Politics & Power Quote by Maggie Gallagher

Gallagher’s line lands like a civics lesson with a warning label: democracy isn’t automatically synonymous with justice. By naming “mass prejudice” as democracy’s Achilles’ heel, she’s prying open the comforting myth that elections launder moral wrongdoing into legitimacy. The phrase “democratic forms” does quiet work here, too. It suggests procedure without promising outcomes, implying that ballots can coexist with brutality when the culture tilts that way.

The pivot is the loaded tag “so-called tyranny of the majority.” That “so-called” is a rhetorical feint: it borrows the prestige of a classic liberal anxiety (Tocqueville and Mill loom in the background) while leaving room for debate over how often the concept is invoked in bad faith. In American political life, “tyranny of the majority” is frequently deployed as a shield for minority interests that are powerful rather than marginalized: money, institutions, entrenched hierarchies. Gallagher’s framing insists the danger is real, but it also invites the reader to ask who gets cast as the threatened minority in any given fight.

Contextually, this is the language of culture-war liberalism and conservative skepticism toward majoritarian social change: civil rights, LGBTQ rights, religious liberty, and the courts’ countermajoritarian role all sit in the orbit of this claim. The subtext is an argument for constraints on raw popular will: constitutional rights, judicial review, federalism, norms. It’s persuasive because it flatters the reader’s self-image as principled and vigilant, while quietly moving the battleground from “what does the majority want?” to “what should the majority be allowed to do?”