The founders created a representative government with a limited franchise and express protections for private property and economic liberty, precisely because of the concerns over populist democracy. That's why they provided for an electoral college rather than direct election of the president, and for senators to be selected by state legislatures. The push towards making that republican system more democratic started half a century later with Jacksonian democracy and expansion of the franchise, culminating in the early 1900s with direct election of senators and extending the franchise to women.
None of this is new or edgy. Just read the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist papers and you'll see more or less the same debate play out. Hell, here in 2024 we're still having a debate about political control over the central bank, which started in the founding era!
> That's still voting, which is the portion Thiel wants to remove.
The founders themselves provided for a narrow franchise!
> But based on other comments where you call Republican dismantling of the US government right now just "Orwellian doublespeak", you're just couching a bunch of your right-wing tendencies
What is being dismantled? Executive agencies and ancillary entities that are 90% controlled by democrats regardless of who wins the election. There's nothing anti-democratic about that!
I'm not "couching" anything. I'm quite openly right wing! But the right-wing guy won the election, promising to do right-wing things! The entities that are preventing him from doing right-wing things definitionally are anti-democratic. Put differently, what some people really mean when they say "democracy" is "liberal democracy." A system of government where the people are allowed to vote for massive taxes to pay for universal healthcare, but not for mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
It's not just about who is the "head" of the agency. In practice, the career civil service has tremendous power and discretion to run the agency; political appointees can't do much without their cooperation.
And the career civil service overwhelmingly is Democrats. 85% of federal employee donations went to Kamala Harris, 90% of you exclude the DOD: https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2024/11/federal-employees-.... The proportion of republicans in AOC's district in the Bronx and Queens is more than twice as high as in the federal government outside the DOD. And given that federal workers tend to be highly educated, and more educated people tend to be more politically ideological, you get a federal government that's a true monoculture.
Certainly, we can debate about the degree to which the career civil service zealously carries out the agenda of the current elected administration. I suspect it depends on the agency. What's disturbing to me is the people who think the career civil service should serve as a "check" on the elected administration. These are the people who cite political appointees overruling career civil servants as itself an example of "dismantling democracy." They are the ones who cheered on civil servants who declared their "resistance" to Trump in 2017 at the start of his term. This view--which I think is fairly widespread--nakedly embraces the idea that "democracy" is where one party always runs the government, and that electing a President from the other party simply means that he gets to cajole and try to persuade civil servants into carrying out some of his agenda.
What's great about voting is that it gives the government a mandate from and therefore legitimacy to the electorate. It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
Even theoretically that's not true. But if we stoop to the pragmatic, sometimes they win without even a majority of those still not disillusioned enough to stop voting.
>It has nothing to do with little kids' aspirations to be a leader.
If not that, then there's nothing about voting that I give much of a shit about. Nor do tens of millions of others. And if he helps to rain destruction upon such systems as you would create, then more power to him.
You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
It seems like maybe you read my "it has nothing to do with X" as meaning "it is not desirable if X." Otherwise not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
>You don't think it's theoretically or pragmatically true that elected leaders are constrained/guided/informed by the feedback generated by elections?
A "mandate" isn't what you just described above. It's always true that those who weasel their way into office have been influenced by someone or someones, but to call that a "mandate" when it amounts to some tiny non-majority fraction of the (even voting age) population is bizarre. Is this some meme joke that I'm just clueless about, because it's difficult to take you seriously.
>not sure what warranted that hysterical response.
An even hand typed the words with a calm heart, and no other emotion other than exasperation. Your takes are pretty far from reality.
The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s. They were not infallible, nor was the system they created.
That's why they created mechanisms for evolving that system.
Except we rarely do. "But Constitutional Amendments", people say.
Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.
Everything is very selective. Infallible when we want it to be. "Oh they didn't mean that/like that" when we want. And completely ignore other parts as inconvenient.
> The founding fathers were often in their (often early) 20s.
The youngest delegate to the Constitutional convention was Johnathan Dayton of New Jersey, who was 26, and there were three more under 30. There were more over 60 than than under 30.
The people that are frequently cited as being "Founding Fathers" in their "early 20s" (or "between 19 or 21, because we're not sure exactly when he was born", in Hamilton's case) are people who were that age in 1776 and ended up playing an important role. But the Constitution was drafted more than a decade later -- there was a war, plus time under the first system of government under the Articles of Confederation in between.
> Actually, one of the doctrines of the founding fathers was that the whole system should be reviewed, head to toe, every 10-20 years.,
No, that was not a "doctrine of the founding fathers", it was a belief of Thomas Jefferson expressed later in a letter to, as I recall, John Adams, specifically (the upper limit of the period at which he held any law or constitution needed to expire was actually 19 years, based on actuarial data and a set of assumptions he had about what was necessary and acceptable in terms of avoiding the living being ruled over by the dead.)
You can tell it was not a widely held "doctrine of the founding fathers" (or, more to the point, of the Framers, who are the ones actually relevant to the Constitution, though the two groups have considerable overlap) because instead of expiring by its own terms in 19 years or less, the Constitution was permanent, with a very difficult method of amendment, and that method of amendment was specifically barred from changing certain parts.
There weren't really very many widely shared "doctrines" of the Founders or the Framers. They weren't a hive mind or a cult or even a group as ideologically aligned as the coalition that makes up either of the US's current major political parties. The idea of shared doctrines or a single unifying vision behind the Constitution are mythologies created after, and requiring deliberate disregard of, the facts.
They certainly were not infallible, but the question is whether they were unwavering advocates for democracy.
All of the restrictions they put in place, such as the electoral college and who was able to vote at all, along with the writings we have, suggests as a group they were not.
