Egypt trying to prove democracy means tyranny of the majority

By David McElroy · January 10, 2012

It’s been official U.S. government policy for decades to promote democracy around the world. The assumption seems to be that majorities everywhere really want western-style freedoms if they just get a chance to vote for them. Well, guess what? They don’t.

In many places, all the majority really want is to control people who don’t agree with them. I’ve talked before about how freedom and democracy aren’t the same things, but the people of Egypt — newly “freed” from a longtime dictator — seem to be trying to create a textbook case of a democratic tyranny.

In recent voting, Islamists have taken close to two thirds of the seats in the country’s first post-revolution parliament. Roughly 37 percent of the parliament will be held by the Muslim Brotherhood alone. We might be having a look at the future for Egypt right now, though, because a wealthy businessman made the mistake of tweeting the cartoon above — as a joke about how Mickey and Minnie Mouse would be required to look if the religious parties win.

The businessman — who’s a Coptic Christian — faces trial for “insulting Islam.”

This is the heart of the problem with a majoritarian system. All it does is allow the majority to get their way. It doesn’t protect individuals. It doesn’t protect minorities. It’s purely about the exercise of power by the majority. So what happens when the majority are wrong? What happens when the majority don’t want individual freedom — of speech, religion, assembly or any of the other rights we’re supposed to take for granted?

Despite what you might have been taught in school, democracy doesn’t ensure that we have freedom. This country wasn’t even supposed to be a democracy, because the founders understood the problems inherent in it. What they gave us was flawed enough, but at least it was a republic, which was designed to prevent a majority from enforcing their will on everybody else.

Egypt is fast becoming a model democracy. The country has multiple legal parties that compete in elections. It is setting up a representative government that will carry out the will of the majority. But that doesn’t make it free. In many ways, the democratic country will be less free than the “dictatorial” country was.

In 1979, Iran exchanged a secular dictator for a religious dictatorship. Are the people freer? Not really. They just have different things they can do and not do. When you don’t have freedom, your privileges change at the whim of the dictator in power.

And when the powers that be don’t believe in jokes involving their religion, don’t make religious jokes, because you’re certainly not free.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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