Democracy: The Pall Over Freedom That ...

Makes dancing, whoring, drinking, and hanging with riff-raff, less joyous and more de'classe'.

This very thing, democracy, we vend mercilessly to a mostly reluctant world was used by the Founding Fathers to 'calm' the free spirit in the 'lesser' classes after the Revolution.

So why is that a bad thing? Maybe there was way too much of that stuff happening at one time but we're past all that! So what's the point?

The point is how we got to be the way we are now and could we have been a different, happier, freer people if we had not been fobbed-off into a fantasy world of self-improvement and civic discipline called democracy.

The common folk were anathema to the new masters, the Founders; their life styles held in low esteem. There were few exceptions among the Fathers to this class bias and in some cases they exhibited downright loathing. For example:

Alexander Hamilton found Americans "vicious" and "vile".

Samuel Adams, "a torrent of vice".

John Adams: "Indeed, there is one enemy who is more formidable than famine, pestilence and the sword". His comment on the fitness of the average American. "I mean the corruptness which is prevalent in so many American hearts, a depravity that is more inconsistent with our republican governments than light is with darkness".

The rulers feared sex slightly more than drink as a distraction from their vision of docile, productive, well-behaved subjects. This from the staunchest friend of the common people amongst the Founders, Thomas Jefferson, on why the common man should be discouraged from visiting Europe: where,'' he is led by the strongest of all human passions, into a spirit for female intrigue,...or a passion for whores..."

It would appear then, the Founders actually feared and despised the concept of democracy but used it as a device to subtly control the masses, or rather to encourage them to self control, sans a large degree of personal freedom. Of course, they themselves would have no part of it... this democracy business. Fit only for the rabble, you see.

After the Revolution and during nation-building every barrier to the voting franchise they could devise was erected to exclude the people. Gender, males only; Race, white males only; Property ownership; all were requirements for the privilege of the ballot. John Jay infamously quipped,"Those who own the country ought to govern it." Thus, every opportunity to approach or influence the seat of power was kept from the common people.

This elitist spirit prevails even today in the bizarre Electoral College barrier between us and our direct vote for the Chief Executive.

Just a few years after the end of a bloody war waged partially in response to onerous taxation by the English Crown, the new elites resorted to the same tactic. A tax was levied on the production of alcohol to make it harder for the masses to obtain it cheaply, and thus, discourage drinking. The Patriots had reacted to the Crown levies with rebellion as did the farmers who made the whiskey. The result: more bloodshed, as the militia was called to force the taxation on the new (small 'p') patriots.

For a definitive, in depth, study of the history of the choice we've been offered between personal freedom or democracy, see, A Renegade History of the United States by Thaddeus Russell. Professor Russell has gone past the bounds hagiographers seldom dare cross in examining the covert motives of the Founders and what we may have lost as a result.