a power, is like following contemporary events. Corruption, demagoguery, cronyism, injustice, misinformation, foreign wars, and the lust for empire led to the demise of that short and limited experiment in democracy, the same fate that may await us as well.
Although it is always window-dressed, cosmetized, and down-played, the fact remains that this country was founded by a white mostly English elite who exterminated millions of the indigenous inhabitants of North America, and then proceeded to steal their land and built a country with the labor of African slaves. Such an origin should at the very least make us sceptical of our democratic pretensions.
It is true that George Washington refused to be crowned king when he could have been, and supported democratic elements in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. But is also a fact that he denounced the free speech of the Democratic-Republican societies that grew up in 1790s to spread the republican ideals of the Revolution as ôtantamount to government buy the 'Mob'ö, to which biographer James MacGregor Burns wryly quips ôso much for a participatory democracyö (Burns and Dunn 2004).
Until the time of Lincoln there had never been any members of Congress or the Government who did not belong to the elite. Sounds a bit like Karl Marx's dictum that bo
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