Calling the majority tyrannous and assuming fringe interests to be naturally benevolent reeks of an agenda.
Please don’t insinuate bad intent where there needn’t be any.
An enlightened millionaire minority, by the looks of it.
It more often refers to settings where a majority and a minority have conflicting interests, and in which the majority is inclined exploit the minority in ways where the damage endured by the exploited far outweighs the benefit to the beneficiaries. The phrase has been uttered: "Democracy can be like two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner."
EG:
- A majority of city-dwellers will vote to destroy the homes of the forest people to improve the development of their cities, however slightly.
- A majority of old people will vote to tax the young more heavily to achieve a transfer of wealth, even though the gains of each beneficiary is smaller than the loss of each loser
- That same majority of old people, finding that their preferences in nearly every domain are different from those of the young, might vote to raise the voting age.
- ...Look beyond the surface level. If you can't trust the majority to make the right decisions, who do you trust to do so? The only reason to bring up the tyranny of the majority is to imply that another (smaller) group could do it better.
I'm not saying it is a good idea overall. Just that while it looks unfair when just consider how the votes are purchased, things look much fairer when you consider that the money used to purchase votes is distributed evenly back into the system.
I'm not sure it would work well for the US government, but it seems like it might work very well for other organizations--for example stockholders in corporations.