The Founders Never Meant The Us To Be A Democracy

One of the great contradictions of American life is that we think of ourselves as a democracy, a model for the world, but one with a profoundly rich elite that exercises enormous influence over politics. Although we often feel (correctly) that democracy is eroding in the United States, we shouldn’t forget that, despite our image, our state was never designed to be a democracy. Our situation, in which an insanely rich oligarchy is nudging aside the last remnants of popular power, emerges from the governmental structures that James Madison and his fellow Founders intended. It was no accident, as the vulgar Marxists used to say, that our first president was one of the richest guys in the newborn country.Madison, born into the Virginia slave-holding planter elite, made plain in the Federalist Papers, the essays he coauthored with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to secure ratification of the new Constitution, that the system he helped design was meant to protect the few against the many. In the most famous of these essays, Federalist No. 10, he argued that economic inequality did not arise from exploitation or inherited privilege but from natural differences in human talent.Madison took the logical next step from this understanding: he rejected democracy outright. A pure democracy would be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Instead he argued for a republic governed by elected representatives, which would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” The aim would be to guard against “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” For Madison and the other Framers, the danger to be guarded against was not the power of economic elites — which is the class they came from — but the threat to those elites posed by the mob.The Declaration of Independence, largely written by Thomas Jefferson in his elegant prose style, provides something of an alternative documentary tradition in American politics, full of language about human equality and freedom, locating the legitimate source of sovereignty in the people. But freedom and sovereignty came with exceptions, since, like the Constitution, it was written by a plutocrat. Jefferson himself, for all his lovely words, owned six hundred slaves in his lifetime, six times as many as Madison. The last of the twenty-seven listed grievances leveled against King George III in the Declaration was his encouragement of slave rebellions and Indian attacks on the colonists: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”As Aziz Rana argues in his splendid book The Constitutional Bind, there has long been a tension in American life between the two documents — the Declaration as a charter of liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty, and the Constitution as one organizing a system of governance designed to limit popular power and protect the wealth and status of elites. As flawed as it is, the Declaration can be rhetorically useful.That system of governance devised by Madison et al. takes several approaches to limiting popular power. Among the most odious is the Senate, initially elected not by popular vote but by state legislatures. As the Senate itself says on its website:To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.The masses, being incorrigible hotheads, need a straitjacket.Another antidemocratic mechanism is the Electoral College, designed to place a barrier of representation between the presidency and the crowd. As the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia correctly put it in the infamous Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, citing Article II of the Constitution, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the electoral college.” Since our federal system grants such enormous power to the states — a structure initially intended to protect the interests of the slaveholding South — small, conservative jurisdictions have enormous weight in choosing presidents. This is, again, no accident; it would have been pleasing to Jefferson, the celebrated advocate of popular sovereignty, who thought rural areas were awash in virtue and cities “pestilential.”On top of those constitutional mechanisms came judicial review, the power of the courts (the Supreme Court in particular) to overrule laws passed by an elected Congress. This right was not specifically granted in the document; in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court famously granted itself judicial review, a power it used only sparingly at first but eventually with more frequency and fervor. It has mostly employed that power in antidemocratic fashion. After Marbury, the court didn’t invoke the power to overrule until the Dred Scot case in 1857, which denied black Americans citizenship and included the famous declaration that they have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Aside from a brief period from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, when it issued multiple decisions expanding social rights, the Supreme Court has mostly been a force for reaction, protecting the propertied. The gush of money that has taken over our political system was enabled by two decisions in particular, Buckley v. Valeo in 1976, which declared political contributions a form of speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment, and Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which held that corporate political spending could not be restricted, also on free speech grounds.All these structures of governance provided an ideal environment for a plutocracy to develop and run wild, largely insulated from popular power — or, more precisely, plutocracies, because, as the Italian theorist Vilfredo Pareto said, they “circulate,” coming and going over time. History is, in Pareto’s phrase, “a graveyard of aristocracies.” They rise, rule, grow decadent (“They decay not in numbers only. They decay also in quality”), and fall, to be replaced by a new set of rulers, who repeat the process.The contributors to Ruling America, a collection of essays edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, focus on nine incarnations of the nation’s elite, from colonial times to the right-wing counterrevolution of the 1970s and ’80s. The early American ruling classes were weak, divided by regional and economic interests. It wasn’t until the end of the Civil War that a truly national ruling class could emerge. In the late nineteenth century, the Northeastern WASP elite came into prominence, and as the century turned, it domesticated the rough-edged robber barons and created an order centered on large corporations and financial interests. That particular formation hit a wall with the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression that followed, but it soon reemerged as the masters of the American Golden Age — the planners of the post–World War II order, with all the institutions that made it possible, like NATO and the International Monetary Fund. Domestically, the elites had mostly made peace with the New Deal; unions and rising real wages were largely, if grudgingly, accepted by the employing class as the price of stability.But that order began to unravel in the 1970s with rising inflation, falling corporate profits, the loss of the Vietnam War, and growing insolence among both the newly independent former European colonies and our own working class. Meanwhile, new fortunes, many of them based in the South and the West, came to challenge the formerly dominant Eastern Establishment. Those new fortunes represented fresh poles not only of wealth but of political influence, and they began funding a right-wing backlash to the old Northeastern establishment via think tanks and new factions within the Republican Party.Those forces grew in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s administration and the subsequent transformation of the Republican Party into an increasingly reactionary formation. The old Republican Party was the major vehicle of the Northeastern WASP establishment, exemplified by the Rockefeller brothers — David, head of Chase Bank, and Nelson, governor of New York and later vice president. But they were replaced by uncompromising reactionaries with lots of funding, energy, and foul ideas.Over time, the new guys only grew more rabid and reactionary. Under Donald Trump’s second administration, they achieved their greatest triumph in the Project 2025 agenda, crafted by the same Heritage Foundation that helped shape key parts of the Reagan program, which now looks almost mild by comparison. Despite that continuity, one new innovation is the starring role of elites from tech, a sector that was once heavily Clintonian Democrat and is now dominated by ghoulish characters like Elon Musk and lesser celebrities like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, chair and CEO, respectively, of the data and espionage firm Palantir. Palantir and Musk’s SpaceX look to be in the process of becoming de facto branches of the US government, developing weaponry and vast surveillance files on us (Palantir) and launching rockets into space for NASA (SpaceX). Their politics are a repellent hybrid of libertarianism (of the “cut food stamps and let capitalists do whatever they want” sort), surveillance, and warmaking. It is perhaps our worst ruling elite since the slavocracy.Yet despite their power as of this moment, they’re not fully established as a proper ruling class just yet. They lack broad legitimacy — in fact, the tech elite is deeply unpopular across the political spectrum, and Trump himself has some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling. Their strategy, as Nikhil Pal Singh argues, is “dominance without hegemony”; true hegemony requires some degree of popular consent. Instead Trump’s crew is deploying force, both at home and abroad. That, as Clyde Barrow noted recently in Jacobin, is a sign of terminal weakness in a ruling order. Add the fact that this crew is deeply incompetent, and you can start suspecting they’re vulnerable.Savor that weakness. As dark as the moment seems — and it is dark — you can summon some hope. I’ve spent most of this piece on all the structural obstacles to popular power that are engineered into the American political system. But it is far from completely undemocratic. Let us use its democratic residues to make their crisis our opportunity.