We cannot but sympathise with those who lament the destruction of American “democracy” as they see the rule of law dissolve before them and the once revered Constitution thrown into the wastepaper basket.

They see freedom of speech, “checks and balances” and fair elections as the hallmarks of a flourishing democracy, and indeed they are some of its basic supports.

Yet American claims to democracy are flawed. Seeing democracy as a comely set of institutions approaches the topic from the wrong end. The foundation of democracy is a sacred respect for individual persons, freely united in cooperative association.

In that, the US fails from the outset. Its revered Founding Fathers, actually a band of landowning oligarchs, made room for the ownership of slaves on a mass scale: human persons with no rights whatever.

The deep puzzle remains: Thomas Jefferson, in part following the Englishman Thomas Paine, pens the Declaration of Independence, announcing the equality and freedom of all simply by right of birth. Yet over his lifetime, he owned some 600 slaves to support his lavish lifestyle at Monticello, and suffered them to be beaten at his will, although he was perhaps more lenient on those slaves who were his own offspring.

Jefferson himself was not at the Founding convention. Serving as the US minister to France, he was on a health trip in rural France and Italy when the Constitution was written at Philadelphia in 1787.

The Framers never pretended to be democrats. Mostly educated men, they were deeply influenced by their book knowledge of the ancient Roman Republic. Greek democracy was anathema to them.

According to James Madison, a central Founder, democracies were “prone to a common interest or passion”, quite without restraint. In contrast to sober republics, they were always “spectacles of turbulence and contention” being also “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property”. Although a classical scholar, Madison seems to be unaware of the Athenian legislators’ oath to protect the rights of property.

John Adams, the second president of the US, argued that democracy encouraged avarice, fraud and unruliness. Democracies “murder” themselves; there never was a democracy that did not “commit suicide”.

Madison invented a form of pluralism that would diffuse power, envisaging weak government. After all, he said, any government is a “misfortune”. Is this what Trump is fighting against? Madison was inspired by the growth, absent an established Church, of myriad religious sects, all competing for allegiance.

The Roman Republic gave the Founders the false example of controlled government through a system of checks and balances. There were broad hints for the American people in the design of civic architecture. However accurate his description, the Greek historian of Rome, Polybius, drawing from a tradition going back to Aristotle, described Rome as a “mixed constitution”; that is, a blend of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in a delicate balance. Each type was meant to restrain the others. In Rome, the Senate was undoubtedly an oligarchy (rather than an aristocracy), the citizens’ assemblies were alleged to be a democratic element (although they were almost always subject to the control of the oligarchy), while monarchic power was vested in the consulate, itself divided into a joint two-consul arrangement. Each was invested with the power to veto the work of the other, which was an invitation to instability.

This balanced constitution was drawn from the mythical cycle of constitutions, in which the three basic types were said to have in time descended into their corrupt opposites (tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule “ochlocracy”), only to be amended by the revival of good forms.

Yet the balance was illogical and impossible: each form of government tended to annihilate the preceding form. There is no democracy where there is any part of an oligarchy.

In America, the Constitution provided for a limited “monarchical” power in the presidency, restricted after Roosevelt to a maximum of two terms of office, aristocracy in the Senate, and a democratic element in the Congress.

Yet the American Founders hated democracy. They took pains to see that, while the tokenism of “balance” was there in the form of the assembly within Congress, equity in the Senate was circumscribed by the overwhelming bias towards the less populous states. Each state was assigned two senators, no doubt in the effort to persuade small colonies to join the federation. At the last census, the smallest state in population was Wyoming with 581,618 people. California had 39,431,263, more people than the 21 smallest states combined.

The most obvious and distorting evidence of this bias against the populace remains the Electoral College. At the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton with 306 college votes to 227. Clinton polled nearly three million more popular votes than Trump. That quirk of the Constitution, which Trump now wants to trash, favoured him massively.

The Constitution, embellished by its set of amendments, once assumed the form of holy writ. Reverence for it was taught in schools, hallowed in colleges, and sworn to by public officers. At the presidential inauguration the inductee swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

It is a truism to note that the Constitution itself has no army or police force to protect it. A president willing to ignore or spurn the oath may face opposition from the law courts, but neither do they hold the means of forceful coercion. Demonstrators in the streets are usually controlled with ease by forces deployed by the executive.

It goes without saying that the force of a constitution arises from the ethos of the people. A universal willingness to commit to living peaceably together inures a population to uphold the law, and to see that its leaders do likewise.

Without a written constitution, Britain has fared quite well under an ethos of obedience to the rules, written and unwritten. Boris Johnson rather broke the sequence when in 2019 he asked the Queen to prorogue Parliament to avoid criticism of his Brexit policy. With its history laced with rebellions and wars, its own constitutional experience has not fared as well as some of its erstwhile dominions: Australia, New Zealand and Canada. In Australia, the written Constitution attends to matters concerning its federation, and outlines the main institutions of state, but how these operate are subject to the unwritten ethos — “conventions of the Constitution” — inherited from the colonial power.

One has to conclude that the US is unravelling because of the breakdown in such a consensus. “The American Way” is historically not corroborated by its history. The original colonists were divided by local regimes dedicated to enhancing the wealth of their leading citizens. In so many of them, wealth was acquired through ferocious treatment of human capital – the slaves they possessed and tormented. They were no more willing, like the libertarian Jefferson, to free the slaves in their own possession. Since the slaves were mostly black, the subsequent history of the states was stained with racism and is still subject to abuse and hatred. None of this is conducive to a community of peaceful co-existence.

A bloody civil war formally ended the institution of slavery, but the hatred and contempt continued in many outbreaks of persecution.

The “democratic” impulse is submerged in an avalanche of gun ownership and a readiness to use weaponry, citizen against citizen. In 2023, 47,000 people died of gun deaths.

The interplay of factions so lauded by Madison has sunk to a ferocious ideological warfare among them. Trump and his billionaire cronies are determined to ride the conflict in favour of their own prosperity.

There can scarcely be democratic sentiment when the leader of the nation calls the governor of the largest state New**scum** — his name is Gavin Newsom_—_ promises vengeance upon his “enemies” with the full force of executive power, or where he announces that immigrants eat dogs and steal pets for food. This piece of deranged fantasy, if believable, would only underline the suspicion that the nation is not inclined to see its newest members properly fed.

America is an oligarchy snuffing out the glimmers of constitutional hope that once clung to its flawed institutions.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.