The Founding Fathers on Populism
A Republic, If You Can Keep It (From the Mob)
The Founding Fathers on Populism
Populism is not new, and it is certainly not radical or innovative. It is one of the oldest political temptations in human history - older than modern ideology, older than mass democracy, older even than the nation-state. Wherever human beings have gathered in large numbers, populism has appeared, promising easy answers, moral clarity without discipline, and power without restraint. Athens learned this lesson the hard way. Rome learned it more slowly, and at far greater cost. Every civilization that allows passion to outrun reason eventually relearns it the same way.
What makes populism dangerous is not its energy, but its confusion. It mistakes intensity for wisdom, volume for legitimacy, and majority feeling for moral authority. It frames politics not as a system of ordered liberty, but as a permanent emotional referendum — a struggle between “the people” and whatever institution dares to slow them down. Courts, constitutions, traditions, and procedures are treated not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Anything that resists immediate desire is labeled corrupt.
Most Americans feel that something is at stake when populism rises, but few can articulate exactly why. The problem is not that populism speaks to real grievances — it often does. The problem is that it offers a solution that erodes the very structure required to preserve liberty over time. Populism is not simply a rhetorical style or a campaign strategy. It is a structural threat to republican government, because it replaces law with mood and restraint with momentum.
The Founding generation understood this with a clarity that should embarrass us today. They had studied history closely enough to know that free societies do not collapse all at once. They collapse when people decide that restraint is weakness and patience is betrayal. To understand why they built the system they did — and why they feared populism as much as tyranny — we have to begin with the basics.
What Exactly Is Populism?
Populism is not an ideology in the traditional sense. It has no coherent doctrine, no stable theory of governance, no enduring philosophy of human nature or political order. It is better understood as a political posture — a moral narrative imposed onto power. At its core, populism offers a simplified story about who should rule and why complexity itself is suspect.
It divides the world into two hostile camps:
“The pure people”
“The corrupt elite”
On one side stand “the pure people,” imagined as morally pure, hard-working, authentic, and perpetually betrayed (oppressed). On the other stands “the corrupt elite,” portrayed as corrupt, detached, self-serving, and fundamentally illegitimate (oppressor). The categories are intentionally vague, elastic enough to absorb anyone who disagrees and righteous enough to justify almost any action taken in the people’s name. And do you notice how it has just a tinge of Marxist bullshit peppered in?
Populist leaders then insert themselves into this moral drama as the sole authentic voice of the “real people.” They do not represent a constituency; they embody it. Institutions that exist to slow power down — courts, legislatures, bureaucracies, the press, central banks — are not treated as stabilizing forces or safeguards against abuse, but as enemies of the popular will. Restraint becomes sabotage. Process becomes corruption. Law becomes an inconvenience.
The demand that follows is always the same: immediate obedience to “the will of the people,” a phrase that conveniently means the will of the leader interpreting it. You’ll hear this from megalomaniacs content with referring to themselves as “the American people.” Any resistance is framed not as disagreement, but as betrayal. Opposition ceases to be legitimate; it becomes evidence of moral failure.
Populism appears across the political spectrum. On the left, it pits the people against the wealthy or powerful. On the right, it pits the people against technocrats or cultural elites. The targets change, but the structure does not, and the grammar remains identical.
Wherever populism emerges, it speaks the same language. The system is rigged. Institutions cannot be trusted. Only one voice is authentic (mine, conveniently). Tear it all down, and trust me to rebuild it. And bad actors with no principles ride that wave into power.
Why Is Populism So Seductively Attractive?
Populism thrives because it answers emotional needs that modern life leaves unmet. In a world that feels increasingly complex, impersonal, and unresponsive, many people experience politics not as representation but as abandonment. They feel talked down to, managed rather than heard, ruled rather than respected. Populism steps into that vacuum with a language that feels immediate, personal, and morally clarifying.
Its first appeal is simplification. When life feels chaotic and opaque, populism reduces the world to a story with clear roles: a villain who caused the suffering and a savior who will finally confront it. Complexity disappears. Responsibility is reassigned. The individual is recast not as a participant in a difficult system, but as a righteous victim whose instincts require no refinement.
Populism also flatters. It tells its audience that their anger is wisdom, that their resentment is insight, and that their identity is morally untainted. It validates every element of their victimhood. Doubt becomes weakness. Restraint becomes betrayal. Self-criticism is replaced with collective affirmation. In this framework, being loud feels like being right.
It promises catharsis rather than reform. Revenge instead of justice. Instead of the slow, disciplined work of institutional correction, populism offers the emotional satisfaction of rupture. It invites people to confuse destruction with renewal, to believe that tearing something down is the same as knowing how to build it back up.
Crucially, populism feeds on real failures. Financial collapse, endless wars, cultural contempt, unaccountable bureaucracy, broken borders — these are not imaginary grievances. Elite institutions did fail, repeatedly and visibly. So when someone says, “They don’t care about us,” the claim resonates because it often feels true.
Populism grows in the neglected spaces where legitimacy eroded and trust was never repaired.
The Inherent Dangers of Populism
Even observers who are sympathetic to populist energy tend to acknowledge its fatal flaws. Populism promises to return power to “the people,” but history shows that something very different happens once it gains real authority. The language of popular empowerment masks a structural reality: when you dismantle the institutions that slow politics, you do not liberate the public — you concentrate power.
Courts, legislatures, procedural norms, and checks and balances exist for a reason. They do not obstruct democracy; they civilize it. There is no question that bad actors and obstructionists with political agendas should be impeached and removed from office. Government exists to serve the people, after all. But when these mediating institutions are weakened or bypassed in the name of popular will, what emerges is not collective self-rule, but the unchecked authority of whoever claims to embody the people. The abstraction of “the people” becomes a tool, and the leader becomes its interpreter.
History repeats this pattern with unsettling consistency. Democratic Athens put Socrates to death by popular vote. Rome empowered tribunes to protect the masses and ended with Caesar. The French Revolution began with promises of liberty and equality and concluded with Robespierre, mass executions, and ultimately Napoleon. In each case, the appeal to popular righteousness justified the erosion of restraint.
The case of Robespierre is a particularly interesting anecdote in this discussion, as his political views embodied the ideas associated with a free society - the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, and the abolition of slavery. But he was cast by a populist, Napoleon, as a threat to “the people”, and was executed despite fighting for their individual rights.
Once populism governs, it tends to follow a familiar trajectory. Minority rights erode. Judicial independence is attacked. Deliberation is replaced with urgency. Loyalty is rewarded over competence. Dissent is treated as betrayal. The identity of the leader fuses with the identity of the nation.
Populism rarely concludes with democracy intact. More often, it ends the same way history has warned it would: with Caesar.
What Would the Founders Have Thought?
The men of 1787 were not naïve. They had lived through revolution, economic collapse, factional rage, and the raw pressure of mobs. They had seen how quickly popular passion could curdle into violence, and how easily righteous crowds could become instruments of coercion. Their experiences left them wary, not of the people themselves, but of unrestrained political emotion.
They disagreed sharply on policy and structure, but their constitutional design shared a common purpose: to channel popular will through restraint, deliberation, and law. The system they built was meant to temper populism, not unleash it. With that understanding, we can examine each group in turn.
The Federalists: Builders of a Guarded Republic
The Federalists — Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Jay, Morris — believed the greatest danger to liberty came not from kings, but from the passions of the people themselves. They believed that liberty depended on structure — on institutions designed to slow decision-making, filter impulse, and restrain sudden swings of popular emotion.
As a group, the Federalists believed the primary danger to republican government was not quiet governance, but volatile governance. Populism threatened to collapse the distinction between representation and rule, turning elected leaders into mere amplifiers of crowd sentiment rather than stewards of the public good.
Federalists favored indirect mechanisms — separation of powers, staggered terms, independent courts, and a strong constitutional framework — precisely to prevent any one faction, even a majority, from ruling without restraint. In their eyes, populism was not a corrective to tyranny, but a shortcut to it, because it weakened the very safeguards that allowed liberty to endure across generations.
Here are how prominent Federalists felt about populism:
James Madison
In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned that unchecked popular rule produced governments that were “unstable, unjust, and confused.” His answer was not to silence the people, but to structure their power through a large republic with layered representation — a system designed to “refine and enlarge public views” rather than simply echo them.
For Madison, deliberation was not a luxury or an obstacle. It was the necessary antidote to passion, and the only way liberty could survive sustained popular rule.
Alexander Hamilton
Hamilton held a deeply skeptical view of unfiltered democracy.
At the Constitutional Convention, he even proposed life terms for the president and senators — an elective monarchy and aristocracy — not out of affection for elites, but out of fear that demagogues could easily manipulate popular passions. He believed that political systems required weight and stability to endure.
For Hamilton, liberty could not survive on enthusiasm alone; it needed ballast — institutions strong enough to resist sudden swings of emotion and ambition.
John Adams
John Adams’s views populism were as blunt as most of his views.
“Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.”
To Adams, populism was a direct threat to liberty because he believed unchecked popular passion inevitably turned into tyranny. He was deeply skeptical of the idea that virtue could be sustained through mass sentiment alone, arguing that human nature required structure, balance, and restraint.
Adams warned that when the people ruled without mediating institutions, power would concentrate in the hands of the most ambitious and manipulative figures. He believed a stable republic depended on mixed government, strong laws, and moral discipline, not emotional unanimity, and that populist movements, however well-intentioned, tended to erode these safeguards and invite despotism under the banner of popular rule.
George Washington
Washington warned that ambitious men would “serve up inflammatory passions”, deliberately inflaming public emotion to weaken institutions and elevate themselves to power. He understood that demagogues do not serve the people; they use them.
By turning citizens into a battering ram against courts, laws, and constitutional restraints, populist leaders undermine the very structures designed to protect liberty. For Washington, the danger was not disagreement, but manipulation — the calculated use of passion to collapse the safeguards of republican government.
Gouverneur Morris
Morris wrote the final draft of the Constitution, and he feared the mob above all:
“The mob begin to think and reason — poor reptiles!”
He distrusted populism because he believed the masses were easily swayed by emotion and demagogues rather than reason and long-term interest. He argued that unchecked popular rule would degrade governance into impulse and instability, making strong constitutional barriers essential to protect liberty from the volatility of the crowd.
Harsh, yes. But the Founders had seen mobs up close — and they did not romanticize them.
The Anti-Federalists: Populism’s Ancestors — But Not Its Advocates
The Anti-Federalists feared that the Constitution would trade one distant ruler for another — replacing a far-off king with a far-off Congress. They warned, correctly, that a powerful national government could elevate a “natural aristocracy” composed of wealth, education, and ambition, insulated from the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
Their language often sounded populist. Patrick Henry’s thunderous denunciations of elite power could easily be mistaken for a modern anti-establishment rally.
But the Anti-Federalists were not advocates of pure populism, and this distinction matters. Their objections were not rooted in emotional mass rule, but in structural concern.
They feared:
centralized power
standing armies
elite capture
taxation without oversight
distant bureaucratic control
These were warnings about consolidation, not calls to tear institutions down.
At the same time, the Anti-Federalists were deeply wary of mob rule and charismatic strongmen. They did not trust plebiscites, direct democracy, or leaders who claimed to “speak for the people” while concentrating power in themselves.
Their solution was not passion, but proximity. They believed liberty survived best in small republics where representatives were close enough to be watched, questioned, and held accountable on a daily basis.
In this sense, the Anti-Federalists wanted more democracy than the Federalists, but far less volatility than modern populism. They sought local control, not mass impulse; accountability, not demagoguery; and restraint grounded in familiarity rather than emotion.
Here are a few notable examples:
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson is the most complicated of the Founders, and any attempt to place him neatly on one side of the populism debate misses his internal tension. He praised the French Revolution even as it descended into violence and ideological madness. He wrote provocatively about refreshing the “tree of liberty” with blood and placed immense faith in the judgment of the common man, sometimes to the point of romantic excess. His rhetoric could sound radical, even destabilizing.
Yet Jefferson’s actions reveal a far more restrained figure. He recoiled from Shays’ Rebellion, accepted the Constitution once the Bill of Rights was secured, and governed with a level of moderation that surprised both allies and critics. When responsible for real power, he favored continuity, stability, and gradual reform over upheaval. His instincts were democratic, but not anarchic.
More than any other Founder, federalist or anti-federalist, Jefferson seemed to understand how dangerous popular passions could be, because despite preaching often in their favor in our revolution and the French, in practice he moderated quickly and consistently.
Jefferson believed in what he called a “natural aristocracy of virtue and talents” — a leadership class formed by merit and education rather than birth or force. This is the balance he saw, a decentralized republic guided by informed citizens, not a mass movement driven by emotional intensity or a charismatic tribune claiming to embody the people nor in hereditary, authoritarian rule.
In modern terms, Jefferson would likely distrust both the unaccountable administrative elite and the populist strongman. He occupies an uneasy middle ground, invoked by both sides, yet fully claimed by neither.
Patrick Henry
Henry is often mischaracterized as a proto-populist because of his thunderous rhetoric and fierce opposition to centralized power. His speeches appealed directly to ordinary citizens, and his warnings about distant authority, elite domination, and consolidated government sound strikingly similar to modern anti-establishment language.
But this surface resemblance obscures a more disciplined view. Henry was not attacking institutions as such; he was attacking the removal of power from local accountability. His concern was not that the people were insufficiently empowered, but that government was becoming too remote to be watched, restrained, or corrected.
Henry believed liberty depended on proximity. A government close enough to the people could be resisted, corrected, and reformed without upheaval. A distant one could not. For this reason, he opposed the Constitution as drafted, warning that it would replace British overreach with domestic consolidation.
Yet Henry did not advocate mass rule, plebiscites, or charismatic leadership claiming to embody “the people.” He distrusted mobs and feared that passion untethered from law would destroy liberty as surely as tyranny.
In practice, Henry’s actions reflected this restraint. He worked through state institutions, not popular revolt. He ultimately accepted constitutional order once safeguards (Bill of Rights) were in place. Henry’s politics were fiery, but his philosophy was structural: liberty survives through local control, not populist emotion. His legacy is not mass democracy, but vigilance against distance and consolidation.
George Mason
Mason represents the most intellectually rigorous Anti-Federalist resistance to populism. Unlike Henry’s rhetorical fire, Mason’s objections were methodical and institutional. He feared centralized power not because it offended popular sentiment, but because it concentrated authority in ways that inevitably produced corruption, elite capture, and abuse. His refusal to sign the Constitution stemmed from its lack of explicit protections for individual liberty, not from hostility to constitutional government itself.
Crucially, Mason did not believe the solution was empowering mass passion. He was deeply skeptical of pure democracy and warned that unchecked popular movements could be as destructive as distant elites. Mason believed liberty required firm boundaries—clear limits on government power, protected rights, and institutional brakes capable of restraining both rulers and crowds. His answer to consolidation was not populism, but constitutionalism.
Mason’s greatest contribution was his insistence on a Bill of Rights. Rather than rallying popular anger, he sought permanent legal restraints that would protect citizens regardless of political mood. His influence shaped the first ten amendments, embedding limits on power into the structure of government itself. Mason understood that liberty cannot depend on virtuous crowds alone; it must be secured against both elite ambition and popular excess.
The similarities we see amongst the anti-Federalists are clear. These men felt deeply that centralized authority was problematic, that exchanging a far-away King for a far-away Congress was no exchange at all. But in practice, they accepted that structure was the solution, and that structure required strong local resistance against centralized federal authority and direct, articulated limitations on said authority to maintain liberty, not simply abandoning all government and institutions.
The Verdict From 1787
If the Founders were dropped into the present moment, their disagreements would reappear instantly, but so would their shared alarm.
Hamilton would recoil at any populist proposal to suspend or discard constitutional provisions in the name of popular will. He believed liberty survived only when ambition was restrained by durable structure, and he would see attacks on constitutional limits as invitations to demagoguery, not acts of popular empowerment.
Patrick Henry would initially applaud anti-elite fervor and suspicion of distant power, but he would turn sharply against any populist leader who attempted to consolidate authority and crown himself the voice of the people. His populist rhetoric never extended to personal rule.
Madison would recognize recent eruptions of mass political passion as precisely the danger he described in Federalist No. 10 — factions inflamed by emotion, convinced of their moral certainty, and impatient with restraint. He warned that when popular energy bypasses institutions, it does not purify democracy; it destabilizes it.
Jefferson would likely issue eloquent, contradictory critiques of both sides — condemning elite arrogance and popular excess alike — before withdrawing in frustration from a political culture that mistook noise for virtue.
What all of them would agree on is this: the Constitution was never meant to be a populist instrument. It was designed to filter passion through representation, deliberation, checks and balances, law, and time. The Founders feared monarchy, but they feared majority tyranny even more. They understood that republics are destroyed not only by mobs, but by men who learn how to ride them.
Whether modern institutions can withstand populism in the age of perpetual outrage now rests with us.
A republic, if you can keep it — and keep it from the mob, and from the man who seeks to command it.