Plutocracy

An interesting discussion at the new American Interest.

From Adam Garfinkle, "Terms of Contention," which is an introduction to the debates over democracy and plutocracy in American, old and new:

The Founders, their classical educations guiding them, did not put democracy on a pedestal as most Americans do today. That place was reserved for liberty and republican government, each in its way an expression of fear of excessive concentrations of power (with Samuel I, chapter 8 serving as a proof text for most of them). Liberty meant freedom from the impositions of a cloying state, a definition dating at the least from the clash of Roundheads and Cavaliers in the English Civil War. Republican government à la Montesquieu meant protection against the kind of monarchy that sought to suborn the judiciary, the law being, in addition to the social power of the nobility, a check on concentrated royal authority. Democracy, as the term was understood, embodied a hearty capacity for abuse—for mob rule and the triumph of passion over reason to serve the ambition of the demagogue. Though to the sharp side of this point of view, Alexander Hamilton said it best on June 18, 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia: “Your ‘people’, sir, is nothing but a great beast.”

I'll have more later.