Nowhere to Appeal

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

James Madison saw the danger before the United States Constitution was even ratified. In Federalist No. 10, published in 1787, he warned that a popular government makes it possible for a majority, once it forms a faction, to sacrifice the rights of other citizens to its own convenience or interest, and that guarding against this was one of the central problems any republic had to solve. Alexis de Tocqueville watched the young republic in practice four decades later and found the warning had teeth. Touring the United States in the 1830s for Democracy in America, he wrote that a minority struck by injustice has nowhere to appeal, because public opinion itself is the majority. A losing side cannot go over the majority's head to some higher authority, because in a democracy the majority is the highest authority there is. John Stuart Mill carried the same argument into On Liberty in 1859, extending it beyond formal government to the quieter tyranny of social opinion enforcing conformity without ever passing a law. Three writers, working across a century and two countries, converged on the same conclusion: counting votes correctly is not the same as protecting everyone the vote affects.