“The People,” Alexander Hamilton once remarked, “are a great beast.” His classically educated contemporaries did not regard sentiments like these as normative judgments but as statements of fact. What today comes off as sneering elitist contempt for the public was once viewed as a proper fear of collective tyranny. The government the Founders formed, the Constitution they ratified, and the codes of conduct they endorsed are thus replete with counter-majoritarian checks on the will of the demos.
The Founding generation's restraints on the popular will have eroded over time, but their ideals have remained largely intact. Among the values we've preserved is an egalitarian understanding that the people are sovereign—the ultimate arbiters of political contests—but “the people themselves” do not govern. Throughout the Federalist Papers, the Constitution's framers warn of the reptilian nature of people in a crowd. They are prone to “the tyranny of their own passions” and possessed of an “incapacity for regular deliberation.” As James Madison warned, even if every Athenian were as wise as Socrates, “every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
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