The Genius of America by Eric Lane Page B

good and private rights against the danger” of faction and self interest, “and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government.” If the delegates failed, Franklin wrote to Jefferson, “it must do harm as it will show that we have not wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves; and will strengthen the opinion of some political writers that popular government cannot long support themselves.” “Wise measures,” wrote Washington, were required, “to avert the consequences [tyranny] we have but too much reason to apprehend.”
    Wise measures would require wise men able and willing to create a new model of government that would answer two fundamental questions: How could liberty be maintained without the high level of public virtue and simple government they had earlier agreed were necessary? How could a democracy protect individual liberty if a majority wanted to impinge on it?
    Madison’s answer was a new system that limited what had been previously considered the hallmark of democracy, the will of the majority. The conduct of state governments since the Revolution had convinced them that their commitment to simple government had been, well, simplistic. The will of the majority, the framers now understood, did not automatically produce the common good. Recent history had proven to them that a government too susceptible to the majority voice of its citizens could not protect liberty. “There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore more needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong,” Madison wrote to James Monroe. For the interest of the majority, Madison added, was the “immediate augmentation of property and wealth,” and its realization would compel “the majority in every community to despoil and enslave the minority of individuals; and in a federal community to make a similar sacrifice of the minority of component States.”
    The fear in 1787 was not the potential for despotism by the few, although that remained a concern, but, paradoxically, despotism by the many and particularly by majorities. “It is much more to be dreaded that the few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.”
    Most Americans would be surprised to be told that at the heart of the invention of our country was a rejection of pure majority rule as the basis for democracy. We so often turn to the majority to answer our questions, from school yard votes on what games to play to Supreme Court decision making. We are brought up on the phrase majority rules . But this is not how our government works or was intended to by Madison and the framers. Its purpose is to stop or at least slow actions that were supported by merely a majority. It does so by dividing political power among the various branches of government and allowing one to check the other in ways we will later describe.
    In 1880, Lincoln Steffens, a radical, muckraking journalist, was so shocked to discover what he viewed as the antidemocratic motives of the framers that he promised to write a “true history of the making of the American Constitution.” He never did, which is too bad. It would have certainly been an interesting book. You can disagree with the framers, as Steffens did, or you can feel they brilliantly solved the crisis of their age. But either way it is not possible to understand our present government without understanding Madison’s and the other framers’ thinking at the convention 220 years ago.
    T HE C ONVENTION’S C ONDUCTOR
    James Madison, a delegate from Virginia, took one of the best seats in the house for the convention. “I chose a seat in front of the presiding member, with other members on my right and left hands. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted in terms legible and in abbreviations and marks