The popular reverence for America's Founding Fathers and the US Constitution obscures a more contentious origin story, one in which the document served as a legal framework for an elite-led counter-revolution against the democratic energies of 1776. That interpretation draws a direct line from the suppression of Shays's Rebellion in 1787 to the unchecked expansion of technology monopolies and data centres in the present day.
The revolution that was curtailed
The American Revolution is often celebrated as a quintessential liberal uprising against British rule. Yet the period after Yorktown revealed deep divisions over who would govern the new nation. The Federalist Papers authors, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, explicitly opposed mass democracy. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Hamilton proposed a president serving "during good behaviour", effectively an elected monarch for life, and a congressional veto over all state legislation. The Senate, the Electoral College and a franchise limited to propertied men, roughly six per cent of the population, were all designed to restrain popular influence.
Shays's Rebellion and the veterans' revolt
The most dramatic challenge to this emerging order came from Daniel Shays, a former captain who had fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill and Saratoga. Like many veterans, Shays returned home unpaid, his farm mortgaged to finance the war effort, facing debtors' prison while wealthy coastal merchants controlled state governments. In autumn 1786, armed bands of farmers, mostly veterans, shut down courthouses across western Massachusetts to halt foreclosures. For several months they effectively governed the region.
"to march directly to Boston, plunder it, and then destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the Court enact what they please"
In January 1787, Shays led roughly 1,500 men toward the federal arsenal at Springfield. A privately financed militia, backed by Boston merchants, met them with cannon fire. Four rebels died; the rest scattered and were hunted through a brutal winter. Shays was later pardoned but died in poverty.
A Constitution built to protect property
The uprising rattled George Washington into accepting the presidency and accelerated the drive for a new constitutional order. The resulting document replaced the radically localist politics of the revolutionary era with a system designed to stabilise property relations and insulate creditors from popular pressure. The poor and propertyless were largely excluded from voting until the Jacksonian era four decades later.
That anti-majoritarian architecture persists. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which treats money as protected speech, exemplifies the logic. So does the proliferation of data centres, facilities that consume vast amounts of power and water, often against the wishes of host communities. The Stratos Project in northern Utah, backed by investor Kevin O'Leary, would immediately require more electricity than the entire state currently uses in a year. Just as Walmart expanded despite local opposition in earlier decades, the Constitution's protection of property rights over political rights enables such developments.
Class, race and the limits of modern critique
Critiques from both right and left often miss the class dimension. The 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, reframes the founding around race and slavery but, the argument runs, continues an elite storytelling tradition that sidelines class. The Bill of Rights, demanded by Anti-Federalists, did enshrine limited government and later enabled the removal of property qualifications for voting, the New Deal and other democratic advances. Yet these "negative rights", freedoms from state interference, have not prevented the concentration of economic power.
Reviving localist democracy
A path forward, the analysis suggests, lies in returning to the localist tradition the Anti-Federalists defended. That would mean enforcing dormant anti-trust law against technology monopolies, enacting right-to-repair legislation, and anchoring banks to the communities they serve rather than to regulatory havens such as Delaware. Reducing federal power over states aligns with the original revolutionary commitment to small-scale republican governance where citizens participate actively and often.
Sociologist Robert Bellah warned in 1985 that a republic organised around private accumulation forgets the language of the common good. Philosopher Michael Sandel argues that Americans have traded the citizen, who helps govern the forces ruling their life, for the consumer, who is merely ignored by them. The material conditions of the present, remote work, decentralised production, drone-assisted agriculture, may, for the first time since the revolution, make a revival of that localist democratic spirit practically possible. Whether Americans recognise their revolutionary inheritance before the counter-revolution completes itself remains the defining question.