… is from page 47 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and important 1937 book, The Good Society:
Then, too, the conception of democracy changed. Once the popular movement had been chiefly concerned with the Bill of Rights and other limitations on the sovereign, but the rapid enfranchisement of the masses resulted in the belief that popular sovereignty must not be restrained, that the meaning of free government was the dictatorship of the majority.
DBx: We human beings have produced during our time on this orb an abundance of bad ideas, ranging from the nitwitted to the calamitous. Closer to the latter than to the former end of this sorry spectrum is the anthropomorphizing of ‘the People’ and then treating this imaginary being as being almost godlike. Unfortunately complementary to this terrible idea is the notion that ‘the People’ have a will, and that this will is both sacred and clearly revealed by majoritarian voting.
