[wardaddy]

What's wrong with the majority ruling within reason? I hope if conservatives ever become the majority here that we squash the liberal ideology and reverse the tide of the culture war.

[Huck]

What's wrong with the majority ruling within reason?

Well, there are things wrong with it, but it is the best deal available. The devil is in the details. What does "within reason" mean? Who decides? Guess who. The majority. There are good and bad examples of majoritarianism. The Kansas Nebraska Act, IMO, is an example of the evil side of the coin. To have a small group of people decide by vote whether or not someone else may be free is sick. But it happened here in the USA.

Then again, the doctrine that any one state can withdraw from the united government whenever it chooses is minority power run amok. Why have nine states ratify the Constitution, why require 3/4's to ratify an amendment, if 1/50th may withdraw whenever it chooses? The doctrine flies in the face of republicanism, which is not majority rule. It is representative government by compact, which uses different majoritarian requirements to meet particular circumstances.

[x]

Ostrowski attacks the unionists for wanting to impose the views of the majority on the minority and for using violence to do so. But this was precisely what secessionists did in states like Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Alabama and North Carolina. That is assuming that the secession conventions did represent majority rule.

Majority rule is unavoidable under representative government -- though on important questions one could demand a 3/5ths, 2/3rds or 3/4ths vote, or a series of majority votes in consecutive years. Southern radicals made much of Calhoun's "concurrent majority" theory as a defense of Southern interests in the union, but did not offer similar measures to defend the interests of those who did not want to secede.

So if majority view and violence were used by both sides, why only blame one? Why does Ostrowski make majority rule a dirty word when used against him and expect it to prevail when it works for him?

If you want to secede to escape from the results of majority rule decisions, by what right can you compel others to live under your rule? What would prevent them from forming their own state, or remaining with the rest of the old country. In the Southern and Border states of the 1860s, the India and Palestine of the 1940s and in the Balkans and the Caucausus of our own time, secession and partition bring messiness, violence and war.

Secessionists absolutize state's rights in their arguments. States can leave any time they like for any reason or none, but any revolt against a state itself is illegitmate. Unfortunately, the text of the Constitution doesn't support such a reading.

Does that mean that political unions like ours are indissoluble? No, but breaking up countries and separating people who have grown together has to be done patiently over time with much effort, or it will bring war. This was recognized by Henry Clay and others in the second generation of the Republic: "The dissolution of the Union and war are identical and inseparable; they are convertible terms."