When you are looking for answers to today's problems, a short detour into the past can be very useful. Aristotle's Politics is still a useful touchstone in an era of instant world-wide communications, and civilization destroying nuclear weapons. The "democracy" he feared was rule by the rabble/poor, just as he feared oligarchy or rule by the rich. A storng, vibrant middle class underpinned the best form of government.

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As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Use and Abuse of History, "Man . . . cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him."

Yet there are so many Americans today whose knowledge of our nation's past runs to a few platitudes from our nation's Founders and Framers barely remembered from history class, and the misquotes of their favorite radio or TV pundits. Their lack of real knowledge about our nation's history, and about its Founders, allows them to be manipulated by mountebanks like David Barton and Congressman Paul Ryan into believing their lies and misstatements, and voting against their own best interests.

One of these misstatements involves the fear and contempt with which men like Washington, Madison and Adams purportedly viewed democracy, and the existence of factions.

Much of the source of this fear arose from the Founders' reading (and misreading) of Aristotle's Politics, together with their study of the histories of Plutarch, Thucydides, Livy and other classical authors, and those authors' descriptions of the political turmoil in ancient Athens and Rome.

What did not occur to our Founding Fathers was to question either the personal biases of those ancient authors, or to carefully define for some future reader what they meant when they used the terms "democracy" and "faction" in their writings and speeches.

I don't think the Founders could have foreseen a day when "educated" individuals would never have read any of the works of classical Greek and Roman authors. Nor could they foresee that their own thoughts would be abused and misappropriated by unscrupulous individuals for their own gain.

In this they were probably being somewhat naïve.

When Aristotle wrote of democracy, a careful reading of his Politics shows that he was writing of government by the poor, or "mob rule" as some would say in modern parlance, not what we mean when we use democracy in its modern context.

When we speak of democracy today, we are speaking of a constitutionally limited government, in either a form of a federal republic, a limited monarchy, a parliamentary system with proportional representation, or some combination of the three. In all of these cases, the government at all levels is dependent upon either a direct or indirect form of democratic election for most if not all of its offices and legislative representatives.

Aristotle in his Politics wrote of the constitutionally limited government as being the best form of government available. There was a caveat to this. The state had to have a middle class which could either by itself, or with the aid of one of the other two classes (rich and poor, although the middle class being able to accomplish this by itself was his ideal), keep the other class from changing the state into an oligarchy (if the rich dominated) or mob rule (if the poor dominated). The innate relationship between a strong, vibrant middle class and a stable constitutional government was one of Aristotle's axiomatic ideas, which he delved into deeply:

"Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes [poor or rich], or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant. The reason [for failure of these states when established] is that the middle class is seldom numerous in them, and whichever party, whether the rich or the common people [poor], transgresses the mean and predominates, draws the constitution its own way, and thus arises either oligarchy or democracy [mob rule]." Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, Chapter 11; translated by Benjamin Jowett.

I was fortunate enough to read Politics on my own as a junior in High School. The relationship between a strong, vibrant middle class and a stable, constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic underlies the foundation of much of my political thought and philosophy. The expansion of that economic class to include the largest percentage of our nation's population possible is one of my ultimate political goals.

I would argue that there are five, not three, different economic classes that exist within a society. They are: the poor; the lower-middle or working class; the middle or small business/managerial class; the upper-middle or professional class; and the wealthy or upper class. (I could possibly use a variation of Karl Marx's descriptions of poor, proletariat, petite bourgeois, bourgeois, and capitalist classes, but I do not think that they are fully descriptive of today's economic reality.

The size, income and power of these classes vary significantly according to both historical era and geography, and the names that I have given to them are not fully descriptive of their actual economic function or demonstrable ability. A factory worker who solders the same ten connections together, or forms the same sheet metal car fender using a stamping machine, should at this time be considered lower middle class, not poor, in my estimation. But a century ago, such a menial, repetitive position would have counted him among the poor.

I believe that it is our ability to aspire to a real choice for better things for ourselves, our class, and our children, which actually spells the real difference between the attitudes of the five classes -- especially the working and professional classes -- more than any other circumstance.

When the lower middle or working class is hopeful; when it sees a bright future for itself and its posterity; then it is indeed part of the middle class. When the upper middle class sees that it is growing in size; and that there is real upward mobility though out the system; and there is real turnover in the upper class and it is not a hidebound aristocracy of a few families of old money; then it too is part of a thriving middle class.

On the other hand, if the working class is filled with despair, and sees a dark future for itself and its children, then they will believe themselves to be part of the poorest class. If the professional class is stagnant in its size, limited to a few professions (physician, attorney, military officer, engineer, architect), and has no real hope of joining the wealthy upper class except by marriage or accidental good fortune; then the professional class considers itself (falsely) to be a part of the wealthy or upper class.

The first option is the far more optimistic and positive of the two choices for a constitutionally limited government in any form. The second option will, as Aristotle points out, invariably lead to a dictatorship or an oligarchy.

Sometimes you only have to keep in mind that some knowledge is so self-evident that we have been aware of it for almost two and one-half millennia.

"The mean condition [middle class dominance] of [constitutionally limited] states is clearly best, for no other is free from faction; and where the middle class is large, there are least likely to be factions and dissensions." Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, Chapter 11; translated by Benjamin Jowett.

I feel certain that George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison read Plutarch's Parallel Lives with horror and revulsion. These were primarily the stories of the men under whom the factions developed in Athens and Rome, which ultimately led to the fall of Athens' democracy and Rome's republic.

What these three Founders did not realize, and what modern scholarship has shown, is that the factions developed when the commercial interests in Athens and Rome had acquired so much economic power at the expense of those city-states' middle classes, that together with the aristocracy, a de facto oligarchy came into existence. In Rome, this was primarily composed of the patrician Senate -- which held much of Rome's land, and equites or Knights -- who represented Rome's commercial interests.

In 133 B.C.E., Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus was elected to be Tribune of the Plebs, an office which gave him the ability to propose laws in Rome's Plebeian Assembly, even against the Senate's wishes. Gracchus then attempted to take back much of the illegally expropriated public lands from the patricians and equities that they had begun to use when they bought the farms of dead legionaries from their families. He did this in the hope of resettling some of Rome's urban poor as farmers on these lands. (Under Roman law, farmers were allowed to use a limited amount of public land adjacent to their own farmsteads. When the patricians or equites bought a dead legionnaire's farm, they acted as if those public lands were an actual part of the land they had bought. This soon placed them over the amount of public land that any one citizen was permitted to use under Roman law.) Tiberius Gracchus had good reason to do this: Rome depended on those yeoman farmers to provide manpower for their legions. The steadily decreasing number of yeoman farmers had led to serious shortages of manpower for the legions in his lifetime.

This was the start of the bitter factional fight between the oligarchic optimates, and the pro-middle class populares in the Roman Republic. It led to multiple civil wars, assassinations, and some of the worst political double dealing ever seen in the history of Western Civilization. It was not settled until Octavius defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C.E.

When men like George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison read of such destructive political in-fighting in Plutarch's Lives, there is little wonder that they looked upon political factionalism as an evil to be avoided at all costs.

But two of our other Founding Fathers knew better: that it was not political factions themselves that were to be avoided; it was rather that the factions must never be permitted to develop such a deep gulf between them as existed between the optimates and populares of Rome. Those two men were arguably two of the nation's--and possibly the world's--finest politicians at the time -- Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

In any human undertaking involving more than three people, you have factions. If you and a group of your friends go to dinner, there will be a faction that wants one restaurant, another faction that wants to go to a second restaurant, and one or two of you who want to go to a third. Negotiation and compromise ensues, and you agree to go to one of the proposed eateries, unless an alternative comes up that is more agreeable than the others.

Benjamin Franklin was the master of pragmatism and patience. In the negotiations with King Louis XVI of France and his ministers, he lacked the financial inducements required to hurry along diplomatic negotiations. So he charmed Louis's court and Queen, never making a serious faux pas while waiting for something positive to develop in America. When General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777, he saw his opening, and concluded an alliance with France that gave America the money and matériel it needed to fight the British Crown. When it came to negotiating the peace treaty in 1783, he made certain that America asked of England only what England was willing to give. Nor did Franklin permit America to succumb to the temptation to surrender any of America's significant gains from England to France in the name of the French alliance. In attaining this diplomatic triumph, he had to outmaneuver the English, the French, and -- in some cases -- his fellow Americans, John Adams and John Jay.

Thomas Jefferson was the expert at bringing individuals with opposing viewpoints together for dinner, and then steering them towards the outcome that Jefferson thought most desirable. He recognized that men could honestly arrive at, and at the same time have, conflicting views about the same subject. The secret was to prevent their ideas from becoming intransigent, so that some compromise might be reached that encapsulated the greatest good for all.

Jefferson realized what most of the other Founders did not: that faction would always exist within a political system; that the secret was to keep both sides from hardening their positions so they continued to speak to each other. He put it best in a letter written June 1st, 1798, "An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry."

Jefferson had a distinct advantage over George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison: a long and varied political career: from Virginia's prewar House of Burgesses, to its governor during the Revolutionary War, ambassador to France, as well as his time in the Continental Congress. He instinctively understood what they did not: that the real danger to a constitutionally limited government was not factionalism per se, but the intransigent factionalism that Aristotle had experienced in his lifetime in Athens, as well as the factionalism that represented by the nearly constant threat of civil war in the Late Roman Republic.

The "Revolution of 1800," which saw John Adams defeated as President and Thomas Jefferson elected, demonstrated the difference in outlook of the two men. Adams, who feared factionalism, had established during his term one of the most vicious factions in American History, which would not tolerate dissent in matters of speech, the press, or even by members of Congress. Adams' administration used the Alien and Sedition Acts like a club against his political opponents, proving once and for all the need for the Bill of Rights. (This brings to mind one of my own observations of humanity: we condemn most strongly in others what we despise most in ourselves.)

President Jefferson did not shut down newspapers, or arrest opponents like his predecessor. He answered with letters of rebuttal by his own hand, or those of trusted friends like Madison and Monroe. John Adams' high-handed actions had inspired men like Aaron Burr to consider founding their own nation in the West, which Burr then attempted to carry through after his murder of Alexander Hamilton. In contrast, when Thomas Jefferson left the White House in 1809, he left a country whose divisions were more by geography than party.

When we limit our knowledge of history and the other social sciences to the snippets of information we hear on the radio or television, or read in newspapers, magazines and on the Internet, we do ourselves and our country a grave disservice.

This is in part because there is so much disinformation being disseminated out there -- blatant falsehoods, cherry picking of information, and taking the information out of the context in which it was originally given.

It is also in part because of our own lack of curiosity in attempting to discover what is fact, what is falsehood, and what is merely opinion. My opinions of Franklin and Jefferson stated above have been formed through thirty plus years of reading about these two gentlemen, including large parts of their published papers. My more recent readings (or re-readings) include: Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787, by Catherine Drinker Bowen; Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, by Thomas G. West; Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, by Gore Vidal; What Would Jefferson Do? A Return to Democracy, by Thom Hartmann.

My curiosity concerning the 30 years of our nation's founding -- which I start with the Boston Massacre in 1770, and end with the "Revolution of 1800," and Jefferson's election as President that year -- has been unabated since I read about Ethan Allen, Nathaniel Green, and Daniel Morgan in third grade.

I do not expect everyone who reads this article to become as obsessed as I am with the history of our nation's founding. Much of the public's disinterest in the social sciences falls at the feet of the teachers in our public schools. They teach history, government (political science), psychology, philosophy, etc., by rote, rather than as an interdependent whole. Pedantic, and with no real connection given to today's world, is it any wonder these are everyone's favorite classes to sleep through?

As American citizens, we have a duty to overcome the disinterest of our youth, and learn what we can about our nation's founding from every possible source. When we have done so, it is a moral imperative that we use our knowledge to preserve our "constitutionally limited, democratically elected, representative republic."

I believe that Aristotle would approve.

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'