… is from page 252 of the late William Riker’s 1982 book, Liberalism Against Populism (link added):
The main defense against populist excesses is the maintenance of the constitutional limitations inherited from eighteenth-century Whiggery. It would probably help also to have a citizenry aware of the emptiness of the populist interpretation of voting. And surely a wide dissemination of the discoveries of social choice theory is a desirable additional defense. But this dissemination of a rather arcane theory is a task for generations.
