How Democracy Can Destroy a Republic

The Founders saw the danger of ‘mob passion’ long before America existed.

Democracy is one of the few ideas in modern politics that almost no one questions. We celebrate it, export it, and often speak of it as though more democracy is always better.

The Founding Fathers would have disagreed.

Not because they opposed liberty or self-government. They had just fought a revolution to secure both. But they also believed something that has largely disappeared from modern political discourse: unchecked democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

It now appears that those seeds may have taken root.

James Madison called it “the violence of faction.” Alexander Hamilton warned against “the passions of the people.” George Washington feared political parties would replace independent judgment with tribal loyalty.

None of them believed that simple majority rule was enough to preserve freedom. In fact, they believed it was one of the greatest threats to it.

That is why the United States was never designed to be a pure democracy. It was deliberately built as a constitutional republic, filled with layers of representation, deliberation, and institutional safeguards intended to slow popular…