Those who own the country ought to govern it.
— First Chief Justice of the United States John Jay
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
— Thomas Paine, Common Sense
As we contemplate the majesty of our 250 years as a democratic republic, with our glorious president recently threatening to murder his negotiating counterparts on their way back to Iran, an ancient civilization he threatened to exterminate to the last man, woman, and child, let us pause to consider that perhaps the “Miracle in Philadelphia,” as we modestly call the pact that barely holds us together, was something more than a noble experiment to bring democracy to a fallen world.
Although by our own telling the Founding Fathers (a term better suited to a nursery story than an account of political history) were free of any taint of the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterized the “Old World,” in actual fact they were part of a circle of men that had received vast land grants from the British crown from the very earliest English settlements. By 1700, three-fourths of the acreage in New York State belonged to fewer than a dozen people, and by 1750, fewer than five hundred men in five colonial cities owned most of the land and controlled most of the commerce, banking, mining, and manufacturing, as well as a majority of the newspapers and journals on the eastern seaboard.
This makes it rather problematic to characterize the emerging United States as an egalitarian, middle-class society in any politically substantive sense. By 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, property qualifications left about one-third of the white male population disenfranchised, and more than a majority permanently excluded from running for office. Women, Indians, and Africans – whether slaves or “free” – were completely excluded as well. Finally, there were no secret ballots at the time, which meant that even those who were qualified to vote could not cast their ballots free of promised rewards or threatened punishments put forth by the wealthy.
As for the men who drew up the Constitution, it should come as no surprise to learn that there were no dirt farmers or indentured servants at Philadelphia. People who have only their labor with which to pay bills cannot take four months off to discuss their views on political and economic arrangements, much as they might like to. Those who did enjoy such luxuries dominated the events at Philadelphia, consisting almost exclusively of financially successful planters, slaveholders, merchants, creditors, bankers, and manufacturers. Their concerns were overwhelmingly property-related, and they wrote farmers, artisans, and workers out of the Constitution.
What they wanted was not an inclusive democracy, but a strong central government to deal with three prominent challenges: (1) better management of conditions in trade and industry, (2) better handling of relations with rival states internationally, and (3) a cure for the chronic rebelliousness and “insurgent spirit” of the mass of common people, who were engaged in broad political agitation to the point of having taken over a number of state governments. Strong popular resistance dated back thirteen years, in fact, having been particularly fierce in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence, when British rule was routed throughout the colonies. In 1774, for example, in every county seat in rural Massachusetts thousands of farmers had dragged British officials into the streets and made them repeatedly run a gauntlet, removing their hats and writing and announcing their resignations again and again before thousands of commoners thronging them on both sides.
Initially conceived to amend the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention evolved into a forum on establishing a unified nation out of the thirteen states. Waves of popular protest succeeding those that had replaced British rule with local democracy before the battles of Lexington and Concord were regarded by the Founders as a threat to be subdued, not a stimulus to establishing full democracy. No matter that an overwhelming majority of the “free” population – about 85% of Americans – then lived in the agrarian sector, most of them small farmers, tenants, or indentured servants, with interests quite distinct from those of wealthy elites.
These people were burdened by high rents, low incomes, and a series of ruinous taxes stemming from the Seven Years War. To survive, they often had to borrow money at very high interest rates. Desperate to pay off their debts, they then had to mortgage their future crops, which only deepened their indebtedness. In those days debtors’ prison was a fixture of American life, and jails were crowded with economic prisoners, the overwhelming majority of them poor and working class. Given this situation, many felt that the American Revolution had been fought in vain, leading to violent uprisings in a number of states.
Perhaps the best known such revolt occurred in 1787 when debtor farmers in Western Massachusetts led by Daniel Shays took up arms. Their rebellion was crushed by state militias after skirmishes that claimed eleven lives and left scores wounded. Shays was not an advocate of “free trade” as a solution to common economic woes. On the contrary, he wanted relief from oppressive debt, taxes, and rigid adherence to paying debts in hard currency. He desired not “limited government,” but more state intervention to protect against waves of speculation that bankrupted commoners. More specifically, he supported court shut-downs to impede debt collection that was ruining farmers.
The causes that animated revolts like Shays Rebellion were suppressed, not rationally debated and resolved in Philadelphia, where the Founding Fathers acted on their belief that persons of good breeding and ample fortune should dominate the affairs of state and check the leveling impulses of the fickle and unruly masses, ever prone to irrational passions and wicked projects (like debt relief). James Madison, who played the most crucial role among the Founders, focused on how to construct a government that would win some popular support while conceding only a minimum of democratic substance, so as to preserve the existing class structure favoring the wealthy.
It had to be a government strong enough to serve the expanding needs of an entrepreneurial class while holding off the democratic, egalitarian demands of the common people. The way to do that, Madison thought, was by excluding commoners from most points where power was exercised. Madison correctly noted that “the various and unequal distribution of property” was what fueled class conflict, although he called it “faction.”
“Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society,” said Madison in Federalist Paper #10, sounding a lot like Karl Marx. “The first object of government is the protection of different and unequal faculties for acquiring property,” he went on, without noting that inheritance, a primary method of “acquiring” property, cannot plausibly be described as being the result of exercising a human faculty.
Roger Sherman, a delegate to the convention from Connecticut, expressed a common sentiment among the fifty-five assembled dignitaries, saying that “the people should have as little to do as may be about the government.” Alexander Hamilton agreed, arguing that the people “seldom judge or determine right.” Another delegate, Elbridge Gerry, a wealthy, Harvard-educated merchant from Massachusetts who died in office as Vice President to Madison, felt conceding any power at all to commoners constituted an “excess of democracy,” calling such a system the worst of all evils because of its “leveling spirit.”* He even opposed popular elections for the House of Representatives.
Ultimately, the House of Representatives was subject to direct election by the people, but even that concession required an argument to get it established, which shouldn’t have been the case if Jefferson’s high-minded reference to “we the people” eleven years before actually referred to national independence instead of merely class interest.
But in the delegates’ view “the people” referred only to a very select portion of the population. It didn’t mean the half of the population that was female, the hundreds of thousands of slaves or even “free” Africans in the north, or the hundreds of indigenous peoples who Thomas Jefferson referred to as “merciless Indian savages” in the Declaration of Independence. It also didn’t mean the poorest of white males, who were disqualified by property qualifications, nor those who were barred from the polls by literacy tests. As for the rest, though not formally excluded, many simply could not manage a ten or fifteen mile horse-and-buggy ride over muddy roads to the county seat to cast a ballot, a typical practical obstacle to voting.
Such were the political realities at the dawn of the self-proclaimed greatest democracy in world history.
Fifty-nine years later the “empire of liberty” (Thomas Jefferson) invaded and later annexed over half of Mexico in the name of its civilized master race, and then commenced to finishing off indigenous peoples in the West through disease, deliberate starvation, and war. In the midst of that campaign the contradiction of a free and democratic society rooted in slavery erupted in a civil war that butchered hundreds of thousands of Americans and nearly destroyed the “democratic experiment” altogether.
Then followed twelve years of “reconstruction,” during which time ex-slaves proved themselves remarkably adept at lifting themselves up by their bootstraps, a practical necessity given that a briefly instituted policy of “40 acres and a mule” given to freed slaves reached perhaps one percent of the ex-slaves who desperately needed it. Tragically, the brief progress that was made during Reconstruction was brutally cut short when federal troops occupying the south were withdrawn in 1877, leaving ex-slaves to the mercy of white supremacist terror that continued into the civil rights era, including thousands of lynchings, often in front of cheering throngs who considered such wholesale degradation a form of entertainment.
It would be gratifying to report that with the (in principle) enfranchisement of the entire adult population, unrestrained democracy finally flourished in the U.S., replacing the horrors of our anti-democratic past. Alas, such was not the case. The successors to the “rich and well born” at Philadelphia in 1787 created the modern public relations industry during WWI to destroy the labor movement by drafting its members into what was then the bloodiest war in history. This initial success at “manufacturing consent” to crush the main threat to capitalism encouraged further development of the industry, leading to an utterly debased form of political “democracy” that shattered the merest hint of working class unity into a galaxy of market niches along racial, ethnic, religious, gender, age, and even dietary lines, among others. “Democracy” was reduced to selling identity cliques to the highest bidder, an electoral circus that was finally taken over by a complete clown, an outcome that should have surprised no one.
Because whatever else may be said about him, Donald Trump is the most representative president the U.S. has ever had, in that his absolute shamelessness embodies our collective narcissism to near perfection. He appears fully capable of passing off a noisy flatulence attack at the presidential podium as the introduction of a new line of White House perfume while denouncing reporters fleeing the scene with burning eyes for delivering “fake news.” It is easy enough to condemn those who still believe the barrage of idiotic claims issuing forth from our Dear Leader, but the fact remains that – politically speaking – he, and we, are the product of a specialized class of media mind managers which has convinced us that we are the greatest democracy in history, immaculately conceived by philosopher kings in Philadelphia, and utterly incapable of criminality, though not of an occasional inadvertent atrocity,** and that any opposition to what we like to call “the American way of life” represents irrational hatred on the part of those who just have to be in league with the Devil (Evil Empire, Axis of Evil, etc).
In other words, reports of an Age of Reason having woven Enlightenment values deep into the fabric of “our democracy” are greatly exaggerated. Though the “alternative media” can and do spew out many a myth-making minnow, we-the-people collectively swallowed an ideological whale long before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. In fact, that’s why he appeared on the scene.
There simply is no getting around the fact that ideological absurdity forms the political bedrock of team USA. Our freedom-loving forebears rescued Africans from savagery and gave them civilization? Check. The Indians they exterminated were savages? Check. Capitalism working people to death in mines and factories built character? Check. Communism is satanic? Check. Women factory workers didn’t need their wages? Check. Chinese workers spread leprosy? Check. God gave Palestine to Israel? Check. Arabs are terrorists? Check. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Check. Attacking and destroying Vietnam was an act of self-defense? Check. Normandy was the key battle of WWII? Check. There is no alternative to capitalism? Check.
The way out is the way forward, and even the way back, for there was a path not taken advocated by the likes of Thomas Paine, who regarded the American revolution as not just a tax revolt, but a global fight to establish human rights and liberty, including freeing and retroactively compensating slaves, a truly revolutionary stance. He was struck by the mobilization of mechanics and laborers, and the formation of committees to enforce colonial resolutions, and felt that the American Revolution was for all people, not just the rich and well-born.
The law itself should be “King,” he thought, accountable to democracy, not a monarch. He believed legitimacy – the right to rule – could only be granted by the people, and rejected unchecked elite privilege and hereditary monarchy. In Common Sense, he argued that ordinary people were capable of governing themselves and should have sole authority to form their own government and write a constitution. That did not happen in Philadelphia in 1787.
Crucially for his descendants today, Paine argued that political democracy required a certain level of economic equality to function properly. He was an early advocate of social welfare provisions, such as pensions and direct inheritance rights for young people, the latter a lump-sum cash payment he advocated be given to every citizen on reaching adulthood, to be funded by a tax on inherited property.
Paine did not believe that the earth was a commodity to be monopolized by the few. Private property was necessary for its cultivation, but concentrated in few hands it deprived the community of its “natural inheritance.” Paine favored compensation to make sure no citizen was worse off under civilization than prior to its establishment, arguing that over-concentration of wealth led directly to despotism. The rich end up buying “democracy” and destroying people’s rights in the process, as financial precarity breeds political submission. Progressive taxation and redistribution of wealth were the antidote, he argued, without which the poor could have no meaningful liberty.
Paine did believe the American Revolution was unique, but not because of the brilliance of U.S. elites, but because of the common understanding of freedom and self-government held by ordinary Americans. In contrast to revolutions elsewhere, Paine thought, “here the value and quality of liberty, the nature of government, and the dignity of man, were known and understood, and the attachment of the Americans to these principles produced the Revolution, as a natural and almost unavoidable consequence.”
Although Paine has been criticized for not living up to his radical democratic ideals, they are our true and honorable revolutionary heritage. We can either reclaim them, or continue to watch the pathetic attempts to create a trillionaire class, which might inspire a Democratic Party hack to hail billionaires as “the new middle class.”
The choice is ours.
* We can hear echoes of this contempt for real democracy from U.S. elites down to the present day, typically in references to a “crisis of democracy,” which arises whenever ordinary people begin to impose a democratic climate of opinion on the elite-dominated culture.
** “You think we’re so innocent?” — Donald Trump. “We tortured some folks.” — Barack Obama
Sources:
“Common Sense/Thomas Paine and the Promise of America,” January 7, 2026, www.amrevmuseum.org
Thomas Paine, “Agrarian Justice.”
“Howard Zinn Panel with Ray Raphael: A People’s History of the American Revolution,” C-SPAN 3, April 25, 2001
Michael Parenti, “Myths of the Founding Fathers,” You Tube, August 25, 2025
Ray Raphael, “Rethinking America’s Founding Era,” You Tube, August 30, 2025