many Americans would be surprised to learn that the word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution nor does it appear in any of the Constitutions of the 50 states the founders did everything they could to keep us from having a democracy James Madison rightly known as the father of the Constitution wrote in essay number 10 of The Federalist Papers 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 in short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths Alexander Hamilton agreed and he stated we are a Republican government real Liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy and John Adams a signer of the Declaration of Independence stated democracy never lasts long it soon wastes exhausts and murders itself the founders had good reason to look upon democracy with contempt because they knew that the democracies in the early Greek city States produced some of the wildest excesses of government imaginable