"…Language like this seemed designed to serve what Paterson, Lane, and Rand saw as a worrisome trend of elevating democracy over liberty as a central constitutional value. For nearly a decade, New Dealers had made a virtual fetish of the word “democracy”—whether expressly in terms of political control, or more abstractly in terms of the national spirit—perpetuating the notion that majority rule is more important than, or is even the basic source of, individual freedom. To Paterson, this represented a dangerous reversal of priorities. “Liberty is the last word you’ll find in contemporary books or speeches,” she observed in “Turns” in early 1940. “When it is mentioned at all, it is only in order to explain that by liberty the speaker doesn’t really mean liberty, so don’t worry; he means some form of coercion.” Throughout that year, she returned to the point time and again. The American political system, she argued, was not based on democracy—which “contains no other principle than majority rule,” and is therefore “fatal to liberty”—but on “the inalienable right of the individual.”
(from “Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness” by Timothy Sandefur