Editorial Observer
Democracy in America, Then and Now, a Struggle Against Majority Tyranny
By ADAM COHEN
Published: January 23, 2006
During the War of 1812, an angry mob smashed the printing presses of a Baltimore newspaper that dared to come out against the war. When the mob surrounded the paper's editors, and the state militia refused to protect them, the journalists were taken to prison for their own protection. That night, the mob broke into the prison, killed one journalist and left the others for dead. When the mob leaders were brought before a jury, they were acquitted.
Alexis de Tocqueville tells this chilling story in "Democracy in America," and warns that the greatest threat the United States faces is the tyranny of the majority, a phrase he is credited with coining. His account of his travels through America in the 1830's, which is often called the greatest book ever written about America, is both an appreciation of American democracy, and a cautionary tale about its fragility....
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It was a very different America that Tocqueville was writing about in the Jacksonian Age, but the concerns he raised still resonate strongly. He worried that the state's power would end up concentrated in a single authority, until its citizens were "reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." He feared the majority would trample on minorities, like the mob that attacked the Baltimore editors, or the whites of Pennsylvania who intimidated blacks into not voting. And he was concerned about tyranny of opinion, saying he knew of no country with "less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion" than America.
Tocqueville pointed to some bulwarks against tyranny. He was a firm supporter of checks and balances. He believed in the power of American law to limit the excesses of the ruler - the exact issue in today's debate over the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. He had great hopes for the judiciary. "The courts correct the aberrations of democracy," he wrote, and "though they can never stop the movements of the majority, they do succeed in checking and directing them." Tocqueville would not be surprised that the Supreme Court has limited the Bush administration's excesses in the war on terror - or that the administration has been eager to nominate justices with an expansive view of presidential power.
Tocqueville would not have been distracted by all the talk that warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detainment of enemy combatants and other civil liberties incursions are serving the cause of freedom. He understood that the newest incarnation of despotism was likely to be ushered in by the "avowed lover of liberty" who is a "hidden servant of tyranny."...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/opinion/23mon3.html?incamp=article_popular_4
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