I really don't know the answer to it, and it may not even be possible to answer it at all. There simply haven't been enough truly democratic states in history to provide us with a good sample, and there are too many other things that can go wrong in a nation that can overwhelm any simple catch-all explanation. I hope the answer is "no", but I can't really say for sure.

We know the founding fathers weren't too crazy about democracy, they mistrusted the common people, feared they might get too much power. They put together a Republic based on the Roman model, not a Democracy based on the Athenian polis, and they certainly had the classical training on which to base that decision. If you study our founding documents and early history, what you see is a self-made commercial aristocracy determined to keep power firmly in their own hands; local and commercially based (planters, merchants, ministers). These men were intellectuals, scholars, highly educated, but they were also men of action and affairs: soldiers, farmers, lawyers, businessmen, judges, politicians. Their governmental architecture was designed so no one, not even one of their own, could take over, but so power would always remain in the hands of folks just like them, but spread out so no one individual or faction could gain too much influence. By the standards of their time, it was a remarkably liberal and progressive document. It was a Government of, by and for the Gentlemen of Property. It is notable to consider the British Crown, the state they rebelled against, was one of the most "Liberal" in the world at that time, a Parliamentary Monarchy which had had its own Bourgeois Revolution over a century earlier. The founding fathers didn't care for Kings and aristocrats, but they had no love for the Rabble, either.

It is folks like them them, or at least, who fancy themselves as being just like them, who bewail the most about the inevitable damage history has done to the 18th century idea of government.

I am looking forward to reading your RWA manifesto.

PS.

My Uncle Filibert lived in Puerto Rico. He was born in Germany, and was old enough to have been in the Hitler Youth as a boy. After the war, his family escaped the advancing Soviets and resettled in Cuba. They were forced to leave that country in the early 60s by the Communist Revolution, this time settling in Puerto Rico.

The last time I talked to him, in the early 1970s, he said something to me that will always stay with me.

"You Americans used to produce Great Men. In school, we studied your early patriots, those who led the fight against the British during your Revolution. You don't produce men like that any more."