[...] statute law initiatives [...]
When you first used the phrase "Divine Right of Crowds" you immediately explained in parentheses that you meant "human rights" or something similar. Now you seem to be talking about democracy instead. The two aren't the same, though probably approval of one is correlated with approval of the other.
Anyway, "crowds" in the literal sense still aren't involved (it needs N people to get something voted on, but that doesn't require them to be colocated or to know one another or anything else crowd-like other than sheer numbers; and if you're now using "Divine Right of Crowds" to mean "a political system that tries to favour outcomes preferred by more people rather than fewer" then, again, I suggest that you're picking terminology simply to make the other side look as silly as possible.
Speaking of dubious origins: [...]
It is possible that those words from the Declaration of Independence show that in the 18th century people believed in something like a "Divine Right of Crowds". (It's not entirely obvious, though. Perhaps they actually just believed in a Right of Crowds and thought what they said would sound better if they included "created" and "by their Creator"; compare the mention of a Creator at the end of some editions of the Origin of Species, or Einstein's "God does not play dice".)
But that doesn't mean that people who now favour democracy, or human rights, or independence of the US from the UK, have to believe (or commonly do believe) that those things are divinely ordained. Similarly, there are people now who want kings without believing in a Divine Right of Kings, and pretending that they do would be a shabby rhetorical trick.
[...] incompatibility of typical intuitions [...] with what (the most popular flavors of) utilitarianism seems to indicate [...]
Yup, there are indeed such incompatibilities (though I think one could make a reasonable argument that, given human nature, overall utility is likely to be higher in a society where people care more about themselves and those closer to them than in one where they truly care equally about everyone. Surely not nearly so much more as our intuitions lead to, though.
the same sequence of backpedalling
I'll take your word for it, but I'm a bit surprised: I'd have thought an appreciable fraction of LWers advocating utilitarianism would start from the position that it's an expression of their preferences rather than an objective fact about the world.
(For my part, not that it particularly matters, I do indeed care most about myself, and less about people less connected to me, physically further from me, more unlike me, etc., but I find that as I reflect more on my preferences in any given case they shift nearer to egalitarianism, though they often don't get all the way. Something like utilitarianism seems like a pretty decent approximation to what I'd want in law.)
am I mind-killed [...]?
I can't tell, obviously, but I do tend to think that things like switching ground without noticing ("human rights" --> democracy) and insisting on using question-begging language ("Divine Right of Crowds") are often signs of someone not thinking as clearly as they might be.
Related to: Privileging the Hypothesis
-- Paul Graham
-- Doug Henwood
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Here are some political questions that seem to commonly get discussed in US media: should gay marriage be legal? Should Congress pass stricter gun control laws? Should immigration policy be tightened or relaxed?
These are all examples of what I'll call privileged questions (if there's an existing term for this, let me know): questions that someone has unjustifiably brought to your attention in the same way that a privileged hypothesis unjustifiably gets brought to your attention. The questions above are probably not the most important questions we could be answering right now, even in politics (I'd guess that the economy is more important). Outside of politics, many LWers probably think "what can we do about existential risks?" is one of the most important questions to answer, or possibly "how do we optimize charity?"
Why has the media privileged these questions? I'd guess that the media is incentivized to ask whatever questions will get them the most views. That's a very different goal from asking the most important questions, and is one reason to stop paying attention to the media.
The problem with privileged questions is that you only have so much attention to spare. Attention paid to a question that has been privileged funges against attention you could be paying to better questions. Even worse, it may not feel from the inside like anything is wrong: you can apply all of the epistemic rationality in the world to answering a question like "should Congress pass stricter gun control laws?" and never once ask yourself where that question came from and whether there are better questions you could be answering instead.
I suspect this is a problem in academia too. Richard Hamming once gave a talk in which he related the following story:
Academics answer questions that have been privileged in various ways: perhaps the questions their advisor was interested in, or the questions they'll most easily be able to publish papers on. Neither of these are necessarily well-correlated with the most important questions.
So far I've found one tool that helps combat the worst privileged questions, which is to ask the following counter-question:
What do I plan on doing with an answer to this question?
With the worst privileged questions I frequently find that the answer is "nothing," sometimes with the follow-up answer "signaling?" That's a bad sign. (Edit: but "nothing" is different from "I'm just curious," say in the context of an interesting mathematical or scientific question that isn't motivated by a practical concern. Intellectual curiosity can be a useful heuristic.)
(I've also found the above counter-question generally useful for dealing with questions. For example, it's one way to notice when a question should be dissolved, and asked of someone else it's one way to help both of you clarify what they actually want to know.)