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Comment by mwigdahl | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with virtually everything you're saying here, I'm not convinced the Founders had a high opinion of democracy itself. The Federalist Papers are full of warnings about mob rule, and the goal of the Constitutional framework was explicitly to insulate government from populist and direct democratic influence, while setting up structures that were supposed to mold the government into the form of an aristocracy (in the sense of Plato's Republic).

The Republic is actually quite prescient in its analysis of forms of government and how they decay from one form to another. The USA today very much resembles an oligarchy (class-based rule by the rich) being pushed rapidly into social media-driven democratic mob rule.

Were we already farther down that path, Trump might have been enough to push us down the hill even farther, from democracy to true tyranny.

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What we call oligarchy now and what they called democracy then -- it's the same picture. Re democracy's weaknesses, I think the most important factor was that whatever their radical ideas, they were living in a country that had been born out of a revolution / civil war and were living through the failure of one attempt at creating a country (the Articles of Confederation) so they were primarily concerned with creating a system that could actually work for a while and maintain stability through turbulent times. They were true believers in (what they called) democracy, enough to bet the future of the country on it, but they also believed it had weaknesses, and they did not want to embarrass and discredit it by building a democracy that failed because of something that seemed inherent to democracy itself. That's one reason they were obsessed with its weaknesses. Another other reason is that they had to sell their new system to democracy skeptics. So, they had to convince both themselves and others that their system built around the idea of democracy was designed in a way that guarded against its weaknesses.

It should be noted that the Federalist papers only represent the views of a few of the Federalists (Hamilton, Madison, Jay), i.e. from one of the two major parties. The Democratic-Republicans had a greater distrust of centralized government and were more supportive of democracy and rule by the better of the average Joes (Jefferson's 'yeoman farmers' and all that).

This is quite similar to taking the views of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul and calling them representative of the US government. Those views are not extreme in the context of the time and are shared by a sizeable fraction but it's not a random or representative sample.

> It should be noted that the Federalist papers only represent the views of a few of the Federalists (Hamilton, Madison, Jay), i.e. from one of the two major parties. The Democratic-Republicans had a greater distrust of centralized government and were more supportive of democracy and rule by the better of the average Joes (Jefferson’s ‘yeoman farmers’ and all that).

“Represent the view of” is misleading. The Federalist Papers were not an academic exercise of recording opinions for posterity, they were long form campaign ads for a targeted audience to sell the ratification of the constitution.

Also, the Federalist Papers were written before the formation of the parties, and when that formation did occur, Madison was one of the founding leaders, along with Jefferson, of the Democratic-Republican Party, he wasn’t a Federalist.

> The USA today very much resembles an oligarchy (class-based rule by the rich) being pushed rapidly into social media-driven democratic mob rule.

Agree with the first part, disagree with the second part.

It's going to remain an oligarchy, but the circus of 'mob rule' will be utilized to make sure the oligarchs remain in power.

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