ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the controversy during the Founding period over competing visions of democracy in America. The debate pitted constitutionalism, which sought to constrain majorities, against populism, which sought to erect political institutions that would obey them. Throughout American history these ideas have coexisted, sometimes in an uneasy alliance—Thomas Jefferson is credited with reconciling the ideas within the American federal system—and sometimes in contradiction, as expressed by Theodore Roosevelt. The Populists' agitation for democracy and social and economic reform came to its political maturity, in some senses, with the Progressive movement. Roosevelt's balancing act between populism and constitutionalism was far more problematic than Jefferson's. Roosevelt reasoned that the energetic executive created by the constitutionalists to be strong but insulated from public opinion could be used by the people and for the people. Bill Clinton and his consultants created a soft kind of economic populism to generate support for his presidential candidacy in 1992.
