Randy Barnett’s contribution to The NYU Law Democracy Project’s “100 ideas in 100 days” series asks this question. I encourage you to read for a succinct statement of his viewpoint. Whether or not he accurately characterizes the views of James Madison when the Constitution was written in 1787 (and on this I think his characterization is overly one-sided concerning the need to balance majoritarian governance with minority rights in a republic), what’s more important in my judgment is that Barnett’s account fails to appreciate the evolution of Madison’s own views over the entirety of his lifetime. As other Madison scholars have observed, Madison became more majoritarian as he saw partisan politics develop in the young Republic. I’ve drawn upon that scholarship in my own work as well as contributed to it in “The Real Preference of the Voters”: Madison’s Idea of a Top-Three Election and the Present Necessity of Reform. The account I give of how Madisonian democracy (or republicanism, if you prefer as Barnett does) relates to the threat of authoritarianism posed by Donald Trump and the now-dominant MAGA faction of the Republican Party is very different from what Barnett articulates.