The Founding Fathers Were Against Democracy Because It Was Really Anarchy In Disguise; They Chose System of Governmental Control.

When the United States was born, the Founding Fathers were adamantly against democracy and sought to establish a republic.

Their goal was to create a nation that would be strong, upstanding and committed to a fair deal for its entire population.

They were even in many respects opposed to democracy as the following quote attests. 

“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49.”

– Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, author of the Bill of Rights.

The Founding Fathers looked high and wide for the most reasonable system to put in place for the new country that was to become the United States.

But they found in history only reasons to avoid democracy, at least in its literal sense, as one of the worst forms of government ever to be attempted.

It is for this reason that the United States Constitution does not refer to a democracy.

What it does say is that the United States should guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.

Getting Down to the Facts

The Poor Report Card of “Real” Democracy

The difficulty in comprehending the stated attitude that the Founding Fathers were against democracy in our society today is that we have different motions of the word democracy.

When we speak of democracy, we associate with it motions of proportional representation, freedom of speech and other civil liberties.

When the Founding Fathers spoke among themselves of democracy they referred to what they had seen at the time.

But this meant democratic experiments in European countries where mob rule resulted in the deaths of a number of people without justification, without logic and without any purpose other than irrational hate and fear.

Reasonable Compromise Instead of Unreasonable Ideals

However, when we look for what the public generally associates with democracy today, even if it is not in the literal sense of the word democracy, we have something that is close to the ideal of the Republic as envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

This holds the key to why the Founding Fathers were against democracy

We have the ideals of balance and of separation of powers, with a fair and just representation of smaller states as well as larger ones.

The Refusal on Democratic Tyranny or Anarchy

When using the word democracy, one needs to be careful in the exact meaning that is attributed to the word.

It is all too easy to associate different meanings and to use the word to cover up a number of dubious actions, as in the tendency over the last decades for U.S. presidents to send troops into foreign countries to uphold ”democracy”.

The word has become a catchall term and an excuse for imperialism and a bizarre form of colonialism.

Societies that try to use democracy in the literal use of the word are typically doomed to failure.

Societies that apply democracy in the sense that the Founding Fathers associate with a republic have a much greater chance of surviving.

However in this case it is not a democracy, it is a republic.

The founders of the United States were aware of the danger of a literal democracy degenerating into tyranny.

That is why the Founding Fathers were against democracy in the true sense of the word.