Democracy Is No Bulwark Against Oligarchy

None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams; he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766, and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve, lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.” Six years after he ended his presidency (the weakest part of his legacy), Adams wrote that “the Creed of my whole Life” had been that “No simple Form of Government, can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power. Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism, Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy.”

By this time in his life, Adams had come to believe that the ideal government balanced democracy against elements of monarchy and aristocracy. Adams is widely judged (by the conservative writer Russell Kirk, among others) to have evolved after the American Revolution into a conservative apologist for privilege. There’s plenty of evidence for that view, including Adams’s ridiculous suggestion, as vice president, that President George Washington be addressed as “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of the Rights of the Same.” Adams’s successor, Thomas Jefferson, was so appalled by two ornate coaches with silver harnesses that Adams left behind that Jefferson refused to keep them, much as Jimmy Carter would later cut loose the presidential yacht Sequoia, used by every president back to Franklin Roosevelt.

“I think his experience in London, where he was American ambassador during and especially immediately after the war in the 1780s, really shaped his opinion about oligarchy,” Holly Brewer, Burke professor of American history at the University of Maryland, told me. “He became more comfortable with it.” The carriages, pulled by six horses, were “modeled after how the king traveled in London,” Brewer said.