One of the great contradictions of American life is that we think of ourselves as a democracy, a model for the world, but one with a profoundly rich elite that exercises enormous influence over politics. Although we often feel (correctly) that democracy is eroding in the United States, we shouldn’t forget that, despite our image, our state was never designed to be a democracy. Our situation, in which an insanely rich oligarchy is nudging aside the last remnants of popular power, emerges from the governmental structures that James Madison and his fellow Founders intended. It was no accident, as the vulgar Marxists used to say, that our first president was one of the richest guys in the newborn country.

Madison, born into the Virginia slave-holding planter elite, made plain in the Federalist Papers, the essays he coauthored with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to secure ratification of the new Constitution, that the system he helped design was meant to protect the few against the many. In the most famous of these essays, Federalist No. 10, he argued that economic inequality did not arise from exploitation or inherited privilege but from natural differences in human talent.

Madison took the logical next step from this understanding: he rejected democracy outright. A pure democracy would be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” Instead he argued for a republic governed by elected representatives, which would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.” The aim would be to guard against “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” For Madison and the other Framers, the danger to be guarded against was not the power of economic elites — which is the class they came from — but the threat to those elites posed by the mob.