The silent majority no more..

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Out of this trip came de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, in which he expressed admiration for American civil liberties and compared the world’s first genuine liberal democracy favorably with Old World institutions. But de Tocqueville had serious reservations, too. The biggest danger to US democracy, he believed, was the tyranny of the majority, the suffocating intellectual conformity of American life, the stifling of minority opinion and dissent. He was convinced that any exercise of unlimited power, be it by an individual despot or a political majority, is bound to end in disaster.

An Unhinged Democracy in America by Ian Buruma - Project Syndicate


With the advent of splintered media where truth or objectivity no longer is a constraining issue, this is getting scary. 

Since its inception in 1996, the Drudge Report has been a home to conservatives who feel disenfranchised by traditional media. Drudge has marketed his website as a news destination not controlled by corporate interests or politicians. And he has continued to have great success. Last week, SimilarWeb, an analytics firm, ranked the Drudge Report as the third-most-trafficked media publisher in the US for June 2016. The website amassed 1.2 billion combined page views for the month — all with hardly any traffic coming from social-media channels.

Matt Drudge is the man who could have stopped Donald Trump - Business Insider

Countries with highly partisan media like Turkey and Russia can remain formal democracy, in the sense that they have elections, but whipped up by these media, majorities become rather intolerant.

Of course, the big difference in the US is that this isn't controlled from the levers of state power, as it is in Turkey or Russia, but a self-selection. But the end result might be similar, a large part of the population impervious to alternative views.