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The Atlantic: The Other Fear of the Founders
The Atlantic - (archived: https://archive.ph/fsCGX ) The Other Fear of the Founders
America’s early leaders were worried not only about demagogues like Donald Trump, but about the rise of an antidemocratic, wealthy elite that goads such men on.
By George Thomas
February 12, 2025, 7 AM ET
The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant.
As a first step to protect against this sort of alliance, America’s republican political institutions rejected the built-in privileges of aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, wrote legislation that abolished primogeniture and entail—property laws inherited from monarchical and aristocratic England that advantaged “an aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” entrenching a sense of social and political privilege.
Similarly, Gouverneur Morris, the Founder who drafted the actual text of the Constitution, worried at the Constitutional Convention that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” Morris insisted that the “rich will strive to establish their dominion,” and even considered designing a Senate populated by the established and propertied to balance the more democratic and popular House. The two classes, he reasoned, reflected in two different institutions, would contain each other. Although the Constitution did not embrace institutional class divisions, it did formally prohibit the granting of titles of nobility as a hedge against rule by the few. Yet even in a wholly republican and popular government, fears that concentrated wealth would enable the rich to have a predominant position in political life persisted.
The remedy, many Founders believed, was a broad economic distribution among the middle class, avoiding established classes of both rich and poor and the conflict that inescapably came along with it. Defending the Constitution in “Federalist No. 10,” Madison acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” is the most durable source of political conflict, but argued that a large republic would inevitably include a great diversity of property and economic interests. Conflict within a dynamic political economy would be between different and diverse property interests, which would fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely. Noah Webster echoed this thinking in a lesser-known defense of the Constitution and the logic it rested on. A political and educational thinker famous for his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster wrote forcefully on his belief that democracy depended on the middle class and could not survive highly concentrated wealth: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” Webster observed that, historically speaking, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.
/snip
America’s early leaders were worried not only about demagogues like Donald Trump, but about the rise of an antidemocratic, wealthy elite that goads such men on.
By George Thomas
February 12, 2025, 7 AM ET
The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant.
As a first step to protect against this sort of alliance, America’s republican political institutions rejected the built-in privileges of aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, wrote legislation that abolished primogeniture and entail—property laws inherited from monarchical and aristocratic England that advantaged “an aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” entrenching a sense of social and political privilege.
Similarly, Gouverneur Morris, the Founder who drafted the actual text of the Constitution, worried at the Constitutional Convention that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” Morris insisted that the “rich will strive to establish their dominion,” and even considered designing a Senate populated by the established and propertied to balance the more democratic and popular House. The two classes, he reasoned, reflected in two different institutions, would contain each other. Although the Constitution did not embrace institutional class divisions, it did formally prohibit the granting of titles of nobility as a hedge against rule by the few. Yet even in a wholly republican and popular government, fears that concentrated wealth would enable the rich to have a predominant position in political life persisted.
The remedy, many Founders believed, was a broad economic distribution among the middle class, avoiding established classes of both rich and poor and the conflict that inescapably came along with it. Defending the Constitution in “Federalist No. 10,” Madison acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” is the most durable source of political conflict, but argued that a large republic would inevitably include a great diversity of property and economic interests. Conflict within a dynamic political economy would be between different and diverse property interests, which would fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely. Noah Webster echoed this thinking in a lesser-known defense of the Constitution and the logic it rested on. A political and educational thinker famous for his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster wrote forcefully on his belief that democracy depended on the middle class and could not survive highly concentrated wealth: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” Webster observed that, historically speaking, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.
/snip
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