By Gary M. Galles writing for Fee Stories
America was never meant to be run by popular opinion.
In his book "Liberty in Peril," Randall Holcombe challenges the presumption that liberty and democracy are complementary
Holcombe main point is about the role of government, he says,
The role of government as [America’s founders] saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself. So they designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution. This book describes how the fundamental principle underlying American government has been transformed from protecting individual liberty to carrying out the will of the people, as revealed by a democratic decision-making process.