
The preamble to the US Constitution boldly asserts a claim of popular sovereignty. The document declares itself the work of “We the People.” This claim, as many historians and others have pointed out, is a mystification: Insofar as ours is a democratic polity, it has become so in spite of the intentions of the Founding Fathers, who were, at best, the palest of democrats.
Among the clearest indications of this mystification are the absence in the document of anything but the thinnest provisions for indirect popular rule and the Founders’ failure to provide any institutional space for the exercise