'll have less means for resolution.
Because of this, we ought to be selective and prudent about what we kick upstairs. This means we ought to let people in other regions and states keep more autonomy for resolving their own conflicts.
