Chris Hedges — Americans Face A One-Choice Election—The Oligarchy

Pulitzer-winning author and host of “On Contact” Chris Hedges joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the influence of lobbyists on establishment media in their coverage of politics and that donors, bankers and billionaires have on the US political process. He argues that the corporate elite sees Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is a much greater threat to corporate power than President Trump, which is why they are uniting so stridently behind former Vice President Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary...

Like you need to be told this. But apparently many don't yet get it. Should Biden will, they will, unfortunately.

Dandelion Salad
Chris Hedges: Americans Face A One-Choice Election—The Oligarchy

Michael Hudson — In a struggle between oligarchy and democracy, something must give

Until Nevada, all the presidential candidates except for Bernie Sanders were playing for a brokered convention. The party’s candidates seemed likely to be chosen by the Donor Class, the One Percent and its proxies, not the voting class (the 99 Percent). If, as Mayor Bloomberg has assumed, the DNC will sell the presidency to the highest bidder, this poses the great question: Can the myth that the Democrats represent the working/middle class survive? Or, will the Donor Class trump the voting class?

This could be thought of as “election interference” – not from Russia but from the DNC on behalf of its Donor Class. That scenario would make the Democrats’ slogan for 2020 “No Hope or Change.” That is, no change from today’s economic trends that are sweeping wealth up to the One Percent.

All this sounds like Rome at the end of the Republic in the 1st century BC....

Markets in everything, including political office.

Note: I am refraining from posting links to overtly political posts or articles. While Michael Hudson's post is heavily political in one sense, being about the crisis in the Democratic Party, it is more than that in that it is really a post about political economy, a discipline that has been overshadowed by conventional economics and needs to be revived. While Michael Hudson has a degree in economics and has been involved in finance professionally, it is one of the few political economists operating in this environment, more remarkably as a closet Marxist.

Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism
In a struggle between oligarchy and democracy, something must give
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

Also

Important tidbit about US politics.

"Everyone knows" that US general elections are dominated by swing states that are in play. But not many also realize that it comes down in the end to a few swing counties that are in play.

Econospeak

Who Wins Prairie du Chien Wins the White House
J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics and Business Administration James Madison University

After Neoliberalism — Ganesh Sitaraman

The last 10 years have seen the collapse of neoliberalism. The question now is, what comes next?

For 40 years, we have lived in a neoliberal era, an era defined in public policy by deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and austerity. Starting with the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions, neoliberal ideas spread to capture the center and even the left, ultimately becoming the reigning policy consensus by the mid-1990s.
But over the last decade, that neoliberal consensus has collapsed. We can now see that its results were disastrous....

The central question of our time is what comes after neoliberalism. New political paradigms emerge in response to the challenges and failures of the preceding era, and today, four possibilities for the future are emerging.

• The first possibility is reformed neoliberalism.…
• The second possibility is nationalist populism, which combines ethnic, religious, or cultural nationalism with economic populism.…
• The third possibility, which many refer to as authoritarianism, has gotten the most attention.… The better term for this third future is “nationalist oligarchy,” and Trumpism is its American variant..…
• The final possibility is that a new era of democracy will follow the age of neoliberalism.…

The neoliberal era has put us in this moment of crisis, and the central battle of our time is now between nationalist oligarchy and democracy. The fight for a great democracy will require boldness and creativity, courage and resolve. If we want to save democracy, we will first need to achieve democracy.

Insightful.

The Nation
After Neoliberalism
Ganesh Sitaraman | professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School

The End of Neoliberalism and the Rebirth of History — Joseph E. Stiglitz

For 40 years, elites in rich and poor countries alike promised that neoliberal policies would lead to faster economic growth, and that the benefits would trickle down so that everyone, including the poorest, would be better off. Now that the evidence is in, is it any wonder that trust in elites and confidence in democracy have plummeted?...

Trickle down or pissing on?

I am not sure about his blanket recommendation to restore Enlightenment values. Enlightenment values led to bourgeois liberalism in which economic liberalism dominates social and political liberalism. Neoliberalism was simply the extension of bourgeois liberalism globally though yet an other empire in thin disguise.

Bourgeois liberalism prioritizes economic liberalism over social and political liberalism based on the assumption that the former is a necessary condition for the latter two. The outcome of this is capitalism, which encompasses free markets, free trade and free capital flows, as the driver of the system. The term "capitalism" reveals that this assumes that capital will be favored over the other factors — labor, that is, people, and land, that is, the environment. The outcome was predictable unless one was wearing blinders. 

So-called democracy was a casually, even though the "democracy" of the Enlightenment was not actually government of the people, by the people and for the people, but rather representative "democracy" in which class structure, power, and wealth are determinative. That's what "bourgeois liberalism" means. Enlightenment thinkers were fearful of "the rabble" and "mob-rule," after. 

This view has persisted. John Maynard Keynes was a proponent of it, for example. See Bruce Bartlett, "Keynes Was Really a Conservative." 

“The class war,” said Keynes, “will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.”

This attitude is reflected presently in the resistance of the bipartisan Establishment that holds the reins of power jointly, passing them among themselves over election cycle, to the rising tide of populism that seeks to unseat them. This is also the attitude of the "deep state" that is now opposing populist-elected President Donald Trump in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

As far as Enlightenment values go, the American founding fathers, held up as the epitome of Enlightnment values, saw now problem with including slavery in the US Constitution, and Thomas Jefferson, not only a slave owner but also a slave breeder, saw no contradiction in penning, "All men are created equal..." in the Declaration of Independence. George Orwell would later lampoon this sentiment with, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others," in his satirical allegory Animal Farm.

We don't need a return to Enlightenment values that were flawed from the beginning and now represent that Western values that the Empire and its vassals are trying to impose through neoliberalism. We need to revisit those values in terms of the 21st century. The 18th century is long past. It was an advance at the time, but looking back to it is not the way forward now.

Project Syndicate
The End of Neoliberalism and the Rebirth of History

Joseph E. Stiglitz | University Professor at Columbia University, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former Chief Economist of the World Bank

Bill Mitchell — The obesity epidemic–Massive daily losses incurred while the policy response is insufficient

The Brexit issue in Britain has been marked by many different estimates of GDP (income) loss arising from different configurations of the Brexit. The media is flush with lurid headlines about the catastrophe awaiting Britain. As regular readers will appreciate, I am not convinced by any of those predictions. But as I said the day after the Referendum in this blog post – Why the Leave victory is a great outcome (June 27, 2016) – that when I tweeted it was a ‘great outcome’ I didn’t say that good would come out of it. I also didn’t suggest that it would be a short-term recovery of prosperity or that the workers would benefit. I was referring to the fact that class struggle now has a clearer focus within the British political debate. There is now a dynamic for a truly progressive leadership to emerge and bring the disenfranchised along with them and wipe out the neo-liberal hydra once and for all.” I think that is lost in this debate. When the British Labour Party claim the latest agreement will irrevocably damage workers’ rights or environmental protections they seem to be implying that they will never be in power again. No legislation or regulation is irrevocable in a democracy. But being part of the EU will always tie a nation to the EU’s rules which usurp any national interests. That is why I maintain strong support for the concept of Brexit. But amidst all these predictions of gloom and doom, I was listening to the radio last week and heard some statistics that are truly alarming. The on-going GDP losses from the obesity epidemic in the UK, which will increase over time rather significantly, are significant when compared to the estimates of GDP loss arising from Brexit. I wonder why that fact isn’t part of the daily narratives coming out from the Remain crowd to justify their view that the 2016 Referendum result should be disregarded so they can have another go at getting their own way!...

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The obesity epidemic – massive daily losses incurred while the policy response is insufficient
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Lars P. Syll — Esther Duflo vs Elinor Ostrom

Agnès Labrouse quote. 

The most revelant sentence: 

While Duflo and Banerjee are in line with a technocratic democracy, the Ostroms sustain a Tocquevillean democratic self-governance. For the latter, institutions emanating from democratic processes, far from being straitjackets, are the core of economic processes. They simultaneously constraint and enable human action.

Paternalism versus democracy.  That's pretty much the "compassionate conservative," liberal divide.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Esther Duflo vs Elinor Ostrom
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Capitalism vs democracy: Europe’s hard problem — Mark Mazower

Modern Europe’s political structure is based on the supposition that capitalism and democracy can be compatible – so the most urgent challenge of our times is reconciling the two.

In short, economic liberalism and political liberal generate paradoxes that require a comprehensive worldview (systematic set of presumptions) that balances social, economic and political liberalism for Western liberalism to survive.

New Statesman
Capitalism vs democracy: Europe’s hard problem

Mark Mazower, director of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris

See also

Monthly Review
The systemic crisis of world capitalism
Prabhat Patnaik
Originally published: Peoples Democracy (August 25, 2019)

On Demagogues and Democracy — Eric Schliesser

Some social & political theory. Focuses on Walter Lippmann, The Good Society.

Although Eric Schliesser doesn't mention it in this post, Aristotle discussed these issues in detail in his Politics.

Digressions&Impressions
On Demagogues and Democracy
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today) — Eric Schliesser

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The University of Chicago Press of Road to Serfdom.) But Knight articulated several major challenges to liberal self-reflection in his review of Lippmann. And some of Hayek's major contributions to the liberal self-imagine, for good and ill, can be fruitfully interpreted as responses to that review.

Digressions&Impressions
The road to serfdom before Hayek (Knight, Lippmann, and a note on Weber today)
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Nobel Economist Says Inequality is Destroying Democratic Capitalism — Angus Deaton

Should be neoliberalism is destroying the illusion of liberal democracy.

Evonomics
Nobel Economist Says Inequality is Destroying Democratic Capitalism

Angus Deaton | Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University

Trump Is Back Under Bolton’s Thumb — Paul Craig Roberts

I don't think that this quite correct. John Bolton is the frontman in the administration for casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a rabid supporter of Zionism and a major contributor to Trump's political campaign. It is not an exaggeration to say that Trump owes his 2016 victory in large part to Adelson's legal bribery.

OK, course, Trump gave no quid pro quo for the funding, so it is not bribery in the legal sense. However, anyone who thinks that political contributions, especially large ones, don't come with strings attached is very naive about how the world works.

The dilemma that Trump has faced and still face is that Adelson's money is needed for his political campaigns and this requires that he play the role that his backer demands, which ties his own hands regarding preferred policy and strategy.  This is especially the case now that the 2020 presidential campaign is upon us.

I don't see Trump caving to Bolton. I see Sheldon Adelson with a gun to Trump's temple in the form of campaign funding.

This is a big reason that for anything like representative democracy instead of plutonomy to prevail in the US, campaign finance has to be reformed, the revolving door locked, and lobbying outlawed. This would require nullifying SCOTUS's Citizen's United decision.

Complicating the problem is that this is a bipartisan issue. Electing the opposition party will not affect it, judging from the past. The lesson is that money doesn't mix with politics in a liberal democracy, not that there are any now, or have been any historically. Bourgeois liberalism is liberalism in name only.

Paul Craig Roberts
Trump Is Back Under Bolton’s Thumb
Paul Craig Roberts | formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate

Is Democracy Doomed? — Alex Tabarrok

The title might be a bit too strong. A better title might be, Is democracy all it's cracked up to be? The upshot is that the marriage of economic liberalism ("free market" capitalism) and political liberalism (democracy) may not be as efficient and effective as assumed.

If much of the allure of democracy has been higher GDP per capita then the allure has been a mistake of confusing correlation for causation. A fortunate mistake but a mistake. The literature on democracy and growth implies that there is no reason to reject an alternative history in which the world’s leading industrial economy was a nondemocracy. Nor why we could not see some very rich nondemocracies in the future–nondemocracies that would be as on par with the United States as say Sweden, Denmark and Germany are today. If that happens, the case for democracy will look very much weaker than it does now as the correlation between democracy and wealth will be broken and the causal effect more evident even to those without sophisticated econometrics.

Marginal Revolution
Is Democracy Doomed?
Alex Tabarrok | Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and a research fellow with the Mercatus Center

Bill Mitchell — The Greek colony remains in depression

On June 13, 2019, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) released its – Terms of Reference for the Evaluation of the Greek Programmes. At the same time, the head of the ESM (Klaus Regling) was lecturing Greece, which is approaching a national election next month, that it “risks missing its budget target” (Source). Apparently, as the failed Syriza government tries to gain electoral support after years of abusing the Greek people who put their faith in them, the bean counters are worried that the permanent state of austerity that the Greek colony is now being held in by the Euro technocrats (and the IMF) might be relaxed a little. Regling claimed there was “great risk” in the Greek government engaging in fiscal slippage. When you look at the data, a fiscal flood is needed not just some ‘slippage’. But such is the oppression of the colony that the technocrats are bearing down on the Government. Meanwhile, the Europhile Left continues to laud the EU as a productive arrangement protecting progressive values. It is beyond laughable....

This is a longish, detailed post that displays the underlying dynamics from an MMT POV. Lots in there.

The post also demonstrates how neoliberalism is jointed at the hip with neocolonialism through finance.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The Greek colony remains in depression
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Joseph Stiglitz — The Economy We Need

After 40 years of market fundamentalism, America and like-minded European countries are failing the vast majority of their citizens. At this point, only a new social contract – guaranteeing citizens health care, education, retirement security, affordable housing, and decent work for decent pay – can save capitalism and liberal democracy.

Three years ago, US President Donald Trump’s election and the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum confirmed what those of us who have long studied income statistics already knew: in most advanced countries, the market economy has been failing large swaths of society.

Giving "market failure" new meaning.

Project syndicate
The Economy We Need
Joseph Stiglitz | University Professor at Columbia University and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute

James K. Galbraith — Capitalism’s Great Reckoning

As the maladies of modern capitalism have multiplied, fundamental questions about the future of the world’s dominant economic model have become impossible to ignore. But in the absence of viable alternatives, the question is how to reform a system that is increasingly at odds with democracy.

James K. Galbraith looks at three recent books on the crisis in capitalism:

• Joseph E. Stiglitz, People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, W.W. Norton, New York; Allen Lane, London, 2019.
• Paul Collier, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties, Harper, New York; Allen Lane, London, 2018.
• Branko Milanovic, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World, Belknap Press, Cambridge, 2019 (forthcoming).

Project Syndicate
Capitalism’s Great Reckoning

James K. Galbraith | Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin

Luke Savage — Liberalism in Theory and Practice

Contemporary liberals are temperamentally conservative — and what they want to conserve is a morally bankrupt political order.,,,

A characteristic of neoliberalism?

Maybe I was predisposed to democratic socialism; I always considered myself to be “on the Left,” even as a teenager. In any case, it’s become clear in retrospect that watching the liberal class respond to events over the past decade has been a powerful stimulus in my politicization.

Which is to say, I didn’t acquire radical politics simply through reading Marx in college (though it certainly aided the process). Nor did I become irredeemably frustrated with liberalism merely by absorbing some abstract argument about its flaws. I didn’t have a Road to Damascus revelation while thumbing through some volume by Chomsky or David Harvey. And while I would certainly count them as formative to my political evolution, it wasn’t the likes of Ralph Miliband and Tony Benn — let alone Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn — who ultimately imbued me with a burning hatred for anything and everything that calls itself “moderate” or “centrist.”

No, that instinct owes much more to watching Barack Obama summon forth a tidal wave of popular goodwill, then proceed to invite the same old cadre of apparatchiks and financiers back into the White House to carry on business as usual despite the most punishing economic crisis since the Great Depression; to seeing the “war on terror” become a permanent fixture of the global landscape long after its original architects had been booted from the halls of power, courtesy of supposedly enlightened humanitarians; to witnessing a potentially monumental hunger for change be sacrificed on the altar of managerialism and technocratic respectability. It comes from watching a smiling Nick Clegg stand next to David Cameron in the Rose Garden at Number 10 Downing Street before rubber-stamping a series of lacerating cuts to Britain’s welfare state and betraying a generation of students in the process; to seeing the dexterity by which Canada’s liberals gesture to the left then govern from the right; and from seeing the radical demands of global anti-austerity movements endlessly whittled down and regurgitated as neoliberal slam poetry to be recited at Davos by the hip young innovators du jour.

These triangulations, and many others like them, helped me realize that the malaise was the product of a congenital trait rather than a temporary blip. The problem, in other words, wasn’t that contemporary liberalism was failing to live up to its ideals, but that it was living up to them all too well....

Bourgeois liberalism.

In theory, modern liberalism is a set of ideas about human freedom, markets, and representative government. In practice, or so it now seems to me, it has largely become a political affect, and a quintessentially conservative one at that: a set of reflexes common to those with a Panglossian faith in capitalist markets and the institutions that attempt to sustain them amid our flailing global order. In theory, it is an ideology of progress. In practice, it has become the secular theology of the status quo; the mechanism through which the gilded buccaneers of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and multinational capital rationalize hierarchy and exploitation while fostering resignation and polite deference among those they seek to rule....

Jacobin
Liberalism in Theory and Practice

Luke Savage

See also

In France, however, there is no centrist opposition or alternative left. Macron won by ingesting and replacing the decayed remnants of all the parties of the centre left and centre right, and even so he only won 24 percent of the vote in the first round of last year’s presidential elections. For liberals, he is literally the only game left in town. If he is defeated in the next presidential elections in 2022, then as things stand today, the overwhelming probability is that the next French president will be Marine le Pen of the National Front (or “National Rally” as it now calls itself).

With this, conservative nationalism would move into the very heart of European politics, and the European Union in anything like its existing form would cease to exist. Moreover, at this point, the main French opposition would become the Marxist (but equally anti-EU) left-wing movement of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s “Unbowed France” (La France Insoumise). If this becomes the only real choice left to French voters, then liberal democracy will be dead and democracy of any kind may not survive for much longer.

Well, maybe not neoliberal "democracy" of bourgeois liberalism. That is a far cry from democracy of any kind.

Otherwise, it is a useful article.

Valdai Club Discussion
The French Fifth Republic: Sinking Fast, with No Lifeboat in Sight

Anatol Lieven | professor at the campus of Georgetown University in Doha, Qatar, Associated Scholar of the Transnational Crisis Project, Chair of International Relations and Terrorism Studies at King's College London, and Senior Researcher (Bernard L. Schwartz fellow and American Strategy Program fellow) at the New America Foundation, where he focuses on US global strategy and the War on Terrorism,

Philip Giraldi — The War Against Globalism

There have been windows in history when the people have had enough abuse and so rise up in revolt. The American and French revolutions come to mind as does 1848. Perhaps we are experiencing something like that at the present time, a revolt against the pressure to conform to globalist values that have been embraced to their benefit by the elites and the establishment in much of the world. It could well become a hard fought and sometimes bloody conflict but its outcome will shape the next century. Will the people really have power in the increasingly globalized world or will it be the 1% with its government and media backing that emerges triumphant?

Western elites are gearing up for war against Russia and China while facing domestic revolutions at the same time. The historical dialectic in action.

Strategic Culture Foundation
The War Against Globalism
Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, now Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Paul Antonopoulos — AGAINST DEMOCRACY: U.S BLASTS DONBASS ELECTIONS AND THREATENS SANCTIONS

When elections don't go the way the US wants.

On Monday, the United States called the election of leaders and parliamentarians in the self-proclaimed people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk a “farce,” according to a spokeswoman for the US State Department, Heather Nauert.

On Sunday the two self-proclaimed people’s republics held elections for leaders and parliamentarians. Turnout in Donetsk reached 80.1% of voters, while in Lugansk the number was 77%, according to the central constituency committees of the republics.…

Fort Russ News
AGAINST DEMOCRACY: U.S BLASTS DONBASS ELECTIONS AND THREATENS SANCTIONS
Paul Antonopoulos

Benjamin I Page, Jason Seawright, Matthew J Lacombe — What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest

A new study reveals how the wealthy engage in ‘stealth politics’: quietly advancing unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative policies...

How can this be so? If it is true, why aren’t voters aware and angry about it?

The answer is simple: billionaires who favor unpopular, ultraconservative economic policies, and work actively to advance them (that is, most politically active billionaires) stay almost entirely silent about those issues in public. This is a deliberate choice. Billionaires have plenty of media access, but most of them choose not to say anything at all about the policy issues of the day. They deliberately pursue a strategy of what we call “stealth politics”.

We have come to this conclusion based on an exhaustive, web-based study of everything that the 100 wealthiest US billionaires have said or done, over a 10-year period, concerning several major issues of public policy.... 

Our findings help illuminate how the political network assembled by the Koch brothers could have become so powerful. The Kochs have had a fertile field of less-well-known conservative billionaires to cultivate for hundreds of millions of dollars in in secret, unreported contributions. The Kochs’ entrepreneurship and organizational skills, together with stealthy contributions by these little-known billionaires, have produced a political juggernaut.

Both as individuals and as contributors to Koch-type consortia, most US billionaires have given large amounts money – and many have engaged in intense activity – to advance unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative economic policies. But they have done so very quietly, saying little or nothing in public about what they are doing or why. They have avoided political accountability. We believe that this sort of stealth politics is harmful to democracy....

The Guardian
What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest

Benjamin I. Page, Fulcher professor of decision making; Jason Seawright, professor of political science, and Matthew J Lacombe, PhD candidate in political science, all at Northwestern University and co-authors of Billionaires and Stealth Politics (forthcoming 2018, University of Chicago Press)

See also

Le Monde — Le Blog de Thomas Piketty
Le Monde » and the billionaires

Thomas Piketty

William Hogeland — What Did the Founders Mean by “Democracy”?

The thing that almost all of the framers really agreed on is that a broad franchise for electing representatives makes things too responsive to the popular will; and that even where the franchise is appropriately, in their view, restricted to white men with sufficient property, with even more property required for standing for office, a legislature unchecked by a more elite upper house still makes things too responsive. New ideas were out there. They urged not direct democracy but access to the representative franchise for unpropertied men, as well as the establishment of representative legislatures unchecked by upper houses. The framers disparaged those ideas as “democracy,” along with the state legislatures in which those ideas found expression and the people pushing for them.

Hogeland posts here

What Did the Founders Mean by “Democracy”?
William Hogeland