I am missing important parts of European history here. Switzerland is the oldest still-running democracy and it dates back to 1291.
The Hanseatic League was a middle-class organization supporting trade spanning much of Northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century.
Venice developed into a powerful middle-class maritime empire from the 9th century on (and if we have to appoint a single city, it can be seen as the place from which the Renaissance derived later on due to its many connections with the rest of the world).
We really need to go to the beginning and the center of the middle-ages to find the feudal system in place.
The battle for freedom is a European battle, and the US became one of the expressions of that freedom. The Founding Fathers studied Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, democracies in their days, so they did not tinker from scratch; they had examples to work with.
Your article is well written, but bleak. You found yourself a concept, and you placed the concept on top of everything you wanted to say. So, in a way, you did a good job, and in a way, you ran with it before it was developed well enough.
We do indeed have the problem of feudalism in the US because people are kept so poor that their opportunities to go elsewhere are limited. The Land of the Free is particularly free for those with the money. You make this clear, and you do so well.
If we want to move forward in a more honest and fair way, we have to bring power back to what the Enlightenment desires of us. We have to empower folks better than we do now.
In Europe, many nations give more power to their people than we do here in the US (or in the UK for that matter).
The Scandinavian ideal is based on two things in place:
They have One House and One House only; no Presidency, no Senate.
And they have proportional voting, so all voters can point their fingers to the ones they hand-picked themselves indeed sitting in a seat. We have just winner-take-all, so up to 49.9% of the voters may actually go home empty-handed. Plus we have three different parts of government that can then undermine each other, and therefore the voters.
Talking about feudalism. Our voting system contains that dominating element; it turns voters into the have's and the have-nots.
Let's change our system. The Founding Fathers gave us two ways (a hard one and an easy one). Let's take the easy way to reform our feudal voting system.
