Oregon’s Tyranny of the Majority

            When Donald Trump got elected I had a lot of friends tell me, “Well, he lost the popular vote, that’s how we should elect our president anyway.” I tried to explain to them, badly as I still had not clearly thought the idea out, about the Tyranny of the Majority. One person I knew laughed at the idea and said “Tyranny of the Majority, isn’t that just democracy?” This made me reflect on that idea as I had no counter to it.

            After thinking about it for a while I came to the conclusion that, yes, pure democracy is the Tyranny of the Majority. This is one of the Tyrannies that the founding fathers sought to prevent when they created the Government of the United States. They were concerned about the Tyranny of an Individual, such as a monarch or dictator, on one end of the spectrum and the Tyranny of the Majority, mob rule on the other end.

            The Tyranny of the Majority is a more difficult concept to grasp than a Tyrant. With a Tyrant you can point to the Tyrant, see them, hear what they have to say and can see the concentration of power. The Tyranny of the Majority spreads the power out to the mob. It places the group above the individual, in a way that if sacrificing the individual will benefit the group it will be done regardless of the individual’s desires. The new rosy term for this idea is called Social Justice.

            In Oregon, the city of Portland (Multnomah County) and Washington County run the state. The bulk of Oregon’s population is in these two counties, so that makes sense. Yet it leaves people in the rest of Oregon’s counties frustrated because they feel they do not have a voice. Not only that, but they also feel that the people in the big cities are basically bossing them around. This is due to the Democrats holding both houses of congress as well as the governorship.

            As someone of the Millennial Generation who grew up in Washington County and went to college in Multnomah County (and who, no thanks to my teachers or classmates, held conservative/libertarian views) Republican was always thrown around as a dirty word. In fact it is used as a pejorative in some groups. I kept my mouth shut in college because, one I was a shy person, and two I found that if you said you voted Republican you got a lot of scorn and bullying. The insulation from different ideas coupled with the demonizing of the word Republican turns people away from even listening or understanding Conservative points of view. Libertarians also get lumped into the not Democrat box and are seen as just as bad if not worse in some cases.

            I know Republicans in Oregon do not expect, nor would they want, the government to fix this problem. Yet I do think they would want to see a Republican candidate running the state, just to get things back on track. My question is, what’s it going to take to make that happen?