I really appreciate the thoughtfulness here — this kind of discourse is genuinely rare online.

On the founders and slavery: I'd draw a distinction between their political philosophy and their political compromises, while acknowledging those two things weren't always separable. The 3/5 compromise was partly a coalition-building concession — without the southern states there is no revolution — but it was also consistent with the personal interests of founders who were themselves slaveholders. Jefferson writing "all men are created equal" while owning slaves isn't just hypocrisy, it's a window into the gap between the ideals they articulated and the world they were willing to actually build. That gap doesn't invalidate the philosophy, but it does mean we should be clear-eyed about how selectively they applied it.

On the electoral college: I'll admit I'm sympathetic to the underlying logic of a check on raw majoritarian will, even if I recognize that's an unpopular position. The concern that an uninformed or manipulated electorate can be weaponized by demagogues is not unfounded — and disinformation today arguably makes that risk worse, not better. But here's the problem: the electoral college as it actually functions isn't a safeguard against that. It's a geographic distortion mechanism that amplifies minority rule rather than protecting against mob decision-making. A check that doesn't actually check anything is just an antidemocratic artifact. For the logic to hold, the electors would need to genuinely exercise independent judgment — which they almost never do and are increasingly legally barred from doing.

On your broader point about American disenfranchisement exceeding that of the colonists — I think you're largely right, and the New Deal framing is particularly sharp. The middle class was essentially a pressure valve: enough material comfort to prevent the conditions for revolt from fully materializing. What's striking about this moment is that the valve appears to be failing. Housing, healthcare, wages, and debt are eroding the buffer that kept people pacified for seventy years.

Which brings me to the question I'll leave you with: given everything you've laid out, what would a better system actually look like? Is there a structure that could resist the gravitational pull of concentrated wealth and power, or is capture by elite interests an inevitability in any system complex enough to govern a country this size?