Voting isn't democratic. It's oligarchic.

Supplement it with democratic practice

Many people supporting either candidate in tonight's presidential debate claim that, in this election, democracy itself is on the ballot. But democracy has little to do with the ballot.¹

Aristotle, Machiavelli, Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau agree: elections are not democratic institutions. They are aristocratic or oligarchic ones. We haven't outsmarted these philosophers, and our experience hasn't proven them wrong.

As most people know, the American founders hated democracy.² They drafted a Constitution that would discourage it. They were far more successful than most people realize.

This post offers a quick look at the history of elections and the philosophy regarding elections, and it offers some democratic alternatives—or democratic supplements—to the vote.

I hope you vote. I did in last week's primary elections. If you vote, though, I hope even more that you supplement your vote this fall with democratic practice.

The founders were successful at discouraging democracy

All historians of the American founding recognize that the founders despised democracy. Most of them recognize that the founders ratified the Constitution, complete with two elected branches and a judicial branch, in part to prevent public passion that the founders associated with democracy.³ Representation in the legislative and executive branches, the founders believed, mediates between public reason and public passion. In theory, it would work like this, according to a Federalist essay by James Madison:

But it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled by the government.⁴

From the founders' standpoint, the story goes, something went wrong soon after the Constitution's ratification. Most historians seem to think that, despite the elections that the Constitution set up to move public debate from localities to Congress,⁵ democracy somehow arrived anyway. In his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, historian Gordon S. Wood makes himself a recent champion of this view:

Well before 1810 many of the founding fathers and others, including most of the older leaders of the Federalist party, were wringing their hands over what the Revolution had created and most American citizens were celebrating: American democracy.⁶

This claim that the Constitution's republicanism had inadvertently brought on democracy has the advantage of contemporary testimony. As Wood points out, many early nineteenth-century Americans believed that they were living in a democracy, and some talked and wrote about it. But what was the nature of this democracy? How did it differ from republican civic virtue that the founders thought they were inculcating through the Constitution? Wood seems to respond:

Instead of creating a new order of benevolence and selflessness, enlightened republicanism was breeding social competitiveness and individualism; and there seemed no easy way of stopping it. Since at the outset most revolutionary leaders had conceded primacy to society over government, to modern social virtue over classical public virtue, they found it difficult to resist people's absorption in their private lives and interests.⁷

I agree with Wood: the Constitution encouraged "people's absorption in their private lives and interests." But is this absorption into private life democracy?⁸ Is the early nineteenth-century expectation that, in Wood's words, "each person was supposed to pursue his own private interests, and the pursuit of private interests was the real source of the public good"⁹ —is that a democratic philosophy?

Hannah Arendt, a political theorist, would disagree with Wood’s characterization of democracy and answer no. Her approach to government is situated in the democracy of the Ancient Athenian polis, a place where private interests were physically and philosophically separated from the public good. As Arendt points out, the notion of people absorbed in their private lives and interests gave rise to the Greek word from which the English language derived "idiot."¹⁰

Like Wood, Arendt wrote a book on the American Revolution and its aftermath, and On Revolution's chief claim of policy (perhaps its only claim of policy) is that the United States Constitution should be amended to encourage everyone's participation in what might be called micro-local government. She endorses Thomas Jefferson's plan to involve everyone in civic life, "not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day," as Jefferson puts it.¹¹

Jefferson, Arendt, Mumford: democracy must have concrete organs

Arendt and Jefferson aren't alone in their concern over Americans' limited civic action. Like Jefferson,¹² the historian Lewis Mumford celebrates the direct political participation of citizens in the New England townships, and he faults the Constitution for not perpetuating it:

. . . the failure to grasp [the political importance of the township and the failure] to continue it—indeed, to incorporate it in both the Federal and State Constitutions—was one of the tragic oversights of post-revolutionary political development. Thus the abstract political system of democracy lacked concrete organs.¹³

The concrete organs in the Constitution are republican ones, but they are not also democratic ones. Consequently, the nation's founders' focus on representative government was more effective at suppressing democracy than Wood gives it credit for.

Seven ways voting discourages democracy

How does voting discourage democracy? First, when we vote, we may picture ourselves somewhat hazily as members of the political covenant the founders made with one another and with their political posterity. This is somewhat misleading: the founders weren't known for their voting. They were known instead for debating, legislating, and acting. They were known, in other words, for their active involvement in what they called "public happiness."¹⁴ In contrast, the average voter serves in private affairs while their representative enjoys the American covenant, just as the founders did, by exercising public liberty. Our hazy sense of continuity with the founders on Election Day keeps us from enjoying the founders’ public life.

Second, the nonstop political campaigns we're subjected to focus our civic life on one moment a year at a polling station. The campaigns ask us to vote for a candidate or a cause, and they might also ask us to persuade others to do the same. Naturally, based on this constant reinforcement, when we vote, we think we've done our entire civic duty (assuming we're also up to date on obeying the law).

Third, voting as a ritual amounts to an annual reaffirmation of the surrender of our civic life to our representatives. In this respect, voting doesn't differ from mailing in one's proxy to a stockholders' annual meeting that one won't attend. Consequently, we rarely exercise our public muscles.

Fourth, getting elected to office in America takes a lot of money, and many people and entities that give large sums of money expect to be rewarded for it. Elections—American elections, anyway—undermine the public’s trust in legislative bodies, and the public opinion polls consistently reflect this distrust.

Fifth, elections, especially at the national level, usually come down to two candidates. This binary choice flattens public discourse and displaces opinion with its corrupt cousin, political ideology.

Sixth, elections strip citizens of agency. Elections take public discourse out of communities of interpretation where people can interact in person and come up with solutions together over time. Elections put public matters in the hands of representatives, and citizens are left to discuss politics in the abstract, knowing that they can have no real effect on their own public world.

Seventh, elections often lead to aristocrats and oligarchs, such as plutocrats, holding office.

Expanding officeholding and suffrage doesn't lead to democracy

If the Constitution discourages democracy, what about the franchise's later expansion in turn to white men with no property, to African American men, and to women? Hasn't that increased democracy? Yes, but only indirectly.

Because our system makes the franchise the most important indicia of citizenship, everyone should have it. Those denied it have rightfully fought for it. In fact, the limitation and suppression of the vote has caused many people to enter civic life in more democratic ways than voting. For instance, people organized, marched, spoke in public, petitioned, and involved themselves in nonviolent action to obtain the vote for themselves and for others.

I would therefore offer these distinctions: voting is aristocratic, but waiting in long lines to vote because of the closure of polling places in minority neighborhoods is democratic. Voting is aristocratic, but working to end partisan poll watching is democratic. Voting is aristocratic, but fighting gerrymandering and partisan voter purges is democratic.

Wood holds, however, that the expansion of the vote and of who holds office increases democracy. Wood points out that paid officeholding opened the doors for common people to hold office. He points out also that by 1825, all but three states had extended suffrage to all white males irrespective of their property holdings.¹⁵ However, political philosophers have noticed that, in the past, the extension of the franchise and of officeholding to common people didn't lead to democracy.

Machiavelli, for instance, retells Livy's surprising story of an extension of such officeholding. When the Roman plebeians finally won the right to hold tribunal offices, the plebeians themselves continued to vote for the patrician candidates for these offices.¹⁶ Likewise, James Harrington, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, expresses his amazement that, despite Venice’s free and fair elections, ". . . electors tend to vote repeatedly for the same prominent individuals or distinguished families," in historian Bernard Manin's words.¹⁷ In both cases, the writers were surprised that the expansion of suffrage or of officeholding reinforced an aristocracy or an oligarchy.

But undemocratic means lead to undemocratic ends.

Adams and Jefferson on aristocracy

Correspondence between two prominent founders shows how their understandings about the relationship between elections and aristocracies are similar to Machiavelli’s and Harrington’s understandings.

The subject of aristocracy seems calculated to disrupt their recently renewed friendship. Aristocracy, after all, came up during their years as political foes when they took turns beating each other to become president. The Federalists painted Thomas Jefferson's Republicans as democrats who would would lead the country to anarchy. The Republicans tarred John Adams's Federalists as aristocrats and monarchists who would lead the country to monarchy.¹⁸

But here they are, in 1813—early in their renewed correspondence that would continue into 1826, the year they would both die—discussing aristocracy. In 1813, both men claim to hate aristocracy. Consider Adams's crusty, Enlightenment-Era-sized subordinate clause deriding both aristocrats and the rest of humanity who "become their Dupes":

When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence, and on the other hand, the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks . . .¹⁹

This account of Adams's hatred for aristocracy might have surprised Jefferson's Republicans, were they to have read it.

Likewise, Adams's Federalists might have taken pause at the "Sage of Monticello"'s admiration²⁰ for what he calls a "natural aristocracy" based on "virtue and talents." (Jefferson hates another form of aristocracy, which he terms an "artificial aristocracy," one based on "wealth and birth.")²¹

Jefferson: American voters pick good aristocrats

Jefferson himself seems to assume that voting goes hand-in-hand with an aristocracy. In arguing for his distinction between natural and artificial aristocracies, Jefferson claims that American voters have instinctively acted on his new distinction for years. He thinks Americans generally vote for the good aristocrats—his "natural aristocrats."

Jefferson is rarely a full-throated defender of the new Constitution, but he loves how it creates, in his opinion, a good aristocracy. In fact, Jefferson goes so far as to argue that the best form of government "provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government."²² America's federal and state constitutions, Jefferson thinks, "leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff."²³

The people, in general, "will elect the really good and wise," Jefferson says.²⁴ That is, more often than not, the people will elect members of the natural aristocracy, not members of the artificial aristocracy. Jefferson praises America's system of elections because it creates a good aristocracy.

Aristotle: elections are tools of aristocracies and oligarchies

To an extent, Jefferson channels Aristotle. Jefferson's distinction between a natural and an artificial aristocracy matches Aristotle's distinction between an aristocracy and its degenerate stage, an oligarchy. (Aristocracy, of course, is rule by nobles, or the "best," while oligarchy is rule by any small group.) Like Jefferson, Aristotle associates elections with aristocracy:

If, then, election for magistrates for their wealth be characteristic of oligarchy, and election for merit of aristocracy, there will be a third form under which the constitution of Carthage is comprehended; for the Carthaginians choose their magistrates, and particularly the highest of them—their kings and generals—with an eye both to merit and to wealth.²⁵

Through elections, Aristotle thinks, a people can institute either an aristocracy or an oligarchy or something in between. To use Jefferson's terms for this distinction, Aristotle thinks that people can institute a natural aristocracy or an artificial aristocracy or a blend.

Adams: elections lead eventually to “a Monarch and Master”

Adams, who doesn’t buy Jefferson's distinction between two kinds of aristocrats, thinks America's elections produce something like Aristotle's Carthaginian blend, at least for the present.

But in the future? Using Jefferson’s terms for the sake of argument, Adams thinks Jefferson's "natural aristocrats" lead to a government by "artificial aristocrats" when "Corruption in elections becomes dominant and uncontroulable." Then worse things happen: rivalries among powerful aristocrats necessitates a "Caesar, a Demagogue to be a Monarch and Master" to put the aristocrats in their place. But with his acerbic tongue planted in his cheek, Adams assures Jefferson that it can't happen here:

We, to be sure, are far remote from this. Many hundred years must roll away before We shall be corrupted. Our pure, virtuous, public spirited federative Republick will last forever, govern the Globe and introduce the perfection of man . . .²⁶

Aristotle and Adams, then, are less sanguine than Jefferson about the results of elections to always produce the right form of an aristocracy. They might produce an oligarchy—a government based on Jefferson's "wealth and birth"—instead. Or they might produce a tyranny.

But Aristotle and Adams agree with Jefferson that elections are an aristocratic institution.

Other famous political theorists agree with Aristotle

Until sometime after the Constitution's ratification, no political theorist seems to associate elections with democracy. Manin finds a "commonly accepted doctrine among intellectual authorities" up through the eighteenth century that elections are aristocratic in nature.²⁷

Some theorists sound like Jefferson. Montesquieu during the century before Jefferson’s and Adams's correspondence praises the common people for their ability to elect the best aristocrats to lead them. Harrington does the same a century before Montesquieu.²⁸

But Harrington’s and Montesquieu’s praise for the popular vote turns to disgust not long before the American Revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau looks at the English parliamentary elections and finds in it a form of slavery:

The English people thinks it is free, but it is quite mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of Parliament; as soon as it is elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing. The use it makes of its brief moments of liberty fully warrants its loss of it.²⁹

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: elections produce slavery

The strongest indictment of elections, however, may have come after the American Revolution from one of America's greatest friends, Alexis de Tocqueville. The title of his famous book, Democracy in America, would have repulsed many of the American founders for whom "democracy" was a dirty word. But by the 1830s, Americans understood their system of government as being a "representative democracy"—a Jeffersonian oxymoronic neologism, like “natural aristocrat.”³⁰

As his earlier compatriot Rousseau does, Tocqueville associates elections with slavery, but Tocqueville refers not just to English elections but to American elections—"democratic" elections—as well. It's worth setting out two paragraphs of Tocqueville's indictment:

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.³¹

Mull over this friend of America’s strong diction: "being in tutelage," "their own guardians," "put in leading-strings," "holds the end of the chain," "state of dependence," "select their master," and (probably the phrase most directly applicable to the effect of the vote) "extorted obedience." This state of affairs comes, Tocqueville says, from a central government elected by the people.

Democracies fill most offices through rotation, often by lots

The same big-name political theorists who find that aristocracies or oligarchies use elections to fill offices find also that democracies use rotation, usually by lot, to fill offices. Manin summarizes the evidence of associations between democracy and lot in the modern age:

The other notable fact is that political writers of the caliber of Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau should, each from his own standpoint and in his own manner, have advanced the same proposition, namely that election was aristocratic in nature, whereas lot is par excellence the democratic selection procedure.³²

Ancient Athens may be the example of democracy par excellence, and it filled most of its public offices by lot. Lots, Manin says, allow those interested in holding office a reasonable chance at doing so. Lots also signal that public duties fall on everyone, that decisions made by officeholders will be felt by those same officeholders once their term ends, that those who obey are trained to become those who command, and that those who command become those who obey.³³

Manin summarizes lots' service in a polity that values rotation and its people's civic participation:

The Athenian democracy was thus to a large extent organized, in practice as well as in theory, around the principle of rotation. This fundamental principle made selection by lot a rational solution: since a substantial number of individuals were to be in office anyway, one day or another, the order in which they acceded to those offices might be left to chance.³⁴

Democracy: people take turns being ruled and ruling

Athenian democracy wasn't really rule by the people, or majority rule, as Hannah Arendt points out. The term "democracy" was thrust on Ancient Athens by its detractors. Athens called its form of government not “democracy” but "isonomy," by which it meant "no-rule":

Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled.³⁵

Manin echoes Arendt's understanding of Athens's "no-rule" versus the characterization by the city’s detractors that, in Athens, everyone ruled at once:

The cardinal principle of democracy was not that the people must both govern and be governed, but that every citizen must be able to occupy the two positions alternatively.³⁶

How can we rotate millions of Americans in and out of office?

Speaking of holding two positions alternatively, Jefferson is able to write one letter championing elections as the way to select natural aristocrats, and write another letter championing something very much like Ancient Athens' isonomy. In fact, in a single letter to Adams, Jefferson advocates both.

Jefferson writes several letters to others, too, warning that the American republic will end if counties such as Virginia's aren't divided into wards in order for each ward's citizens (about a hundred in number) to participate directly in government.³⁷ An example of his warning sounds like the warnings advanced by the supporters of both of this year's major-party presidential candidates:

There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe, the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.³⁸

In other words, without what he calls “little republics,” America’s big republic will end.

Here's how he describes part of his plan to Adams:

My proposition had, for a further object, to impart to these wards those portions of self-government for which they are best qualified, by confiding to them the care of their poor, their roads, police, elections, the nomination of jurors, administration of justice in small cases, elementary exercises of militia; in short, to have madd them little republics . . .³⁹

Jefferson believes that these local matters are of greater moment than state or national matters, and that representatives should be sent from these little republics to state assemblies. Jefferson's plan, which I've done little more than introduce here, is consistent with democracy as well as with biblical and American federalism trans-locally.⁴⁰

Jefferson: merely voting will spell the republic's end

Why would this local democratic practice be essential for the American republic's survival? It would create active citizens, Jefferson writes to Samuel Kercheval:

. . . by making every citizen an acting member of the government, and in the offices nearest and most interesting to him, will attach him by his strongest feelings to the independence of his country, and its republican constitution.

Jefferson compares the citizen's experience of merely voting disfavorably to the citizen's local, democratic practice:

Where every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day, when there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.⁴¹

Partisans on both sides of the current presidential race seem amazed by how easily the country seems ready to turn to "a Caesar or a Bonaparte," or worse. Assuming one or both sides' fears are justified, Jefferson's own fears will have been justified, too, and—whether today’s Americans know it or not—at least partially from the same origin, the lack of daily public life in America.

Citizenship has changed from participation to validating regimes

Why did elections win out over office rotation? Our nation's large size suggests one reason, but Manin believes that rotation would be viable in America through a "multiple step procedure," moving from the local to regional and national levels.⁴² Manin’s outline is much like Jefferson's plan to create wards.

Manin rejects a nation's large size as a reason why elections have won out over rotation. Instead, he asserts that modern citizenship is far more passive than in earlier times. The change came with the elections called by medieval monarchs. Manin describes the practice of kings to demand that communities elect representatives to assemblies where taxes would be raised or other unpopular measures would be passed. The representatives would have the power to bind their electors. Manin finds that "There was in the election something like the promise of obedience,"⁴³ something Toqueville, as we've seen, also found.

Where citizenship is focused on obedience as it is with elections, we'll eventually lose our undeveloped public freedoms. But where citizenship is based on public life, Jefferson says, we need not fear contracting a Caesar or a Bonaparte.

What democratic practices can we add to our vote?

What might public life include today? A number of things suggest themselves as democratic practices, and I'll touch on a few. A lot of these suggestions involve training, and almost all involve practice. But we teach civics, don't we?

One democratic practice is to canvass in teams to learn about the needs of our neighbors. In the process, we would network among our neighbors to create relationships and the power to meet those needs.

Another source of democratic power is creative nonviolence such as Jesus advocated in his Sermon on the Mount.⁴⁴ One fascinating resource in this regard is Gene Sharp's 1973 book The Methods of Nonviolent Action. His 198 methods include public speeches, petitions, journals, mock awards, picketing, public prayer and worship, displays of portraits, vigils, singing, pilgrimages, teach-ins, walk-outs, silence, social disobedience, sanctuaries, collective disappearance, lightning strikes, boycott of legislative bodies, disguised disobedience, nonviolent occupation, guerrilla theater, and alternative markets.⁴⁵

Other forms of democratic practice include mutual aid, public lamentation, street liturgy, hospitality to strangers, indigenous public traditions, community advocacy, community art centers, carnivals, intentional communities, and anticipatory democracy.

In sum

I hope I haven't discouraged you from voting. But we have to be clear-eyed about where voting alone—voting without democratic action—has lead us and will lead us. There’s nothing less democratic than a silent majority, a people who are, as Wood puts it, absorbed “in their private lives and interests,” a people who come out of their absorption each year just long enough to pick a proxy for the public life they’ve surrendered and a caretaker for the public world they’ve neglected.

Whether or not you vote, act.

Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash

The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

1. One could argue far more plausibly that the rule of law is on this November’s ballot. “The rule of law in its deepest sense means that there is a social consensus within a society that its laws are just and that they preexist and should constrain the behavior of whoever happens to be the ruler at a given time. The ruler is not sovereign; the law is sovereign, and the ruler gains legitimacy only insofar as he derives his just powers from the law.” Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, 262.

2. The most famous Federalist essay, Madison's no. 10, for instance, savages democracy: ". . . democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." Madison, Federalist 10, in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist Papers, 76.

3. Arendt, On Revolution, 217, Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1993, 231.

4. Madison, Federalist 49, in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist Papers, 314. According to Charles Kesler, Madison means that "the deliberative give-and-take among the branches replaces direct appeals to the people as the means to decide questions of constitutional propriety." Kesler, xxix.

5. In supporting the proposed Constitution's elimination of democracy, Madison argues in Federalist No. 10 that ". . . a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction." Madison, Federalist 10, in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist Papers, 76.

6. Wood, 231.

7. Wood, 230.

8. Wood’s characterization of America’s increasingly private and profit orientation to life at the outset of the nineteenth century is possible in that great umbrella called republicanism. It is not consistent, though, with a newly founded democracy. Hannah Arendt says that “. . . the confusing and confused equation of republican with democratic government dates from the nineteenth century . . .” Arendt, 216.

9. Wood, 293.

10. Arendt, Human Condition, 38.

11. Jefferson, Thomas. Thomas Jefferson, Political Writings. Edited by Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. New York: Cambridge University Pres, 1999, 205.

12. Jefferson, 189, 213-14.

13. Mumford, City in History, 332.

14. “What was a passion and a ‘taste’ in France clearly was an experience in America, and the American usage which, especially in the eighteenth century, spoke of ‘Public happiness’, where the French spoke of ‘public freedom’, suggests this difference quite appropriately. The point is that the Americans knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and that the activities connected with this business by no means constituted a burden but gave those who discharged them in public a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else.” Arendt, On Revolution, 110.

15. Wood, 294.

16. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 119 (Book I, chapter 47).

17. Manin, 66.

18. Jaffa, New Birth of Freedom, 61.

19. Adams, Jefferson, and Adams, Adams-Jefferson Letters, 398.

20. Jefferson’s biographer Dumas Malone passes along Jefferson’s post-presidential moniker, the Sage of Monticello, as the title to the sixth and final volume of his biography.

21. Jefferson, 187.

22. Jefferson, 187.

23. Jefferson, 187-88.

24. Jefferson, 188.

25. Aristotle, 58.

26. Adams, Jefferson, and Adams, 400.

27. Manin, Principles of Representative Government, 79.

28. Manin, 67-68, 73.

29. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Of the Social Contract. In Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings, translated by Quintin Hoare, New ed., 1–133. London: Penguin Books, 2012, 92.

30. Jefferson, 218. Manin points out that “what today we call representative democracy has its origins in a system of institutions (established in the wake of the English, American, and French revolutions) that was in no way initially perceived as a form of democracy or of government by the people.” Manin, 1.

31. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 602-03.

32. Manin, 79.

33. Manin, 8-41.

34. Manin, 31.

35. Arendt, 20.

36. Manin, 26.

37. Jefferson, 183.

38. Jefferson, 197.

39. Jefferson, 189.

40. Concerning the relationships between the Hebrew Bible’s and America’s federalism, see Daniel J. Glazer’s books Kinship & Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and its Contemporary Uses and Covenant and Civil Society: The Constitutional Matrix of Modern Democracy.

41. Jefferson, 205.

42. Manin, 82.

43. Manin, 87-88.

44. Warren Carter summarizes three of Jesus’s nonviolent strategies described in the Sermon on the Mount: “. . . development of autonomous space, and disarming acts of seizing initiative from the powerful like carrying a soldier’s pack further than the stipulated mile, or handing over one’s under garment as well as the outer garment, thereby exposing the harshness of the powerful one’s demand (Matt 5:38–42) . . .” Carter, Warren. “Matthew and Empire.” In Empire in the New Testament, edited by Stanley E. Porter and Cynthia Long Westfall, 90–119. McMaster New Testament Studies Series 10. Eugene, Or: Pickwick Publications, 2011, 98.

45. Sharp, 117-433.