You completely ignore the issue of legitimacy in you talk of things that never happen.
A dictator has NO legitimacy to do anything, good or bad.
The goodness from a dictator is stained by the illegitimate nature of their having the power to do it.
While even a bad representative in a democracy acts with legitimacy.
To scattered-brained crows that don't care about legitimate governance.
The idea is to make power as tenuous as possible.
Make elected servants as easy to kick out as possible.
The dictator today can smile and when times become a little tough can crush mercilessly.
There is no history of a majority in real control moving to crush the rights of others.
I can't think of an instance in history where a majority ever had real control.
Slave owners tend to oppose things that make them less than master.
No, they feared a tyranny of the majority, which I know you deny is possible, but they were smart enough to know was not merely possible but highly probable.
They were absolute tyrants running a system of human torture and you want to talk about how smart they were?
The so-called "tyranny of the majority" is addressed as you say by Constitutional protections of rights that require super majorities to override.
I know next you will be wailing about the tyranny of the super-majority.
The protections of rights would be far more paramount in a democracy than in any dictatorship.
In a dictatorship all rights exist by whim and can disappear on a whim.
But you prefer this to super-majority protected Constitutional rights?
How far will you go to defend dictatorship?
Try to calm down, control your dogma, stop the personal insults, and listen, think, and reason.
Almost nothing in your reply has logical relevance to what I said.
I very explicit stated that a democratic system is preferable and generally leads to better protection of rights.
That makes most of your post irrelevant since you assume I have argued in favor of dictatorships.
What I said is that there is nothing inherent within democracy itself that protects the rights of the minority. In fact, a democratic majority can vote to eliminate their own basic rights, which has occurred plenty of times when they want everyone to be forced to to do or not do X (such as with abortion) and do not want even themselves to have the right to control their own reproduction.
A dictator can choose to grant rights to people that a democratic majority can choose not to. Do you deny this simple fact of reality?
And there have been non-democratic rulers who have granted their subjects rights that have been taken away under democratic rule (again, abortion is and example, as has been religious liberties). That just means that since majority rule by itself does not protect the human rights of the minority, you can have and there have been instances where a particular dictator is better for the rights of some people than a democratic majority. But since benovolent dictators are uncommon, dictatorships are generally worse than democracies, even when those democracies are not restrained by basic individual rights that prevail over the will of the majority.
To protect basic rights requires a Bill of Rights, but democracy itself is not neccessary and far from sufficient to produce such a Bill of Rights. This is nothing about a democratic system of election legislators that will inherently produce a Bill of Rights, which is why there are plenty of examples of democratic systems that vary wildly in or largely lack such rights.
In addition, non democratic systems can and have produced legal rights of the populace, even those who did not elect them or do not support them. In fact, the US constitution and Bill of Rights are not really democratically produced documents.
The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights were thought up by a couple of "tyrants" as you call them, with no consultation from 99.999% of the population, and voted upon by a handful of other "tyrants" whose authority to do so was only granted to them by the small % of people who declared without democratic legitimacy that they were the only ones with the right to vote. Had these "tyrants" actually allowed the populace (whether just white men or the whole populace) democratic input, neither the Constitution nor Bill of Rights would likely have been ratified. In fact, Vermont was the only State to chose to give its citizens a chance to vote on the Constitution and 90% voted against it. So, a year later after every other state had ratified, Vermont delegates decided the people were too stupid to be given this task and voted amongst themselves to ratify.
In PA, the Constitution was only ratified b/c it's supporters committed assault and kidnapping of the delegates who opposed it, physically dragging them through the streets and into the assembly hall so there would be enough members present to legitimize a vote.
Yet this lack of democracy that led to a constitutional democracy and a Bill to protect individual rights does not undermine the fact that these documents laid the foundation for government and society where equality and individual rights would see huge progress, and prevent a majority vote from undoing that progress, despite plenty of moments in history where a majority of voters would likely have voted to violate the Constitution. And while requiring a Super-majority to undo some of those rights is a good start to protecting against a tyranny of the majority, that doesn't go far enough.
The even less democratic document, the Declaration of Independence, gets it more right than the Constitution. Some basic liberties (such as speech) are philosophically inalienable and can never, even by a 100% democratic vote be rescinded. They have more value and legitimacy than democracy itself whose value largely derives from its protection of individuals rights.
Thus, if at some point a super majority exists to oppose the 1st Amendment, then that democracy and it's will no longer serve their legitimate function, and those who value basic rights would be morally obligated to use violence if needed to oppose that democratic will.
