Why didn the Founding Fathers include any Direct Democracy in the Constitution?
The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution in 1787, a hundred years before the discovery of Aristotle’s key texts describing the ancient Athenian experiences with democracy. Texts that they had quoted Greeks who were critical of democracyespecially Socrates who advocated a republic led by philosophers. Despite 140 years of direct democracy in New England town meetings starting as early as the 1640’s, there was no evidence that these small democracies could be scaled up for nationwide benefit. To the Founding Fathers, it seemed necessary that in a democracy all voters should assemble at a single location. The methodology of a statistical random sample of the People for polling or to select candidate initiatives developed over the period 1850-1930. Consequently, based on the available information, the Founding Fathers omitted any reference to democracy from the Constitution, but they did not explicitly forbid it. The Founding Fathers apparently were not aware that the ancient Athenians
