Democracy, including that in the US, is an experiment in the people ruling, and it is still not clear if it works. The American Experiment according to historian James McGregor Burns was that of being the first popular government in history. While one can challenge whether the elite framers who were slaveholders truly were interested in popular government, let’s assume they were. For James Madison, perhaps the principal architect of the Constitution and one of the authors of the Federalist Papers the challenge of popular government or what we call representative democracy today is to protect it from majority faction, mob rule, populism, or what others have called the tyranny of the majority. More
The post Protecting Democracy From Itself: Can the Fourteenth Amendment Save the Republic? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Schultz.