A content warning, this episode includes depictions of torture and human degradation that some people will find hard to listen to.

I'm still thinking about that thing we heard from Woody Holton, the historian, near the end of the last episode.

Oh yeah.

The thing he said about there being attention between democracy on one hand and on the other, capital investment, economic growth, or at least in the minds of some important people.

Yeah, man. That stuck with me.

I mean, it's like more democracy hurts economic growth, right?

Because he wasn't talking about Mussolini either, right?

He was talking about what he was talking about, the framers of the Constitution in 1787.

Yeah.

That they thought that that tension was real.

Let's just play the tape again. Here's Woody Holton of the University of South Carolina.

He's a leading scholar of the American Revolutionary Period.

The authors of the Constitution believed that in order to make America safer investment, they had to make America less democratic.

They really believed that there's a continuum or spectrum between if you move the needle towards more democracy, you're going to get less investment capital.

And if you move it towards less democracy, you're going to get more investment capital.

I mean, that's so different from the mainstream thinking that at least I've heard about progress, right?

Like usually folks tie those two things together, the free market and democracy.

Yeah.

Like peanut butter and jelly, you know, or something like that.

But the idea, right, is that Americans are free economically, our markets are free, and that's the key to our democracy in the Greatness of the United States.

Yeah, I think that is more or less how we tend to think about it in the mainstream of our culture.

So what does it mean that people like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison thought you had to reign in democracy, at least somewhat, kind of keep the will of the majority in check in order to keep the country safe for capitalism?

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