Yes, the founding fathers were deeply worried about peasants voting to redistribute wealth or give themselves civil liberties. These were the impulses that needed checking and balancing. Hence the existence of a Senate and a Supreme Court. Democratic scholars know this, yet schoolchildren continue to be taught incorrect information.

“Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. […] Democracy, will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes, and no man’s life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure and every one of these will soon mold itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues, and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit, and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."

• John Adams (1807)

"Too many… love pure democracy dearly. They seem not to consider that pure democracy, like pure rum, easily produces intoxication, and with it a thousand mad pranks and fooleries.”

• First Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Jay

“If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”

• Hamilton (1787)

“Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

• James Madison (1787)

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