Direct democracy not only represents a threat to freedom, but it is a political order that rejects hierarchies both natural and spiritual. //

“American democracy is cracking,” warns Washington Post Chief Correspondent Dan Balz in a recent column that presents some ideas to repair it. His suggestions include, among other things, proportional representation, diminishing the power of the Senate, and eliminating the Electoral College. What these three suggestions have in common is a desire to remove any intermediary institutions between the will of the people and government action — otherwise known as “direct” democracy. //

The framers of our Constitution felt quite strongly that direct democracy was something to avoid. In Federalist 10, for example, the Father of the Constitution James Madison warned of “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority” on a government, or what has come to be called the “tyranny of the majority,” in which a majority of the population exerts great coercive power over minority factions. //

A generation after that founding generation, visiting French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville authored an extended survey of American politics and culture, Democracy in America. Tocqueville perceived that the American political system was created to resist the tyranny of the majority, “which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not upon rightness or excellence.” //

Yet such a deliberative process of testing is slow and uneven. And we Americans are often eager for speedy solutions. Political theorists, journalists, and ordinary citizens throughout American history have been frustrated by the Constitution’s manifold methods of distributing power to deter the tyranny of the majority. If a majority of the nation’s populace wants something, they posit, why shouldn’t they be able to get it? After all, as the journalist H.L. Mencken wryly commented, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Such demands especially increase at times of heightened political gridlock in which the country obviously has a particular problem or set of problems but constitutionally mandated laws and procedures thwart attempts to resolve them. When we are all vexed with our politicians for failing to act in what we believe to be the interests of the nation (and its voters), it’s easy to be sympathetic to that line of thinking.

Yet we must beware of this temptation, which reflects what conservative political theorist Russell Kirk calls a manifestation of vox populi, vox dei — the voice of the people is the voice of God. In other words, as long as they constitute a majority, whatever the people want becomes the law of the land. //

As that great French observer of American politics Alexis de Tocqueville observed: “If ever freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the … majority driving minorities to desperation…”

Let’s do everything we can to avoid that scenario.