As for the idea of democracy, the Founding Fathers — Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and others — never conceived of it solely as an external form of government. The meaning of democracy was always rooted in a vision of human nature as both fallen and perfectible — inwardly fallen and inwardly perfectible. To a significant extent, democracy in its specifically American form was created to allow men and women to seek their own higher principle within themselves. Without that inner meaning, democracy becomes, as Plato and Aristotle pointed out twenty-five hundred years ago, a celebration of disorder and superficiality.
— Jacob Needleman, The American Soul