Americans today are filled with angst about the state of “our democracy.” A March 2024 Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service poll found that 81 percent of Americans believe democracy in the United States is threatened. A November 2025 survey conducted by the Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute found that “84% say democracy is either in crisis or facing serious challenges.”

　　There can be little argument that governance in the United States, particularly at the national level, faces serious challenges of both function and public confidence.But the solution is not, as partisans across the political spectrum often proclaim, greater deference to the will of the majority. Rather, the solution is to regain an understanding of the foundational principle of popular sovereignty on which the nation was founded and to restore and reinvigorate the limited democracy established in the United States Constitution.

　　The Framers of the Constitution understood from experience the hazards of majority rule.They recognized that the people might, on occasion, elect an authoritarian. George Mason of Virginia reminded his fellow delegates at the 1787 constitutional convention in Philadelphia that “notwithstanding the superiority of the Republican form [of government] over every other, it had its evils.” Chief among them was the danger of the majority oppressing the minority, and the mischievous influence of demagogues.”Publius wrote in Federalist #10 that “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”

　　The Framers’ solution to the hazards of majority rule—of pure democracy—was a limited democracy. They proposed a Constitution with numerous constraints on popular rule: the separation of powers between legislative, executive and judicial functions; a federal system in which powers are divided between a national and state governments; a bicameral legislature in which states, without regard for population are equally represented in one branch with representation by population in the other; indirect election of the president; executive veto of legislation; and judicial review. The Constitution they proposed was ratified not by popular vote but by a minimum of nine of the thirteen states.

　　Forty years later, James Kent, Chancellor of New York, Columbia University professor of law, and a leading commentator on the United States Constitution, reminded his fellow citizens of the hazards of popular governance. “The danger to be apprehended … in governments resting in all their parts on universal suffrage,” wrote Kent, “is the spirit of faction, and the influence of active, ambitious, reckless and unprincipled demagogues, combining, controlling, and abusing the popular voice for their own selfish purposes.”

　　Today, most Americans of every political persuasion appear ignorant of the Founders’ insights on human nature, the politics of partisan faction, and the hazards of direct democracy. While partisans on the left and the right have starkly different understandings of the public good, they tend to agree that majority rule is the essence of American democracy. “Majority rules” is the default explanation for disgruntled election losers. For the victors, it justifies winner-takes-all governance. For the losers, it invites undivided resolve to prevail in the next election.

　　In the White House, the United States has gone from Obama to Trump to Biden and back to Trump, with federal policies lurching from one extreme to another, all in the name of majority rule. As President Obama famously said to Republicans objecting to his 2009 stimulus package: “I won.” Or as President Trump declared after his 2024 victory: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”

　　Obama won with 52.9 percent of the vote in 2008. Trump won with 49.8 percent of the vote in 2024. Claims that even a narrow electoral victory (with only a plurality in Trump’s case) is all the victor needs to justify transformative policy initiatives can come only from a belief that “our democracy” is nothing more complicated than majority rule. Never mind that 60 million voters preferred someone other than Obama in 2008 and 75 million voters preferred someone other than Trump in 2024. In a nation founded on the principle of popular sovereignty, humility, not hubris, is the appropriate response when nearly half of the voters stand in opposition. But popular sovereignty is also widely misunderstood.

　　It is commonplace for politicians to assert that “the People” demand this or “the People” demand that. These mantras are meant to convey that, as President Trump might say, everyone agrees that there is no other defensible course to pursue. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, “the majority [in America] lives in perpetual self-adoration.” But in every democracy there are always alternatives favored by a significant portion of the population. There is no principled reason that some of the people or their elected representatives should be allowed to speak for and impose laws on all the people. So why do democracies everywhere resort to majority rule?

　　For the American Founders, “majority rules” was a pragmatic, not a principled basis for public action. The principle guiding the Founders was popular sovereignty derived from the more fundamental principle of individual sovereignty. The Founders of the American republic believed that every individual, not a king nor a majority of one’s fellow citizens, ought to be in control of and responsible for his or her life. That is the ideal expressed in the Declaration of Independence: “that all Men are created equal … with unalienable Rights … [to be secured by governments] deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”

　　The democracy of the US Constitution is designed to protect liberty and prevent tyranny by making it difficult for a minority or a majority to abuse the powers of government.

　　The American Founders were pragmatic idealists. They recognized that the consent of the governed could not mean that every sovereign individual must consent. They understood, as George Washington wrote in transmitting the proposed constitution to Congress, that “it is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all: Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.” The Founders recognized that public actions limiting the exercise of individual liberty are sometimes necessary to the broader preservation of individual liberties and the provision of what economists call public goods.

　　For government to take such necessary actions, it must have a legitimacy based on the consent of the governed.Understanding that unanimity is not a viable rule for public decisions, the challenge for the Founding generation was to create such a government while avoiding a tyranny of the majority. As Publius wrote in Federalist #10: “To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of … [majority] faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”

　　When politicians and political factions claim that they represent the People, that the People prefer a particular course of public action, or that the People oppose a different course of action, who are the people they purport to speak for, and how is their will to be known? Today, the People is the aggregation of nearly 350 million individuals living in the United States, or 40 million people residing in California, or 680,000 inhabitants of Boston, or the 15 souls who call Two Dot, Montana, home. Perhaps in Two Dot, those who constitute the People will occasionally speak with one voice on a matter of public concern, but in communities of any size there will be differences of opinion.

　　Absent unanimity, actions taken in the name of the People will compromise the sovereignty (liberty) of some individuals to the preferences of others. That those favoring a particular public action constitute a majority in no way changes the imposition on those in the minority. The minority accepts the will of the majority with the understanding that constraints are necessary to the perpetuation of liberty and the expectation that on other matters they will likely be in the majority—that there will be what, in the 1922 case of Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called “an average reciprocity of advantage.”

　　Because public action is necessary to the preservation of individual liberty and the achievement of public goods, there must be an agreed-upon method for the resolution of disagreements and the setting of public policy. Unanimity would be most consistent with the individual sovereignty on which the principle of popular sovereignty is founded, but for the reasons we value individual sovereignty, unanimity is seldom realized except, perhaps, in the smallest of communities like Two Dot.

　　With little discussion or debate and only a few exceptions, the Framers accepted majority rule. The exceptions are in ratification and amendment of the Constitution, Congressional overriding of presidential vetoes, and impeachment. In these circumstances, a super-majority of states or elected representatives is required. Otherwise, the Framers assumed that majority rule would be the method for public decisions at all levels of government. It was accepted as the default method not on principle but because, as James Madison observed in his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, “no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority.”

　　That the Framers did not see majority rule as the incontrovertible measure of the public good is evident from the many constraints on majoritarian democracy they instituted in the Constitution. As noted above, those constraints include the separation of powers with judicial review and executive veto, federalism with a national government of only enumerated powers, bicameralism with a senate in which states of widely varying populations have equal representation, impeachment, and a unique process for election of the president that has come to be called the electoral college.

　　All of these limits on majority rule were instituted because the Framers understood from experience that majorities can and do abuse their powers and sometimes elect demagogues. The founding generation aspired to a virtuous population of informed citizens who would be as concerned for their fellow citizens and the public good as for their own interests. But they understood human nature and did their best to, in Madison’s words, write a Constitution in which “ambition … [is] made to counter ambition.”

　　American democracy may be threatened, but if so, the greater hazard lies in the pervasive belief that the majority is entitled to do as it pleases without regard for the rights and interests of others. When the majority rules without constraint, Congress abandons compromise, judicial invalidation of liberty-infringing legislation becomes abuse of judicial power, the president claims unlimited authority as if he were a king, dissent becomes un-American, and everything can be turned upside down at the next election.

　　The democracy of the US Constitution is not one of simple majority rule. Rather, it is designed to protect liberty and prevent tyranny by making it difficult for a minority or a majority to abuse the powers of government. Survival of American democracy depends not on more democracy, but on respecting and revitalizing the several counter-majoritarian institutions proposed in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and ratified by the 13 original states.