Despite much lofty rhetoric portraying the United States as a democracy (in which the people rule), this nation, in fact, has often resembled a plutocracy (in which the wealthy rule).
The confusion owes a great deal to the fact that the United States, at its founding, was somewhat more democratic than its contemporaries. In the eighteenth century, European nations, governed by kings, princes, and other wealthy hereditary elites, usually provided a contrast to the more unruly, less hidebound new nation, where some Americans even had the vote.
Even so, the overwhelming majority of Americans didn’t have the vote, which was largely confined to property-owning or tax-paying white males―about 6 percent of the U.S. population in 1789. Women (comprising about 50 percent of the population) were, with very few exceptions, denied voting rights. And slaves (about 18 percent of the population) lacked both voting rights and citizenship.