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See also Hillsdale College's Constitution 101, Part 3 “The Problem of Majority Tyranny.” Registration required.

Overview

America was governed under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1789. Unable to redress the problem of “majority tyranny,” the Articles were abandoned in favor of the Constitution, which created a “more perfect union.”

The creation in the Constitution of “a more perfect union” did not mean that the union—or its people—would get more and more perfect with time. Rather, this phrase meant simply that the Constitution marked an improvement over the Articles of Confederation.

The majority tyranny that prevailed under the Articles meant that instead of strong but limited government, the nation labored under weak and ineffectual government.

The Founding Fathers featured in this week’s readings—George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson—were united in their fear that America’s future under the Articles of Confederation would be short-lived. The Articles, they agreed, not only failed to solve the problem of majority tyranny, but in fact made that problem worse.

In Federalist 10, Madison outlines how the problem of majority tyranny is best solved by enlarging the republic. Factions, or groups acting adversely to the rights of citizens and the interests of the community, can thereby be multiplied, and in their multiplicity counterbalance the pernicious effects they produce. This solution is realistic but not cynical, for it is based on the idea that even though human beings are imperfect, they are still capable of self-government.

To PF, thank you for at least reading my post. Its an increasingly rare habit at FR. In Federalist 62 Madison described the "double security" to our freedom that a Senate of the States provides.

Because of the 17th Amendment, the federal government immediately became national. We haven't had a federal government for 100 hundred years. As the Anti-Federalists of 1787-1788 feared, it soon burst beyond its enumerated powers, subsumed those retained by the people and the States, and by 2013 became a consolidated government that determined the limits of its own powers. As history has demonstrated, rival governments in the States will not be tolerated as contenders for power, but have been relegated to being administrators of national Utopian schemes.

If republican freedom is to be restored, the 17th must go.