The Federalist Papers have a few good ideas on this. Next best thing to finding a philosopher king is to try to create lots of warring interest groups that pre

The Federalist Papers have a few good ideas on this. Next best thing to finding a philosopher king is to try to create lots of warring interest groups that prevent each other from doing much at all. Or maybe make everything take supermajorities... In a small setting like a school district, it's not clear there's any way to protect the rights of a minor subset of the population without simply granting them disproportionate power and making the other subset of the population the maligned group. If group A wants x, and group B wants y, then you can either solve it by majoritarian or anti-majoritarian rules. Depending on the issue, I want majorities to decide in some cases, and not on others. I don't feel like issues of slavery, for example, are appropriate democratic questions. You could put a special court on top of the structure with the goal of looking out a sort of "Rawlsian fairness," trying to seek the outcome that both parties would agree to if they were both spending some time in each others' shoes. I'll admit I don't know what the fair resolution should be in a school district where a majority of parents prefer no school taxes and no public schools, just that people seem to get pretty unfairly hurt as this one unfolded.