A lot of talk on here about the “end of democracy” in America. I’m confused as to when the beginning of it was. The framers abhorred democracy and saw it (correctly) as a threat to the class privileges of rich landowners. That sentiment has carried straight through to today.

The rich have always used false democracy to placate the multitude. James Madison, Federalist 10: “To secure private rights against the danger of [rebellion] and at the same time preserve...the form of a popular government is the great object to which our inquiries are directed.”

Many Americans have a basic (if underdeveloped) awareness of how racist the founders were; far fewer understand how much they despised the unpropertied classes across all demographics. Hamilton said, “The [masses] are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.”

Elbridge Gerry (5th US Vice President) referred to democracy as “the worst of all political evils.” This he said amid the ongoing genocide of millions of native people in order to acquire the land and resources for the early development of American industrial capitalism.

American history is littered with powerful voices admonishing democratic rule. Edmund Randolph, a US attorney who was the ninth governor of Virginia, said that the country’s problems were a consequence of the “turbulence and follies of democracy.”

The Convention delegates in Philadelphia debated hotly for weeks about the wording of the Constitution. But it was not a democratic debate between rich and poor; it was the factional squabbling of merchants, slave masters and manufacturers vying to defend their holdings.

Our government was instituted as the rich person’s equivalent of a union. It existed to serve the interests of the privileged class, not least of which was protection from a landless multitude whose appetite for liberty was not satisfied by the pretentious screed of landlords.

A Twitter thread is not the place to detail every piece of evidence that proves this argument. For more, read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and Michael Parenti’s “Democracy For the Few,” both still legal only because very few decide to read them.

Maintaining the illusion of democratic rule has been an essential piece to the overall maintenance of the American empire as it has developed through the centuries. The ruling class in this country (yes, there is a ruling class) has done what it wants from the beginning.

All the various iterations of progressives and socialists who’ve developed in America through the generations to resist the dominant capitalist orthodoxy arrive at the same conclusion: democratic freedom means nothing in a system designed to impose economic tyranny on the masses.

All of this is to push back on the liberal argument that workers ought to support a system of rapacious exploitation, corporate monopoly, and genocidal market expansion in order to preserve some rhetorical gimmick that gives the system a legitimacy it’s never deserved.