The all-devouring nature of America's illusory promise of democracy then, for Bercovitch, can be traced back to this founding Machiavellian moment of argumentative genius, when a self-serving coterie of remarkably rich merchants, proto-capitalists, and slave-owning patriarchs (in order to persuade their less-well-off neighbors to fight their wars, pay their taxes, and obey their laws) constructed the colossal, inescapable chain of associations that has ruled American culture ever since: economic self-interest equals political community-interest equals historical national-interest, each of which is, by founding definition via the Declaration, thoroughly revolutionary.

Historians of the manipulation of "democracy" as an ideological cover for both political domination and unfettered capitalist self-interest have traced this strategy of argument back to the battles between monarchical state centralization and early-modern liberals in Seventeenth-Century France and England.  For example, Ellen Meiksins Wood (1991) argues in The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, that

Early European theories of "constitutionalism" and "popular sovereignty" were rooted in medieval doctrines and the feudal parcellization of the state, enunciating the claims of lordship and corporate privilege against royal intrusion.  They represented in essence the assertion of feudal power, privilege and jurisdiction against the claims of the monarchy. (p. 60)

Ruling elites quickly recognized the persuasive power of arguments that appealed to the concept of democracy, however, and sought to beat oppositional liberals and proto-capitalists to the punch by incorporating the rhetoric of democracy into their existing practices of governance.
                                                                                                                                        (P. 111)

                    Argumentation and Advocacy
                    35 (Winter 1999): 95-114