The Unintended Constitution

How Gordon Wood's thesis of the unintended and ironic Constitution has become reality in the minds of political commentators:

Do “the protection of slavery, the restriction of suffrage and so on” mean that “the framers’ constitution represented values that Americans should abhor or at least reject today”? I’m not so sure. It is certainly the case that many of the framers had values Americans today abhor and should and do reject. I tend to support those who argue, however, that most of those values were not, in fact, found in their Constitution...

...Yes, the Framers as a group were afraid of what they thought of as democracy; feared the masses and did nothing specific in the Constitution to enfranchise them; and had ideas about citizenship and virtue that were interesting but also deeply problematic... Yet it’s also the case that the ideas of self-government they derived from liberalism and republicanism turned out, in practice, to be intensely democratic. In other words, whatever they thought about “democracy” at the time, and whatever their own personal prejudices about elites and masses may have been, what they actually put into the Constitution was extraordinarily democratic. [The New Republic]