I always thought it boiled down to the following quote -
which I thought was from Benjamin Franklin but was then said to be from a Scot, Alexander Fraser Tytler, also known as Lord Woodhouselee:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
Now they say Tytler never wrote it at all: http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/athenian.asp http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html
Whoever wrote it, he was on to something.
I was just chuckling at the thought that maybe the founders should not have written about how the republic would fail because the communists/Marxists are doing exactly what they said to bring it about.
Did they write about how to keep it? My favorite quote of Adams’:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Message from John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massacusetts
I have a funny feeling there will never be a monument to honor him in DC.