As with everything that's wrong with the country, thank you president Reagan.

So, a significant chunk of the founders were very skeptical of democracy and saw the risks of demagoguery. Their answer unfortunately tended to be to let the rich run things, because rich people (like themselves) would be more likely to be public minded and not selfish. That’s also, one might say, why the president has as much power as is allocated to that office independent of the legislature - initially, some wanted a king - and why the senate has more power than the house, and senators were not originally determined by popular election. The 17th amendment was passed in 1913.

They made a few other mistakes, too. Although some people (notably including Washington) saw the threat of political parties (which might in fact be an inevitable aspect of democracy), they also thought that the self interest of office holders would be to their office - president vs house vs senate vs judiciary, federal vs state governments - and did not foresee that people would instead find their self interest in their party, which would coordinate across all of those boundaries.

They also carried the enlightenment ideal of people being rational self interested actors who could deliberate and put aside self interest for the good of the country. Adam Smith himself said as much.

It comes down to selfishness versus tribalism versus what David Singer calls the expanding circle of inclusion (family, tribe, city, nation, humanity, ecosystem).

The founding fathers never conceived the complete lack of morals and character from a majority of the leaders of our country. I'm pretty sure they planned on a revolution long before we got to this point.

That ship has sailed. 🚢

I've been saying this for years.

This government was setup with several base assumptions. One was a minimum level of societal expectation from those in power positions. And along that same expectation, only white male land owners would be able to vote. This meant that there was a base expectation that a voter had enough time to stay informed of current events, and to be educated about politics so they could have have an informed opinion worthy of a vote.

We have removed many state nearly everyone has the right to vote and voice their desires and expectations, but nothing was done about the other side of this societal equation.

Instead of only men with the available time and societal expectations to be actively political, stay educated, and up to date; now everyone has an equal chance to voice their opinion, whether or not they have any education about a topic, pay attention to politics at all, or even know how any of our government functions beyond filling out a bubble on a piece of paper next to a letter of the alphabet they believe they identify with. The barrier to entry for voting is essentially non-existent compared to what the system was originally designed with.