I don't agree with everything Roger Scruton says in this piece on the "tyranny of the majority." (Democracy doesn't seem to be doing so well in Europe these days, but I'm pretty sure the problem isn't that it is insufficiently tempered by "monarchical pomp," for example.) He really has a point here though:
A democracy depends upon a durable constitution, which will filter out extremist passions and reconcile conflicting interests. And a democracy is stable only if people are prepared to accept an outcome for which they did not vote. It takes a lot of history to establish a durable democratic constitution, and a lot more to produce the political culture that enables people to accept being governed by their opponents. Roman law, Christian institutions, the mediaeval doctrine of Estates and the Enlightenment ideal of free citizenship all belong to the pre-history of democratic government as we know it. That pre-history has not occurred outside Europe and its diaspora, which is why we should not be surprised if democracy has seldom taken root elsewhere.
We should be a little more surprised that democratic procedure is giving way to autocratic fiat in so many areas of our own national government — yet more surprised that we, the British people, seem so unable or unwilling to resist the change. I doubt that the ordinary British subject in 1945, having lived through a war in which we had risked everything and suffered much, could have believed that, half a century later, most of our laws would be imposed on us by unelected bureaucrats in Belgium — the country that had done least to defend itself against Hitler. I am certain that no British subject of that generation would have believed that our national weights and measures would be ruled illegal by foreigners, and the metric system imposed in their stead, without so much as a debate in Parliament. And had it been suggested then, as it is suggested now, that a British subject might be sent for trial in a foreign court, for the ill-defined and ideologically motivated offence of ‘racism and xenophobia’, itself not a crime in English law, by a foreign police force granted diplomatic immunity in our country, the first reaction would have been ‘Why on earth did we fight this war?’ Yet a whole section of our political and opinion-forming class seems to endorse these changes and to be prepared to pour scorn on those who resist them.