One (very) political blogger I like to read goes by the name Michael J. Smith at a blog entitled Stop Me Before I Vote Again. I'm not sure if his name is a pseudonym or his real name, and one thing is certain: I often don't agree with him. But he has a very biting and incisive style, he is a stunningly good writer, and is a genuine radical. He was offering up a paean to the recently deceased Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and made the following observation:
"Democracy, on any informed understanding of the term, is the negation of ‘rights’. Democracy means that the people rule. They give rights, and they take them away, as their good sovereign pleasure dictates. If you’re really into ‘rights’, you have no use for democracy; and vice versa." – [from blog post here].
I have been trying to wrap my mind around what this means, but my gut feeling is that he is, in fact, on to something important. There is most definitely a tension (not to use a stronger term like dilemma or – god forbid – dialectic) between the field of discourse we call "democracy" and that which we call "human rights." Perhaps if I was better read in Marxism I'd find his remark to be a truism (in that context, anyway), but I think it's more valuable to remove it from that probable origin and confront it head-on, without so much theoretical baggage.
Democracy, at least in the modern, globalist, bourgeois conception prevalent today, is clearly at odds with the "rights" of minorities within democracies, and at odds with the rights of everyone excluded from given "democratic" polities – cf. the US government's attitude, on evidence, toward the rights of Pakistanis living in tribal areas, or toward Mexicans on the wrong side of the border who have failed to jump through previously established bureaucratic hoops. Et cetera.