Mob Rule

The failure mode of democratic legitimacy: what happens when Voice of the People sheds restraint and popular will becomes raw majority coercion. In Kyle’s reading, mob rule is the dark twin of “the voice of the people” — the same principle that grounds democratic authority is also “democracy’s greatest vulnerability to mob rule and the tyranny of the uninformed majority.” Voice of the People

The anchoring case is the Mormon expulsions in Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling, read as an instance where “in the name of democracy” a majority deprived a minority of its democratic rights — the through-line tying “vox populi is the vox Dei” to its abuse. The structural counterweight Kyle keeps returning to is an Educated Electorate: the precondition that keeps popular will from collapsing into mob rule.

Context: “Mob rule” (ochlocracy) is the classical political-theory label for governance by the unchecked mob — distinct from lawful democracy — and is the danger the U.S. founders sought to temper through representative institutions and minority-rights protections (the “tyranny of the majority” Tocqueville and Madison warned against).

Where this appears

• Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling — the church-vs-democracy through-line; Mormon expulsions read as a majority stripping a minority’s democratic rights “in the name of democracy.”
• Voice of the People — names mob rule as the failure mode when popular will sheds restraint, with Educated Electorate as the structural check against it.