… is from page 256 of the original edition of Walter Lippmann’s sometimes deeply flawed but profoundly insightful and still-important 1937 book, The Good Society:
James Madison would not have been astonished at Hitler. He had studied carefully the classical demagogues. That is why the Constitutional Convention attempted to set up truly representative government; in order to protect the masses from the hypnosis of the moment, they invented devices for balancing the constituencies and delaying their decisions.
DBx: Yes. Save, perhaps, in the case of actual war, Madison and the other framers of the U.S. Constitution generally regarded the ability of the executive branch to act more quickly than the legislative branch as a bug to fear and squash rather than a feature to cheer and encourage.
