Nicola Sturgeon Quotes
Parties that win elections should form the government, not parties that lose elections.
Sturgeon, Nicola. "Scottish Leaders' Debate." BBC One Scotland, 8 Apr. 2015.
After Lincoln was elected, Southerners were threatening secession fearing that his government might try and do what they had promised to do in the campaign—and that meant restricting slavery in the new territories of the nation. The Southern logic was that because the slaves were counted in the census for purposes of apportioning congressmen, the smaller slave states have had an artificial overrepresentation so that the Southern States could block most efforts to limit, regulate, or abolish slavery. However, if all the new territories entered the Union as non slave states, the slave states would lose their parity in Congress. Further, it would be easier to get the states to approve Constitutional Amendments to abolish slavery in the slave states. They saw the slavery issue in the new territories to be the beginning of the end for slavery in the U. S. So they wanted to intimidate the new government into not implementing their campaign promises.
A major problem of new and emerging democracies is that many people believe that majority rule per se is democracy. In Egypt for example, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood won the election. They then assumed that they had the right to do anything including exempting the government from judicial review or deciding the role of women in society or denying freedom of religion to non-Muslim citizens. Democracy is not a serial autocracy with each new autocrat being selected by a free and fair election.
This quotation illustrates the "winner take all" conceopt of many political cultures that call themselves and think of theselves as a democracy. But a true democracy does not allow a tyranny of the majority--especially a very narrow minority.
Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon is a Scottish politician serving as First Minister of Scotland and Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) since 2014. She has been a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) since 1999, first as an additional member for the Glasgow electoral region, and as the member for Glasgow Southside (formerly Glasgow Govan) from 2007.
