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> Besides Hamilton, they absolutely did not. How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men? Land owners of a certain acreage, loo

• salawat 6y ago
  >How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men? Land owners of a certain acreage, looks like only 6% of the population fit that bill [1]. Aristocratic comes with way more baggage than what you describe; and you only have to look at jolly old England to see that. To be an Aristocrat. You had to be landed, but you also had to fit somewhere in the Peerage or established Nobility. That whole system of class stratification? That came with an entire Parliamentry House in the form of the House of Lords. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords Where you ended up with the privilege 0f being a 0art of it being determined entirely on whether you were born in "aristocratic class". That was quite literally considered the norm in most European countries at the time. Nobility was mum. Some Men just had a better lot in life. You got born into it, and it came with an entirely different social scene, responsibilities, perks, culture etc from 80 to 90% of the rest of the population. That was normal. If you were in, you had weight in policymaking far beyond the common man, you were Nobility. You could read, you could count, your family had proved their mettle, you were a treasure "revered" by your National edifice by definition, because you were noticed. Then this crazy colonial bunch of States pops up, and all you have to do to have a say. Or participate in a major way in running the place is to get some land (cheap, and basically free in the sense you won it with sweat equity in those days), not be a slave to the regional authorities, and be able to show up to your communities meetings. That's it. If you were literate, you could end up getting picked to hoof it off to Congress, which at that time didn't pay anywhere near as generously as it does now, and would have to leave your life in the hands of your family, for weeks at a time. This was revolutionary at the time. Was there racism? Yes, absolutely, but there was no Aristocracy. There was no hard division of the classes of citizen like you'd get elsewhere. The landholding requirement was not onerous like it is now, and in fact, our history is filled with dead National Banks in part because people realized that they tended to disrupt the egalitarian baseline since financial institutions like such tend to end up being resource consolidation points away from the individual Citizen. Jeffersonian Democrats were particularly sensitive toward this issue. Even Hamilton at his worst imagined not an official Nobility, but that events would inevitably conspire to generate a class of "Merchant Princes" in America whose wealth allowed the to devote resources to exercising an oversized influence in the operation of Government, a reality we are arguably seeing, but has actively been fought against at other times in our history. We've had 100% tax rates in the United States. The whole "no blacks" arose not out of a formal Aristocracy, but out of the set of compromises that kept the country operating as a single unit. The South needed it to stay functioning. And even then, for the time, it was revolutionary as wide a swath of the population had as recognizable a chunk of input as they did. Over time, things have only gotten more accessible, but they had to start somewhere. From the standpoint of a fledgling bunch of ex-colonies banding together, that made sense. Get land? Cool, you aren't going anywhere, enjoy your vote. You didn't have phones for pools, mails and mass printing for distribution of campaign materials, and you had to have your affairs in order enough to have the "leisure time" to meaningfully participate. They basically wrote down as a requirement as broad a se f ignition of voting base as wasn't unworkable controversial at the time.
  • heimatau 6y ago
    > Aristocratic comes with way more baggage than what you describe; and you only have to look at jolly old England to see that. To be an Aristocrat. You had to be landed, but you also had to fit somewhere in the Peerage or established Nobility. That whole system of class stratification? That came with an entire Parliamentry House in the form of the House of Lords. You never answered my question, "How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men?" My point still stands as historically sound. The founders/govt were upper-middle class by England's standards and they recreated a very similar aristocratic structure here in the 13 colonies but with the founders at the top. My point can also be supported by how State Legistatures would pick Senators, the electoral college, lifetime appointments to SCOTUS, lack of term limits on Congress and POTUS. These are all putting power in a select few. The select few aren't as wealthy as England's elites but the founders were very rich (the elite of American society).
    • salawat 6y ago
      Apologies for all the typos by the way. Trying to get these written during breaks/downtime, and Autocorrect is making life interesting. >You never answered my question, "How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men?" I actually did, but the typos may have minced it. You say they created a System where the vote only went to "certain white men". You're not really appreciating how wide that swath was. I offered the example of the House of Lords (peopled by actual aristocrats) as a contrast point. The Peerage and Nobility is intrinsically woven into the concept and definition of English social and civic life. There is no 1:1 mapping of that same characteristic in the United States. There is no Aristocracy. You look at "only landed white men" could vote, and don't realize how drastically that diverged from the European cultural baseline. These landed white men didn't even have recognized and venerated and chronicled names. That was a revolutionary disbursement of power at the time. Johnny sets up a homestead, he gets to vote. Lack of suffrage for everyone else wasn't even mainly an issue of "Everyone without it is inferior;". It was chosen for it's uncontroversial nature amongst the founders and their contemporaries. They were building a Nation, remember, and the seed of Unity had to start somewhere. It's an example of incremental value delivery. They needed some edifice capable of doing the things Governments was expected to do, which means they needed to start building that kernel of "get things done" that people could buy into and go with. So that's what they did. Amongst themselves they built the most revolutionary, egalitarian government they could at the time. They also built in the measures whereby all the assumptions and policies they enacted to create unity at that time could be modified by popular consensus as times progressed. Just as a plant starts with a Seed, so too did the Nation in that group of upper class white men, who wasted no remarkably little time on the Nation State scale of time expanding suffrage. voluntarily, I might add. As to Senators being appointed by State legislatures, that was due to fundamental changes in what the role of the Senate is. The Senate was not intended to be reflective of "the People" at all. It was meant to represent the interest of The State's themselves where "The State" here is defined as the respective government apparat put in place by the People of each State. Each State determined how voting for State Senators was done, and to my knowledge, at the State level, it is still direct election by the voting population at large. So you had that level of people expressing their confidence in someone to take on the mantle of overseer of the fundamental architecture of government. However, when it came to the Federal level, it was delegated to the State apparatus to choose the ones among their number most well-versed and capable of not only representing their State's interests, but balancing them against the competing interests of other States. Without mass media, this arrangement made sense. You wouldn't know a Senatorial candidate from the other side of the State from Adam, but other State Senators would. If you look at the patterns the Founders favored, it was always balances. Everyone gets to weigh in on overall direction, but the nagging details get handled by a smaller more deeply versed group with longer tenures/more experience because the devil is in the details. Start with the widest workable suffrage everyone could agree on, landed men who could show up and weren't deemed impossible to accommodate by the culture of the time, and have faith that men's good nature would see that spread wide in short-order; with a hedge against men's worse vices through deemphasis and deglorification of public service. It was a different world back then. Just as kids growing up today will seemingly never know a U.S. before 9/11 screwed everything up, so too was the Overton window different back then. Human beings are as much victims of the constraints imposed by the physical, economic, and social environments of the Times they Live In. The accomplishment, and great Humanitarian Gift of the Founders, was the Founding of a Nation whereby with Unity would come prosperity, safety, good fortune and freedom for all if only men endeavored to keep it so, and drive it in that direction. History is full of the stories of how things didn't go to plan, but it is also full of examples of a Great Nation giving rise to Great People to do Great things, even from humble origins. The Electoral College arose out of the Founders dedication to bicamerality. They trusted the population with Candidate selection, but once again, the work of figuring out who amongst the candidates was best was reserved for a small group of directly elected Electors. To them, under assumption of good nature, was entrusted the final responsibility of Conscience and wisdom into which candidate was most trustworthy to hold office. A decision best confined to smaller groups, away from the crowds. If it's a good fit, the extra step of the Electors wouldn't make a lick of difference. If it was a bad fit, but they could work a crowd, the Electors should weed out the unfit candidate. Check the Federalist papers on that one. That went sideways when national political parties came about, but that's life. The lifetime SCOTUS appointment was a concession toward attempting to keep the judiciary independent from the political arena and at least constrain the politics to appointment time. Even then, most nominations are encouraged to be of a fundamentally balanced nature, with track records that also encompass going across the aisle, and not taking undue liberty with interpretation of the law. Again, not perfect, but it mostly worked. It got us to the point where you and I are having a reasonable discussion over whether or not there was foul play at the heart of architecting things such that one or another group is kept at a severe disadvantage; which in all my research I haven't found clear evidence of. The emphasis has always been maintaining a governmental edifice that works, and changes with the mores of the time. There have been undeniable bad calls by the government in history to be sure, but those weren't "all according to plan". They were emergent reflections of society at the time, just as the chaos we're experiencing now almost assuredly is. I never in my life dreamed the American System and way-of-life could end up in the painful straits we're in, but neither did any of my forefathers when they had their civic faith tested. I shed a tear everyday, because at a minimum, the change we're experiencing is the system working as intended. Assumptions long unquestioned getting their due attention. This is it. This is the Legacy of the Founders, the marvelous machine they built, for the good or ill of their descendants. The winds o You can credibly say that it sure smells like an aristocracy nowadays, and I won't argue. Back then though? Absolutely not, and never with a clear premeditation to create an underclass, a characteristic of Greek civics they despised as I recall.