"In the twenty-first century, Americans tend to think of their government as a democracy, in the sense that they view the proper function of government as carrying out the will of the people, as revealed through democratic elections. This differs substantially from the vision of the American Founders, who deliberately designed their government to be insulated from democratic pressures. The role of government, as they saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself. So they designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution. As its title suggests, this book describes the decline of liberty as the guiding principle of American liberty in favor of the idealization of democracy. In a nation that views itself as a democracy, any criticism of democracy might appear anti-American. The material that follows shows that liberty, not democracy, was the principle underlying American government, and the American Founders clearly understood that unconstrained democracy can undermine liberty just as much as autocracy. The idea that government should carry out the "will of the people" as revealed through democratic elections may be even more dangerous, because it legitimizes the actions of democratic governments by claiming those actions were approved by a majority"--