Many of the most deadly errors of contemporary political thinking stem from the notion that in a democracy the government is the people and vice versa, so there is scant reason to distinguish between the two—or to worry about protecting citizens from the government.

In 1798, President John Adams pushed through Congress the Alien and Sedition Acts, which empowered Adams to suppress free speech and imprison without trial any critic of the federal government. When the citizens of Westmoreland County, Virginia petitioned Adams with complaints, he responded by denouncing the citizens: "The declaration that Our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult." Adams' response to the people of Westmoreland County—few of whom had voted for him—was the classic trick of a would-be democratic tyrant. He declaimed that people were obliged to submit to oppression because the chief executive had been duly elected by other voters.

On September 4, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson declared, "In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government." Wilson had campaigned for reelection three years earlier bragging that he had kept the country out of World War I. But shortly after he started his second term, he submitted to Congress a declaration of war against Germany. Were the people responsible for President Wilson's 1916 peace promises or his 1917 declaration of war? How can they be responsible for both? Wilson campaigned for the presidency in 1912 as a progressive. Shortly after he took office, mass firings of black federal employees occurred. The chief federal revenue collector in Georgia announced, "There are no Government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place is in the cornfield." How were voters who opposed Jim Crow laws responsible for Wilson's racist purge?

On July 8, 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt declared, "Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a president and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country." When Roosevelt ran for reelection in 1936, he never mentioned his plan (revealed in early 1937) to pack the nation's highest court with new appointees to rubber-stamp his decrees. Yet, because he won in 1936, he effectively implied that the citizenry were somehow bound to accept all of his power grabs as if they themselves had willed them.