The other night, I pulled from the dusty shelf Vol. 43, Great Books of the Western World, 1952 printing, which includes “American State Papers”, “The Federalist”, and Essays by John Stewart Mill.

Browsing the latter, specifically, the Essay “On Liberty”, and found the paragraphs cited below interesting. I am no scholar, but I think the parallels to today’s society, culture, and politiks are unmistakable.

What Mill is warning against is true democracy, that is, mob rule, a separate form of oppression from that of a tyrannical government. I submit to you that Democrats, as a work-around to the protections in our representative republican form of government, employ both dreaded tyrannical forms in concert to achieve their ends.

Democrats, through their vast networks in media, entertainment, and education, are “making themselves accepted as the majority” and washing the masses with a foreign ideology, where any dissenting individuals are ostracized and ridiculed, even targeted. This is the practice of social tyranny, the ends of which are not only the creation of a prevailing counter opinion, but further to use those feelings as a basis for effecting radical change in government, and thereafter ensuring a consensus acceptance of this despotic, unconstitutional regime and its dictates.

Consider for a moment the massive change in our society that has been realized over recent generations, both culturally and politically, and ponder how it came to be.

The current Democrat Party, its leftist enablers and minions, is a social tyranny, a means by collective to political despotism. ~tdv @

“On Liberty”, by John Stewart Mill, 1859, Ch.1: Introductory, Para. 4 & 5
Emphasis mine, excerpts quoted here @1, @2, @3.

But, in political and philosophical theories, as well as in persons, success discloses faults and infirmities which failure might have concealed from observation. The notion, that the people have no need to limit their power over themselves, might seem axiomatic, when popular government was a thing only dreamed about, or read of as having existed at some distant period of the past. Neither was that notion necessarily disturbed by such temporary aberrations as those of the French Revolution, the worst of which were the work of an usurping few, and which, in any case, belonged, not to the permanent working of popular institutions, but to a sudden and convulsive outbreak against monarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time, however, a democratic republic came to occupy a large portion of the earth’s surface, and made itself felt as one of the most powerful members of the community of nations; and elective and responsible government became subject to the observations and criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact. It was now perceived that such phrases as “self-government,” and “the power of the people over themselves,” do not express the true state of the case. The “people” who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the “self-government” spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this as against any other abuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of government over individuals loses none of its importance when the holders of power are regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongest party therein. This view of things, recommending itself equally to the intelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those important classes in European society to whose real or supposed interests democracy is adverse, has had no difficulty in establishing itself; and in political speculations “the tyranny of the majority” is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.