The Tyranny of the Minority

by A.W.R. Hawkins



When the Founding Fathers created this nation, they designated it a republic rather than a democracy. They did so because a republic is fixed and tends toward stability over time, whereas a democracy, which is always in flux, is prone to violent dissolution at any moment. In fact, many of them referred to democracy as “mob rule,” and wanted to avoid it like the plague for fear that it could provide a faction the opportunity to access to the levers of political power and change the course of the nation for the worse in a relatively short period of time.

Although we have all but abolished the Constitution the Founders left us and moved closer to a democracy with each passing generation, we have still managed to remain a republic foundationally. Yet somewhere along the way, between 1776 and now, we opened the door to a rabid political correctness that has actually nurtured the very faction-like atmosphere which tends to undo a republic.

But it’s not the kind of faction our Founders feared: not one where a majority of voters unite for a cause and force their will upon the citizenry as a whole. Instead, it’s a perverted use of the court system and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that allow a person to claim that he’s been offended and then to levy the charge against those who gave offense in order to control their actions.

In other words, we’re not dealing with the tyranny of the majority, but the tyranny of the minority.

We have lost nativity scenes in cities across America because one citizen of one city doesn’t like Christmas. We have lost freedom of religious expression in our public school system because a student here or there is bothered when people pray. We have lost crosses on many of our war memorials because atheists want to shield their children from religious exposure. And we are poised to lose even more freedoms if we don’t stop this scourge before it sweeps across our land and our intellectual landscape completely.

As I am writing this, citizens in King, North Carolina are protesting the removal of a Christian flag from a war memorial in that city: a flag that was removed by order of the King City Council after one veteran who saw duty in Afghanistan filed a complaint with the ACLU.

In today’s usual cryptic fashion, the name of the offended party has not been released to the public, a withholding that reflects a degree of secrecy that could lead some to believe that the offended soldier is a Muslim, an atheist, or a figment of the ACLU’s imagination. Whatever the case may be, the complaint from this ghostlike citizen in King has proven sufficient to have a flag removed that had been proudly flying over the memorial for more than six years.

And in Oxford, Mississippi, where the Ole Miss Rebels have enjoyed the rich tradition of having a mascot named “Colonel Reb” roaming the football sidelines since 1979, politically correct tendencies led them to do away with the southern icon this season and to replace him with a black bear. That’s right: the new mascot is a black bear in a southern gentlemen’s suit, and his name is the “Rebel Black Bear.”

How out of whack do things have to get before we finally say enough is enough?

The majority are losing freedom after freedom and tradition after tradition to a wimpy, nameless, minority that hides behind groups like the ACLU and dumps shame on its opposition through words like ‘diversity’ and ‘fairness.’ But there is nothing diverse about a politically correct landscape, and the methods used to try to create one are clearly anything but fair.

Our Founders were wise enough to know that a tendency toward unchecked factions would devastate the country they sought to leave to posterity. Surely we must be brave enough to take their fears into account and fight against the one person here or the two people there who are actively using the court system to rip us away from our moorings.

The tyranny of the minority is tyrannical indeed.

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HUMAN EVENTS columnist A.W.R. Hawkins holds a Ph.D. in U.S. Military History from Texas Tech University. He will be a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal during the summer of 2010.