October 13, 2004
The Tyranny of the Majority:
Why we have a Bill of Rights
By Floyd Johnson
The framers of our American Constitution were greatly influenced by the period in European history called "The Enlightenment" - a period in which many thinkers, philosophers and writers openly opposed the despotism of kings and archbishops of the church. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other early framers of our Constitution drew sobering lessons from Europe's religious wars, from the ruthless greed of aristocrats to the torture chambers of the Inquisition.
Early on James Madison warned of the "Tyranny of the Majority." He wrote in the Federalist Papers (Number 51): "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure."
The original draft of our Constitution (finished by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, but not yet approved by the individual states) did not solve the problem of majorities imposing tyrannical laws - unnecessary or unreasonable laws without regard to the rights and needs of the individual or minorities.
The effort to protect all Americans from the tyranny of a voting majority was largely the work of a little-known Virginia planter, George Mason. He was a champion of personal liberties. At the start of the Revolution, he wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, giving each person in Virginia the freedom to speak, write, meet and worship as they wanted to. It also protected Virginians from strong arm police tactics and being forced to testify against themselves. With Jefferson and Madison, he also succeeded in ending Virginia's tax support of the Episcopal Church (then the exported version of the Church of England).
At the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, Mason demanded the abolition of slavery and the inclusion of a similar Bill of Rights to protect all individual Americans from the new government of voters being formed. When his views failed to pass, he refused to sign the constitution and campaigned against it. Little interested in public life, Mason gave up and retired to his Virginia home, and died there in 1792. Before his death, however, both Jefferson and Madison continued to press Mason's views of individual rights.
Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote and argued forcefully for the inclusion of a Bill of Rights, as he had for the State of Virginia's own Bill of Rights. Both he and Madison backed a list of strong amendments to the constitution. Finally, ten amendments did pass - what are now known as our American Bill of Rights and they took effect on December 15, 1791. They were designed specifically to protect individuals and minorities in America from the "Tyranny of the Majority."
Two hundred years ago the ratification of our Constitution was withheld by the original 13 colonies until 1791, until the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were finally added to the Constitution. Only when the fundamental and basic rights of citizens were guaranteed against the power of the state, were the original 13 separate states willing to form a "more perfect union" with a strong federal government. During the 1700s our individual rights had been hard fought for with blood and guns, through winters of discontent, frostbite and bitterness. These hard won rights were not about to be relinquished by the new citizens of the new nation being formed.
Many early Federalists in the American colonies believed that only the privileged elite were capable of leading and that they should lead a centralized government, with their authority rippling outward from their legislative and judicial actions. Jeffersonians on the other hand believed that it was the common man, the yeoman farmer, who protected the nation with his vote, his guns and his plow, who should be at the center of government. The idea of "natural rights" had emerged out of English common law, our early colonial traditions, and the humanism of the European enlightenment - rights sworn to, incidentally, by many of our founding fathers in Masonic tenets. This faith in the common man (which at that time did not extend beyond property owning white men) as protectors of our democracy, today requires constant vigilance and attention by ordinary citizens.
The ten amendments that constitute our Bill of Rights, like the Ten Commandments, define rights not merely limited in number to ten. Multiple rights are defined in many of these ten amendments. For example, the First Amendment does not limit itself to a single proscription. It reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
To a very large extent (but not completely), our Bill of Rights protects the individual rights of every American citizen from being trampled by a majority of voters. Unfortunately, I suspect that if American voters were given the opportunity to vote today on the Bill of Rights, many voters would likely decide to discard all or parts of it - especially those rights that many consider tiresome and annoying such as the separation of church and state. This sad lack of understanding and appreciation of how the Bill of Rights protects all of us is particularly depressing in a country that considers itself the bastion of liberty and human rights.
I believe that these rights are being threatened today. As inheritors of these rights, we ordinary citizens must be constantly vigilant that these individual rights are not infringed upon by the state, any organization, another individual, or by mere carelessness. We must pay attention to the individual rights of all citizens - not just the majority - with more attention than simply listening to daytime talk shows and reading tabloid journalism. Such citizen vigilance requires more than merely protecting just the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. It means we must be constantly prepared to defend every individual's right to free expression of views, the freedom of the press, and in insuring that no particular religion wields undue influence on our government as the Church of England once did in England and in our own colonies.
If we do not carefully guard and defend the individual rights of all Americans, we risk losing our own.
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Floyd Johnson describes himself as a depression-born, unreconstructed FDR-Democrat. He moved to Phoenix from London in 1975 after residing several years in Brussels and London. He received a Masters Degree from Thunderbird - The Garvin School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona in 1981. After 35 years in the computer industry, he was a used and rare book seller in Peoria, Arizona until his retirement in 2002.
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