Robert Knight on Obama’s mandatory voting longings.

America’s Founders abhorred the idea of universal democracy, which is why they fashioned a constitutional republic with separation of powers between the states and the central government and within the national government. Plus, national borders and meaningful citizenship.

In Federalist 10, James Madison warned of the dangers of a pure democracy without republican safeguards: “[S]uch democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.”