Has democracy ended in the U.S.?

[Dill]

(07-03-2018, 01:15 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I could get this thread extremely sidetracked on this topic. I will only make a couple of points to this, though.

First, even without universal suffrage, the country would be classified as a democracy. Even if eligibility for voting disqualifies chunks of the population, the hallmark of a democracy is an electoral process where the results are free and fair. However, democracy is not an all or none situation, and so the more inclusive your suffrage is, the more democratic the society is.

Second, I think you may be misunderstanding the intentions of the founders. This part gets a bit more complicated, but they did certainly look for safeguards against the rabble unseating the more wealthy folks. At the same time, though, there was populist streaks among them that aimed to prevent any sort of elite class from forming. Jefferson, for instance, had on more than on occasion called for measures to prevent automatic inheritance of property.

Anyway, the long and short for both of our posts is that democracy comes in many different flavors, but it is still democracy.

Thanks for responding. Not such a bad side-track, really. Certainly not on a thread about the life of democracy in the U.S. I

I took myself to be supporting your point that the distinction between "republic" and "democracy" is specious, especially as currently deployed.  I consider Athens under Pericles a "democracy" even though only 10-15% of its inhabitants were enfranchised and 50% were slaves. It is a matter of describing the operative principle of a form of government. So I have no doubt our "republic" as founded was a democracy and continues to be.
I was commenting, too, on the oddity of current populists supporting the republic/democracy distinction, which hardly favors either their leader or their politics.

I don't see a "misunderstanding" of Founders' intentions in my post, which refers to "many or most," not all, regarding the issue of suffrage. And the "safeguards" you mention are not separable from those intentions, nor an aberration nor surprising for mostly educated property holders. (What was the proportion of college-educated among the Founders, as opposed to the population at large, even just restricting ourselves to white males? Exceptions, like Franklin, were self-educated to a very high standard.)  The best political thinkers among them certainly sought to BALANCE the "rights of property" with with rights of persons (i.e., those who owned only their own person, no real property), rather than giving one or the other the upper hand. But I think  I am safe in saying that, for most of them, education separated leadership from "rabble." In this sense, they were certainly more "elitist" than most present Americans. 

So, speaking of "complication," I would say, for example, that "populism" is not what Madison is about when he writes that no just system of government can exclude men without property. In probably his clearest statement on the subject, his belated "note" to the 1821 speech on suffrage, he argues without enthusiasm, simply conceding to necessity. This kind of thinking did not really satisfy anti-federalists, who still sensed (probably rightly) an "aristocratic" habit of mind in the insistence on a separate and powerful body of government representing "property."

I don't recall that Jefferson ever supported universal suffrage, if that included women and blacks. But he certainly was more populist than Madison or that "anti-leveler" Adams, but even he could only envision a nation in which all free white men could vote, regardless of property--so long as they were literate. But his most populist ideas were resisted by other Founders, both at the state and federal level (thinking here of his calls for state-sponsored education, as well as the inheritance policy to which you refer).  I would say that, at best, most Founders were "populist" in the sense they thought the country and its politics should belong to (almost) all white men, not some rich or otherwise special class, but even that populism is not the blank check it has come to be. At worst, many still wanted their "elite" meritocratic class to retain more power, but understood the degree to which they could or could not buck the tide. We both tolerate nuance so I'm not sure we disagree about this.