Majority rule and the rights of the minority

Most progressives and many liberals have problems with the filibuster and with rights of states-- they seem to think the representation we have is unbalanced and that the majority should be able to make decisions for everyone, therefore Senate representation should be apportioned according to population and other factors rather than the limit of two per state. Many liberals and progressives have complained that the Democrat majority in government hasn't completely had its way. This way of thinking is related to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's ideas of majority rule, who thought that the majority would most likely be right and that if it was wrong, society would have to live with the consequences. Rousseau also held that -

"Whoever refuses to obey the general will must be constrained to do so...which only means that he will be forced to be free."

Rousseau felt that freedom is what the majority claimed it to be. Of course, I'm sure this freedom loving soul always imagined the majority to be consistent with his ideas. It's not difficult to convince most people whose political party is in power that majority rule is the way to go -- it seems fair enough, right? If more people want the country to go in a particular direction, then who has the right to resist the majority? The Democrats won the presidency, the House and the Senate, so, to any reasonable liberal or progressive this is evidence the majority favors the progressive agenda, and the Republicans should not have the ability to block the agenda. Surely these liberals and progressives have thought beyond this simple piece of logic and understand the principles on which this country was founded -- surely they understand the rights of the minority -- they understood the rights of blacks when the majority of the country wanted segregration -- they understand the rights of gays against majority opinion -- so the only logical explanation is they propose violating the rights of minorities they don't like.

To put it another way -- they understand the rights of the minority but are willing to violate their rights as long as they can force their values on everyone, because they know people will be better off -- they have to force the minority to be free. There are lots of problems with this mindset, one being that their views are not the majority views, they just happened to get more votes from the people who actually voted, but we'll bypass that glaring fact for a minute. Even if their views are the majority views, there's still the problem of a Constitution which sets limits on what a majority can do. And this is the major point -- many liberals and progressives are proposing to ignore the Consititution in order to implement their policies. It's not a matter of state rights or federal power, it's a matter of what the Constitution allows or doesn't allow.

This is tryanny pure and simple. In the comment section here on my post about E.D. Kain's grand announcement he is not a conservative, he criticized me for making things too black and white. Well, you can try to find the gray in this issue, and I'm sure many pragmatists can find enough gray to paint several government buildings, but if you want majority rule, you want tyranny -- it's that black and white. And if these progressives and liberals were not so delusionally sure that they will control of the majority going forward, they would realize that giving the government that much power will not be good for them when Republicans gain full control of government, which might be sooner than anyone has thought possible. Principles do matter.