“The idea of a tweeting president would have been a Madisonian dystopia,” argues Jeffrey Rosen in a new video based on the author’s recent article in The Atlantic. According to Rosen, the Founding Fathers designed the Constitution to safeguard against the rise of demagogues. Because passionate arguments—the fodder of demagogues—are more likely to be shared on social media than rational arguments, mob rule is especially common on Twitter. This, Rosen explains, is the stuff of the framers’ nightmares.

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