Good response to interesting article
I mailed a link to this article to a lawyer friend (and classmate). His reply:
The article has an interesting perspective which, while not without its truths, seems to me to be a little too far over the economic right in its analysis.
Jefferson for one, as I’m sure you know, was a left-wing radical for his day, hoping for an agrarian, small-town republic not dominated by money interests; and Franklin is famous for a quip to a lady inquiring about what the convention had wrought with the reply, “A republic, Madam if you can keep it,” (Franklin in fact candidly doubted it would be kept.)
Moreover, while the Electoral College and other devices (such as property limitations on voting) were designed to insulate the republic somewhat from “the mob,” the Founders could hardly have failed to understand the democratic implications of the structure they had built and the realpolitik logic it would have to follow.
The addition of the Bill of Rights (a condition for ratification by New York, among other states) certainly strengthened the democratic thread of the constitutional fabric.
Of course, it’s also true that the Hamiltonians beat out the Jeffersonians in the initial economic structure of the new nation, but John Adams was the first, last, and only Federalist President, allowing Jefferson a latitude that eventually led to Andrew Jackson and the much further democratization of the government.
So I think the article—again, while not without its kernels of truth—reflects a bit of wishful thinking and cynicism about the true range of the Founders’ thinking. Its principles, I’m sure they realized, had an inexorable logic of their own, despite the threads of financial self-interest of the well-propertied the document was partly designed to protect.
