Exploring Adams' Issues With Democracy

Many Americans might be surprised to learn that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution includes the word “democracy.” The gentlemen-authors of those documents conformed to an 18th-century understanding of the term and regarded the prospect of rule by the people as tantamount to anarchy. It took decades of political, economic and social change to redefine democracy away from an inherently unstable form of government and make it the bedrock of American politics. Or so goes the usual historical narrative. According to Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, however, the notion that “the United States is a democracy today” is as much a myth as the assumption that the founding generation ever wanted it to be one.