Americans have little sense of history and little sense of the brevity of their democracy — which was not designed as a democracy, but as a republic with limited franchise.
G. M. Palmer says that republicanism will always devolve into democracy, which will always devolve into socialism, but one Michael S. notes that while the difficulty of restricting suffrage permanently is true for the United States and modern Europe, it’s not universal:
The Venetian republic effectively restricted suffrage to those families listed in its Golden Book, and lasted for a thousand years. The doges were elected — albeit for life — by a complex and indirect process that makes the U.S. Electoral College seem a model of simplicity, while they were constitutionally more or less severely limited in their authority. That they were not above the law, and could be removed from office, is proved by the case of Marin Falier. The ultimate franchise always lay with the patriciate or senatorial class, as in the ancient Roman republic. Napoleon Bonaparte (a military dictator and self-proclaimed emperor), rather than creeping demotism, finally put an end to it.The relative stability of La Serenissima seems to me to stand in contradiction of [Mencius Moldbug]‘s neo-Hobbesian alternatives of absolutism or a democracy that ends inevitably in a brahmin nomenklatura riding to power on the shoulders of a lumpenprole mob. As an aristocratic republic, Venice survived longer than many absolute monarchies, and longer than the United States has existed.