The Founding Fathers died unhappy. As the late Gordon Wood wrote in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, they were “unsettled and fearful” classical elites unprepared for the free world they had espoused. They were not ready for democracy, not even the limited form they had helped create. The public voted for policies they disdained, believed things they had imagined would fade, tore themselves apart over partisan conflict, and voted less in the spirit of deliberation than in a stupor whipped up by hard cider and dishonest journalism. In 1813 John Adams wrote his old rival Jefferson asking, rhetorically, heartbroken, “Where are now in 1813, the Perfection and perfectability of human Nature? Where is now, the progress of the human Mind? When? Where? And how? is the present Chaos to be arranged into order?” 

I find it unpleasantly easy to sympathize with these manuscript men in a newspaper world, book person in an Instagram world that I am. Alexander Hamilton was an authoritarian quasi-monarchist who wanted bankers to run the country? Hey, I would have taken them over Andrew Jackson. James Madison was wrong to oppose paper money– but seeing how highly the price of eggs seems to rank in many voters’ minds, I can understand why he might not trust the mob to run the economy. 

But these men were wrong. 250 years after the birth of the United States, the nation is crumbling. And one reason is that the Founders did not believe in Americans enough.

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The road to revolution did not begin with men of property. America’s road to independence began with ordinary settlers and artisans in 1763-4. Imperial policy after the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763) angered different sets of Americans in different ways.  On the frontier, many colonists were furious that Britain pursued limited peace with Indians rather than outright genocide, and in Pennsylvania, a mob called the Paxton Boys decided to do something about that with genocidal violence of its own. In coastal towns like Boston and Newport, R.I., sailors resisted imperial policing and naval conscription brought on by new tax policies. The Stamp Act Crisis of 1764, over a proposed tax on printed documents, brought merchants, lawyers, and printers into an emerging anti-British coalition. 

I could talk about other grievances and places, but the point is that wealthy men like George Washington and learned men like Samuel Adams did not ignite a revolutionary movement– they joined one. In this as in other revolutions, often the people we later identify as leaders had power handed to them. During the Russian Revolution, in 1917, an angry demonstrator shouted at Socialist Revolutionary Party leader and intellectual Viktor Chernov to “take power, you son of a bitch, when it’s given to you!” This was a test revolutionary elites, for all their moral and political faults, passed: they did take power, and they did use it.

The uneasy revolutionary coalition made for an uneasy revolution, the meaning of which we are still grappling with. Some enslaved people fought for freedom through loyalty to monarchy, while some slaveholders fought for “liberty” they would use to preserve slavery; there were also enslaved Patriots and slaveholding Loyalists. And the end of the revolutionary war did not end the contradictions of the revolution. In the years after the war, conflict between the farmer everymen who helped make the revolution and the merchants who helped fund it even came to blows, with Shays’s Rebellion in 1786.

The Constitution that followed was an attempt by the revolutionary elite to overcome their own differences and produce a republic that could survive. It is a beautiful and tragic document. The Framers imagined a federal system stretching across America, where our representatives would come together and decide our future. With the Bill of Rights added, the Constitution guaranteed protections we rely on today as, often, a last line of defense against authoritarianism. But the Constitution also constrained democracy. Many of these restrictions are now infamous: equal representation in the Senate, the Electoral College. Others have passed away– at least we directly elect Senators now– and still others, particularly the pernicious role of the Supreme Court, arose only within the constitutional system well after its creation. But the spirit, from the beginning, was to keep democracy at arms length.

In Federalist 10, James Madison puts this quite clearly. We cannot, he writes, prevent the emergence of factions of common interest and philosophy. James Madison knew that majorities do not pre-exist government: they are assembled, configured, and might be reconfigured in all kinds of ways. Thus he meddled with that process itself: 

the influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.

Divided across its constituent parts, majorities would be foiled, action would be slow, virtue would prevail. The Union would have representatives (especially Senators, who were not at the time elected, but chosen by state legislators) whose “enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render[s] them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice.” It is telling that when Madison concludes with the promise that the Constitution will protect us from “wicked project[s],” the three he names are paper money, debt relief, and dividing up property. 

James Madison was a talented writer and a deep thinker, and all his clever thoughts and wise words and much-loved quotes have led to now: a republic where some people’s votes count several times more than others in legislative elections, some do not count at all in presidential elections, and when we the people manage despite this to get a good idea through government, the judiciary, which is elected by no one, can blow it all up anyway. He and his comrades betrayed the best of their own revolution and left Americans to slowly, painstakingly try again and again to complete it thereafter. I would take my chances governing with colonial Boston’s three most alcoholic cobblers over such a scoundrel.

The moment you begin to fear your fellow human beings more than you fear a king is the moment you begin forging a crown that will subjugate you for your own protection. Maximilien Robespierre’s fear of counterrevolution brought him and his revolution to ruin. Russia’s Bolsheviks doomed their socialist experiment the moment they decided to rule without elections. Anyone who thinks idealists are scary has not spent enough time with pragmatists.

Our founders were a little more subtle. They put in place– with much controversy and debate– limited protections against powerful men like them. But they left far too many protections for men like them. They deliberately kept the power of money out of the hands of state legislatures, prohibited interfering with the slave trade for the first twenty years of American history, and set up “checks and balances” that constrained we the people as well as our representatives. Particularly regarding slavery, we sometimes describe the Founders as failing to live up to the ideals of the Revolution. That is an understatement: they deliberately betrayed them.

To be clear, the Constitution and other foundational work by America’s early leaders were far from the only reasons for American injustice. Genocide of Indigenous people was quite popular among white Americans; slavery was backed by economic and political forces far beyond the Constitution. But the Founders did help prevent the construction of alternate majorities that might have stopped either. The classes they stood for were the chief obstacle to a more expansive democracy in America’s early history, and they established obstacles to democracy that we still grapple with today.

While many Americans have fought valiantly to expand our democracy against the hesitance and elitism of the Framers, others have continued to build on their antidemocratic legacy. Closer to home, Americans’ fear of socialism a century ago led them to imprison the left. In the name of freedom, neoliberals like Friedrich Hayek and libertarians like Charles Koch supported authoritarianism abroad and then at home. The Koch-backed libertarian outlet Reason has done a good job criticizing federal overreach now– but the Koch-funded Tea Party, a minority movement of property-holders against the unemployed people and underwater mortgages, helped pave the road to today’s federal government. To be afraid of government can be reasonable. To be afraid of your neighbors is poison. It brings only ruin.

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I am not naive. There is a history of leftists assuming that the righteous public wants exactly what we want, if only they could be roused; this is usually a delusion, and it would certainly be one today. I doubt the public; the ease with which Britain has turned its national health system into a nightmare for trans people has even given me some fears about that most common-sense of socialist proposals here. Trump won the popular vote last time, and while it is convenient to believe that some thwarted virtuous majority awaits the right message, it is wrong. We will have to build such a majority ourselves.

But we can. A more democratic America, right now, would be far from perfect. It would not yet become a beacon of freedom dedicated to a real and fair “rules-based international order.” But it would be willing to stop selling bombs to Israel. It would not yet give women equal rights. But even with misogyny ascendant in our culture, it would guarantee a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body. It would not yet respect trans and gender nonconforming people.  But it would protect our rights to healthcare. It would not yet open our borders. But it would rein in ICE. 

Even now, even with a man without virtue at its head, in an economy that rewards vice and penalizes virtue, in a nation of lawyers but not laws and legislators who do not legislate, where every civic institution is in shambles and shambling cowardice is so often the response, where our schools and universities are bent to mere job training, a world of AI misinformation in which the wealthiest man in the world controls what many still take to be the public square, a world where genocide is met with strongly-worded statements at best, even in a world that seems to believe nothing and give little reason to do otherwise, even now, right now, we are already better together than those who represent us.

Americans have been afraid so long of the “tyranny of the majority” that many of us had until recently forgotten about the tyranny of the minority. That is what the Framers helped deliver us. I think you or I could dream up a better Constitution, but you fight with what you have at hand and not what you wish you did. The Constitution we already have has promises and protections we need now more than ever, particularly in the Reconstruction amendments that the right has tried so hard to kill. Reinterpreting these against autocratic judges, racist state legislatures, and out-of-control law enforcement would be a good start toward a better country. 

More democracy is a principle, not a strategy. It’s easy to imagine how, poorly-applied, more democracy might mean more NIMBYs making it impossible to build homes, or harsher border enforcement, or more censorship. But as a principle, as a guiding star, it’s a far better thing to hold close to you than the founders’ mean fears of ordinary people. It’s up to all of us to figure out how to realize the democratic impulse, and I don’t mean this as a policy document– this is a call to silence that part of me, perhaps that part of you, that imagines there is something better than democracy, that if only we could stop these rubes we might prosper. This is a sad and mistaken regret better-suited to old plutocrats like Jefferson than vibrant citizens like us. You will prosper with the rubes or suffer with them. You are someone else’s rube.

I was told by conservatives throughout my childhood in small-town New Hampshire that we are a “republic, not a democracy.” This is not a promise of freedom. It is a confession of wrongdoing. We are not enough of a democracy. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” We are not angels. That is why we can only be trusted to govern if we do it together.