Regarding James Madison, then, Richardson is right—but in a way I don’t think she intends. In Federalist #10, Madison was conjuring, like Obama, a vision of pluralism. And like Obama, he had at heart the protection not of democracy but of oligarchy.
The burden of the essay, as Richardson says, is to clarify for the nervous how effective the Constitution will be in restraining the majority and protecting the minority, but Richardson doesn’t note the brute fact that when Madison says “majority,” he and his readers mean quite specifically those who want to democratize public finance and use the power of government to restrain the power of great wealth, in part by broadening the electoral franchise to include all free white men regardless of property ownership. When they say “the minority,” they mean the few rich men who had the vote.
Many people today insist that Madison’s opposition to democracy was only an opposition to referendum—instead of representative government a “pure” democracy, where every proposed measure of government is put to a vote by the qualified public. In #10, Madison does object to that kind of democracy, but the objection is throat-clearing, even deflection. The main line of the essay is about how representation should work. The main thrust has to do with structuring such representation to defeat what Madison calls the “wicked projects” of democratic finance.
For Richardson is right, too, when saying that many in the ratifying conventions “objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution.” What she refuses to see is the political and economic context in which the Federalist essays addressed those objections. It’s true that the people who objected to the Constitution, members of the governing and financial elite, were afraid their states would lose power. But they were equally afraid of what had been going on in their states to restrain, via the assertion of majority will, the formerly unrestrained power of their money. The latter fear is what had gotten many of the delegates to the convention in the first place. In #10, Madison is pitching the holdouts on the Constitution’s power to protect their financial hegemony by restraining the will of the democratic majority.