“The goal in America today,” Rosen said on our walk, “is to resurrect the primacy of reason over passion—what we are watching now is the struggle between logos and pathos. The central question in our democratic age is this: Is it possible to slow down the direct expression of popular passion? The answer to this question is not obvious.”

In some ways, the Constitution Center is the antipode of Facebook’s headquarters, some 3,000 miles away. The leaders of Facebook and its Silicon Valley cousins argue that instantaneous, universal communication is a boon to democracy and freedom. Constitutional scholars such as Rosen argue that the rapid diffusion of all manner of information—the false and the decontextualized, especially—can just as easily expedite the formation of mobs.

Last year, as Donald Trump (who is undeniably talented in the dark art of mob formation) launched his assault on the norms that undergird American democracy, Rosen and I fell into a discussion about James Madison, the fourth president. I asked Rosen to imagine what Madison, the main proponent among the Founders of indirect democracy, would have made of Trump, of Trumpism, and of our coarse and frenzied political age. Rosen’s eloquent answer is contained in his essay, “Madison vs. the Mob,” which is an anchor article in this special issue on democracy in peril.

“Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason,” Rosen writes. “We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare.”

Madison, Rosen goes on to argue, would have found the populist reforms of the Progressive era, and gerrymandering, and political self-sorting all to be significant dangers as well. And then there is the matter of the out-of-control presidency. “Madison feared that Congress would be the most dangerous branch of the federal government, sucking power into its ‘impetuous vortex.’ But today he would shudder at the power of the executive branch,” Rosen writes. “The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the ‘imperial presidency’ has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches.”

This special issue grew in part out of my conversations with Rosen, but it is also rooted in the traditions and mission of The Atlantic, whose founders wanted this magazine to “endeavor to be the exponent of what its conductors believe to be the American idea.” In a manifesto published in the first issue, in 1857, the founders did not define for the reader, or for subsequent generations of editors, what exactly the American idea is; either it was too obvious for them to bother outlining (they were all abolitionists, and they held the ideals of equality and the right to pursue happiness in highest regard), or they wanted each generation of Atlantic editors and writers to reason for themselves the nature of the idea.