Concurrent Majority

Concurrent Majority In his “Disquisition on Government” (1843), John Calhoun argued that a historical weakness of democracies was their tendency to degenerate into the oppression of regional or class interests by numerical majorities. To prevent the popular will of a northern majority turning despotic against the southern minority, he advocated a constitutional amendment to create a dual executive, with one president elected by the free states and another by the slave states, and to require that no bill become federal law without the signature of both.