Is tyranny of the majority worse than tyranny of the minority?

@RoboGraham All tyranny is equally bad. It's not quantitative.

@Paul4747

To me, if a majority is in control, that's not tyranny, that's democracy. If it's less than a majority in control, that's some form of tyranny.

@RoboGraham What happens when the majority starts voting that the minority needs to get locked up, deported, or otherwise disposed of? Is it tyranny then?

The majority in the US are straight and until recently everything else was illegal. I consider that tyranny of the majority. Likewise, when "community standards" are invoked to try and proscribe what people can read, watch, listen to, and say.

Just because it's the majority does not make them right.

@Paul4747

Any government that behaves tyrannically can be called a tyranny, regardless of how it got into power. I never said that what a government elected by majority does is necessarily right, just that it is democratic. The same what ifs that you mentioned can be applied to a government elected by minority, or an oligarchy, or any other, if it chooses to do those things.

I think a democratically elected government put into power by a majority is less likely to be tyrannical and if it is, the tyranny will be more limited in scope because the government has more supporters than detractors.

What makes you think that direct democracy will definitely lead to tyranny? How does skewing the electoral system to devalue some voters and increase the value of other voters based on geographic location any less likely to lead to tyranny?

@RoboGraham The same thing that makes you think

a democratically elected government put into power by a majority is less likely to be tyrannical

It' is the very rare exception for a president to win the electoral vote without winning the popular vote as well, and we're seeing what happens when the party in power chooses to pursue a narrow partisan agenda rather than run to the center; there's an electoral revolt. Any government has ultimately to rule by consensus, not by fiat.

@Paul4747

So, you believe that direct democracy will cause tyranny for the same reason that I think governments elected by majority are less likely to be tyrannical? The reason I think that a government that has majority support is less likely to be tyrannical is because the more tyrannical a government is, the more supporters it loses. So a gov with majority support probably isn't going to be very tyrannical, otherwise it wouldn't be able to have such high levels of support. Direct democracy elects based on majority support, so how would that definitely lead to tyranny?

Sure it doesn't happen all that often that a candidate losses the popular vote but wins the EC but why should there be that possibility at all? It happens often enough in modern history that 5 of the 9 Supreme Court Justices were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote. How is that okay? If we chose presidents with the popular vote, we wouldn't be seeing what happens when the party in power chooses to pursue a narrow partisan agenda right now because this administration would not be in power. I agree that a government has to rule by consensus or else there will be an electoral revolt. I think that electoral revolt would be more likely and easier to achieve if the electoral process wasn't so skewed. So with the way things are now, governments can get away with governing in a narrow partisan way, thanks to the unfairness, more so than they would be able to in a more democratic system.

@RoboGraham A straight popular vote means the winner takes all and the most populace states rule the roost, period. There's absolutely no incentive for the majority party to do anything but play to those states and keep their majority appeal intact.
The electoral system, imperfect as it is, means that winning the coasts and the big cities is not enough. A candidate has to have a broader appeal, even if it's by a razor-thin margin and even if it's only in strategic states.

The map in 2016 has a good argument for being a majority of the country, if not the voters, going Republican. Geographically, most of the country went for Trump. Yes, it was a razor-thin margin. If Hilary had swung one more state, let's say Michigan, it still would have been a razor-thin margin for her. Neither candidate in 2016 ran a popular campaign. Neither one appealed beyond their base. Neither one broke 50% of the vote. At best Hilary would have had a plurality. (Which I obviously would have preferred, and would be better for the nation, but that's not what I'm arguing about right now.)

A straight popular vote would have given us a President Clinton elected by 4 states on the west coast, 1 desert state, 1 mountain state, Minnesota, Illinois, and a solid east coast. Just as half of the country feels excluded by Trump's victory, half would have felt excluded by Clinton's. There's not an easy answer here.

The system as set up largely functions. It's not the electoral system that's broken, but the hyper-partisan atmosphere of the last 30 years, since the "Republican Revolution", when Newt Gingrich came out with his playbook for candidates explaining how to describe their opponents as "weak", "sick", "un-American", "traitors"... all the language culminating with the tweetstorms of Donald J. Trump. We need a reconciliation. If you will, we need what Al Franken called for in, I believe, his book Why Not Me?- "a return to niceness."