First published in Countercurrents.
“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,” <https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html>
“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
