From National Affairs George Will writes The Limits of Majority Rule. [1] I strongly recommend you read the entire essay.
an excerpt:
Another reason many conservatives favor judicial deference and restraint is what can be called the conservative populist temptation. Conservatives are hardly immune to the temptation to pander — to preach that majorities are presumptively virtuous and that the things legislatures do are necessarily right because they reflect the will of the majority.
But the essential drama of democracy derives from the inherent tension between the natural rights of the individual and the constructed right of the community to make such laws as the majority deems necessary and proper. Natural rights are affirmed by the Declaration of Independence; majority rule, circumscribed and modulated, is constructed by the Constitution. Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, in his book The Conscience of the Constitution [2], rightly emphasizes that the Declaration is not just chronologically prior to the Constitution, it is logically prior. Because it “sets the framework for reading” the Constitution, it is the Constitution’s “conscience”: By the terms with which the Declaration articulates the Constitution’s purpose — the purpose is to “secure” unalienable rights — the Declaration intimates the standards by which to distinguish the proper from the improper exercises of majority rule. “Freedom,” writes Sandefur, “is the starting point of politics; government’s powers are secondary and derivative, and therefore limited….Liberty is the goal at which democracy aims, not the other way around.”
The progressive project, now entering its second century, has been to reverse this by giving majority rule priority over liberty when the two conflict, as they inevitably and frequently do. This reflects the progressive belief that rights are the result of government; they are “spaces of privacy” that government “has chosen to carve out and protect.”
HKO
The Progressive Era marks the point in our history where democracy took precedence over liberty; where majority rights took precedence over individual rights. This was contrary to the intent of the Framers. This departure was the critical argument that converted the administrative state, meant to delivery efficiency in government unpolluted by politics, to the welfare state which grew to serve majoritarian impulses.