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THE FOUNDERS NEVER MEANT THE US TO BE A DEMOCRACY  
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Doug Henwood
July 1, 2026
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ For Madison and the other Framers, the danger wasn’t the power of
elites but that of the mob. _

The structures of governance bequeathed to us by the founding
generation provided an ideal environment for a plutocracy to develop
and run wild, largely insulated from popular power.,

 

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 [[link removed]] in 1976,
which declared political contributions a form of speech and therefore
protected by the First Amendment, and Citizens United v. FEC
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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
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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
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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
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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.

_Doug Henwood edits __Left Business Observer__ and is the host of
__Behind the News__. His latest book is __My Turn_
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* Founding Fathers
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* anti-democratic rhetoric
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