Dominion in the sense of rule, control; I was alluding to an undesdirable politcal structure where majorites impose their will directly without protections in place for the indivdual. When that occurs the indvidual gets negated and any such system always becomes oppressive as he is swallowed up in the collective.
The majority of the voters, though, indirectly determine the law (and if that majority is large enough, they can legally change even the Constitution itself).
Again- process vs rule.
The amendment process is provided for under the rule of law; and a large enough majority can indeed effect some changes but if they do so, they are acting consistent with the Constitution. That is a political process under the rule law which still guarantees personal liberty. It is not surrendered pursuant to the majority- that's the crux of our misunderstaning, I think. The only thing standing between mob rule and liberty is the Constitution and our will to preserve it. Notice has much liberty has eroded consequent of not adhering and protecting it.
[Sorry for the length of this multi-post response]
I think we are 90% in agreement about this, maybe completely about what you just said. I just want to emphasize, though, that neither the law nor the Constitution can be much better than the people themselves. There’s no foolproof form of government. If enough people want it here (as apparently the Muslim Brotherhood do in Egypt), every amendment of the Bill of Rights can be legally revoked by subsequent amendments.
[We may disagree about part of what I’m about to say.]
If most of the people want tyranny, then it’s going to be hard to prevent. On the whole, though, I think that representative democracies are what we should promote, with realistic guarantees for the rights of the individual — that is, in situations in which they stand a good chance of surviving (perhaps not in some Muslim countries, though I wouldn’t write them all off indefinitely. The West too was once about as intolerant as they are, and was mostly ruled by authoritarian regimes.)
Both the Germans and the Japanese seem to have changed very quickly after World War II, even though some persons suggested at the time that the peoples themselves were innately authoritarian, and that free institutions couldn’t survive among them for very long. (Of course, one major difference is that after the devastation of the war, their previous regimes were to a great degree discredited, in contrast with the Muslim world in which authoritarianism is still strongly connected to their religion, and still continues to receive widespread support.)
Almost all our enemies in the past couple of hundred years have been dictatorships of one kind of another. Though the Communist regimes claimed to be democracies, they were really dictatorships. Hitler too came to power with minority support, having actually lost seats in the previous election (by an irregular action of Hindenburg, of doubtful constitutional validity). At the height of his success Hitler probably did have the support of the majority of the German people, but by that time he was ruling as a dictator and not allowing dissent. When things started to go wrong, there was no easy way to remove him.
I haven’t given up on the ideal of promoting free elections, but I think it has to be pursued prudently, and with an emphasis on guarantees for the rights of the individual.
The people, however much we may glorify them, aren’t very smart (after all about 50% are below average :-), but they do know when they’re suffering. A single person or a governing elite can be wiser, but power corrupts, and I don’t think we can trust any kind of authoritarian ruler to look out for our interests, not for very long anyway. Representative democracies (the United States, the ones in Europe, and scattered around the world) are admittedly pretty bad at times, but on the average they’re better than dictatorships.