American Founding Narratives, Monarchy, and Republicanism: The Largely Unsought and Incomplete Democratic Revolution

Most of these works argue that the American consensus narrative of an effortless and intentional democratic founding is an incomplete story and, in many ways, an errant one. Three of the works argue that a significant part of the founding elite continued to hold, into the 1780s, a high regard for governments like Britain's limited monarchy—some of whose institutions, especially concerning the upper legislative house and executive—they sought in part to build into the new federal Constitution. These authors contend that the Constitution was purposefully designed to retard American popular democracy, not advance it. Indeed, they find that many poor white males (as well as many others) were excluded from the ranks of the politically active in the new nation. Thus, to the extent that a broad-based democracy followed the American Revolution, it was imposed from below by popular forces on a resistant gentry population, not generously awarded from above. The hallowed "founders" mostly didn't willingly seek to advance democratic institutions; rather, they had to be coaxed to do so to preserve their political careers. It seems also from these works that how one views James Madison's stature and probity indicates whether one is a defender of the consensus democratic founding narrative.