When one hears today about threats posed by the duly-elected Trump administration to “our Democracy,” one gets the distinct impression that “our Democracy” means the political program of the Democratic Party, whether supported by a majority or minority of the American people. This impression is reinforced by Democrats cheering the unelected district court judges who are massively resisting the policies of a popularly-elected president by issuing restraining orders, or booing the Supreme Court’s returning abortion policy to state legislatures. This “la démocratie, c’est nous” attitude constitutes a return to the Democratic Party’s roots.            

When Martin Van Buren first organized a party to promote the election of Andrew Jackson, and succeed Jefferson’s Republican Party, it was often referred to as “the Democracy.”  As historians Daniel Peart and Adam I.J. Smith have observed, “‘the Democracy,’ as the party was known to friends and enemies alike, represented the singular embodiment of the sovereign people....” Historian Gerald Leonard has noted how this conception of popular sovereignty was Rousseauian. Van Buren “seems to have conceived of the democracy almost as a unified body with a single true will.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the general will posits that legitimate authority derives from the collective interest, embodied in the sovereign will of the people as a whole—not from factions or elites. Jacksonian Democrats consciously cast “the Democracy” as the party rooted in popular sovereignty and the institutional counterweight to an entrenched “aristocracy.” The Democratic Party self-conception as the voice of “the people” mirrored Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and factional self-interest.

In their notorious Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, Democrats repealed the Missouri Compromise’s ban on slavery, and substituted their conception of majoritarian “popular sovereignty.” A majority of the settlers in each territory would now decide whether slavery would be legal, in the words of the Act: “leaving the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.” In their 1856 platform, they defended the Act as “acting through the legally and fairly expressed will of a majority of actual residents.”

Van Buren’s Rousseauian conception of democracy was new for Americans. At the Founding, “democracy” —like “demagogue”—was a term of opprobrium referring to majority rule, and even to mob rule. Edmund Randolph, a delegate from Virginia, told the other delegates that “the general object” of the Philadelphia convention “was to provide a cure for the evils under which the U.S. laboured,” and that “in tracing these evils to their origin every man found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” He was not alone. Similar views were expressed by Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts), Roger Sherman (Connecticut), Gouverneur Morris (New York) and George Mason (Virginia).

In his essay, “The Vices of the Political System of the United States,” James Madison explained the problem with majoritarian democracy: “Place three individuals in a situation wherein the interest of each depends on the voice of the others, and give to two of them an interest opposed to the rights of the third? Will the latter be secure? The prudence of every man would shun the danger.” Likewise, will “two thousand in a like situation be less likely to encroach on the rights of the one thousand?” When the Jeffersonians arose to oppose the Federalists, they adopted the label “Republican” to describe their party; it was their Federalist critics who referred to them pejoratively as “democrats”—just as they had successfully labeled opponents of the Constitution “Antifederalists.”

The Constitution the Founders crafted was “republican” not democratic. Although it included democratic elements like the House of Representatives to protect the rights of the majority and prevent minority rule, the Constitution as a whole embodied the “agency theory” of popular sovereignty reflected in the Declaration of Independence. On this view, governments are not tasked with legislating the general “will of the people.” Instead, governments are “established among Men,” to “secure” the pre-existing natural rights that are retained by “We the People”—each and every one of us. Respecting these individual rights is an indispensable means to actually achieving the common good.           

Nor did the transformative Reconstruction amendments proposed by the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil War alter the undemocratic nature of our republican Constitution. After abolishing slavery, Republicans then protected the individual “privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens from being abridged by the majority will of their own state legislatures.

When I make observations like these, self-identified “Democrats” often hasten to insist that they too reject majoritarianism. They too believe in protecting the rights of the minority. They favor a “constitutional democracy.” That sounds good, but the sentiment does not last long. These same Democrats easily revert to a majoritarian conception of democracy when any of the undemocratic components of our republican Constitution obstruct their favored policies.

Ask Democrats about the composition of the Senate, the operation of the Electoral College, the Senate filibuster when they hold the majority (but not when they don’t), or the Supreme Court when it rules in a way they dislike. They will condemn all these as “undemocratic” as Sanford Levinson did in his book, Our Undemocratic Constitution. (I wrote Our Republican Constitution: Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People as my reply.) Since January 2025, Democrats have also become concerned with the “undemocratic” exercise of executive power, pursuant to broadly-worded statutes, that previously did not bother them.

Context is everything. Given the way “our Democracy” is being invoked today and by whom, it is incumbent on an academic initiative calling itself “The Democracy Project,” to specify what exactly it means by “democracy” and “democratic.” If it is not majoritarian governance, just what is it? Does its mission statement’s reference to “the challenges facing American democracy" include “resistance” to the outcome of elections by “career” administrative bureaucrats or by district court judges? Without telling us what it means by “democracy,” the timing of the Democracy Project’s formation may be viewed merely as a “project” to provide intellectual cover for Democratic opposition to the duly-elected Trump Administration and Republican majorities in Congress. Then, when they regain power, Democrats will once again wrap themselves in the mantle of the “will of the people” and decry the counter-majoritarian elements of our republican Constitution.