The United States government was established in 1776 to secure the liberty of its citizens. The Declaration of Independence is largely a list of grievances against the King of England, and in response to the King’s abuses of power, declared “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.” The United States adopted a new Constitution in 1789 that has guided the nation on a path of liberal democracy for 250 years. The liberty of Americans has been threatened and, in many ways, compromised over the centuries, but Americans remain relatively free and their government is relatively democratic. This paper looks at the design of the nation’s Constitution to analyze the constitutional features that have enabled the persistence of liberal democracy.

This paper focuses on a particular challenge to liberal democracy: the inherent tension between liberty and democracy. Liberty requires a government that protects individual rights and allows individuals to make their own life choices, as long as they do not infringe on the equal rights of others. Democracy is a political system in which individual preferences are aggregated to make collective choices for the group. Democracy threatens to subordinate the liberty of its citizens to the collective decisions made through democratic political institutions.

One way that the Constitution of the United States addresses this inherent tension between liberty and democracy is by limiting the powers of the federal government to those enumerated in the Constitution. That has been, at best, only partially effective. Reading the words of the document, one might question where the Constitution gives the federal government the power to run a compulsory retirement system, for example. Government action enabled through democratic political institutions has often compromised individual liberties.

Some have argued that there are implied powers in the Constitution, and history certainly shows that the federal government has exercised powers that go far beyond those enumerated in the Constitution. The most direct argument that the Founders did not intend any implied powers lies in the Tenth Amendment, which reads in its entirety: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.”

One should be cautious about drawing too close a connection between the nation’s constitution and the persistence of liberal democracy. Democracy was a new idea in 1776, when monarchy was the dominant form of government. Today, liberalism and democracy have spread throughout the world, demonstrating that the Constitution of the United States is not a prerequisite for liberal democracy.2 The Constitution does, however, anticipate threats to liberty and was written not to create a democratic government, but to protect the liberty of its citizens.

KEYWORDS: Democracy, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, Federalist Papers