This history of the Constitutional Convention, in 1787, highlights the extent to which our Constitution was geared "toward constraining democracy".
The fall of the Roman Republic, in any case, left a bad thousand-year savor, a certainty that democracy, even constrained republican democracy, was doomed by demagoguery.
The governor said that the Cossacks should act more freely than the police, whose operations are constrained by "democracy" and "human rights": "What they can't do, he said, a Cossack can".
Mr Clark's very mildness should not be allowed to distract from this new and unwelcome attempt to constrain local democracy, which exposes the hollowness of Mr Cameron's rhetoric.
That said, socio-political issues are generally more prevalent in the advent of new governments, and that technology companies have played a significant role both in supporting and constraining pro-democracy movements in recent times (Crane et al., 2013), thus leading to national drivers of political reform.
But their power may be constrained, even in democracies, as intermediary liability is seized upon as the easy way to fight crime, porn, defamation and intellectual property piracy.
Another is that all democracies are constrained by regulators and judiciaries.
In the Supreme Court's view, this means that American judges must strenuously avoid doing or saying anything that implies they are weighing the merits of a religious doctrine.Judges in most other democracies are less constrained.
Millions of middle-class Americans, combining despair and hope, cynicism and dreams of democracy, will likely demonstrate the (admittedly constrained) power of the middle class in November and well beyond.
The point is, at every stage, what was a vibrant people-powered democracy has been bound and gagged, constrained into a weak and passive bought government.
