Apologies for all the typos by the way. Trying to get these written during breaks/downtime, and Autocorrect is making life interesting.
>You never answered my question, "How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men?"
I actually did, but the typos may have minced it. You say they created a System where the vote only went to "certain white men". You're not really appreciating how wide that swath was. I offered the example of the House of Lords (peopled by actual aristocrats) as a contrast point.
The Peerage and Nobility is intrinsically woven into the concept and definition of English social and civic life. There is no 1:1 mapping of that same characteristic in the United States. There is no Aristocracy.
You look at "only landed white men" could vote, and don't realize how drastically that diverged from the European cultural baseline.
These landed white men didn't even have recognized and venerated and chronicled names. That was a revolutionary disbursement of power at the time. Johnny sets up a homestead, he gets to vote. Lack of suffrage for everyone else wasn't even mainly an issue of "Everyone without it is inferior;". It was chosen for it's uncontroversial nature amongst the founders and their contemporaries. They were building a Nation, remember, and the seed of Unity had to start somewhere. It's an example of incremental value delivery.
They needed some edifice capable of doing the things Governments was expected to do, which means they needed to start building that kernel of "get things done" that people could buy into and go with. So that's what they did. Amongst themselves they built the most revolutionary, egalitarian government they could at the time. They also built in the measures whereby all the assumptions and policies they enacted to create unity at that time could be modified by popular consensus as times progressed. Just as a plant starts with a Seed, so too did the Nation in that group of upper class white men, who wasted no remarkably little time on the Nation State scale of time expanding suffrage. voluntarily, I might add.
As to Senators being appointed by State legislatures, that was due to fundamental changes in what the role of the Senate is. The Senate was not intended to be reflective of "the People" at all. It was meant to represent the interest of The State's themselves where "The State" here is defined as the respective government apparat put in place by the People of each State.
Each State determined how voting for State Senators was done, and to my knowledge, at the State level, it is still direct election by the voting population at large. So you had that level of people expressing their confidence in someone to take on the mantle of overseer of the fundamental architecture of government. However, when it came to the Federal level, it was delegated to the State apparatus to choose the ones among their number most well-versed and capable of not only representing their State's interests, but balancing them against the competing interests of other States.
Without mass media, this arrangement made sense. You wouldn't know a Senatorial candidate from the other side of the State from Adam, but other State Senators would.
If you look at the patterns the Founders favored, it was always balances. Everyone gets to weigh in on overall direction, but the nagging details get handled by a smaller more deeply versed group with longer tenures/more experience because the devil is in the details. Start with the widest workable suffrage everyone could agree on, landed men who could show up and weren't deemed impossible to accommodate by the culture of the time, and have faith that men's good nature would see that spread wide in short-order; with a hedge against men's worse vices through deemphasis and deglorification of public service.
It was a different world back then. Just as kids growing up today will seemingly never know a U.S. before 9/11 screwed everything up, so too was the Overton window different back then.
Human beings are as much victims of the constraints imposed by the physical, economic, and social environments of the Times they Live In. The accomplishment, and great Humanitarian Gift of the Founders, was the Founding of a Nation whereby with Unity would come prosperity, safety, good fortune and freedom for all if only men endeavored to keep it so, and drive it in that direction.
History is full of the stories of how things didn't go to plan, but it is also full of examples of a Great Nation giving rise to Great People to do Great things, even from humble origins.
The Electoral College arose out of the Founders dedication to bicamerality. They trusted the population with Candidate selection, but once again, the work of figuring out who amongst the candidates was best was reserved for a small group of directly elected Electors. To them, under assumption of good nature, was entrusted the final responsibility of Conscience and wisdom into which candidate was most trustworthy to hold office. A decision best confined to smaller groups, away from the crowds. If it's a good fit, the extra step of the Electors wouldn't make a lick of difference. If it was a bad fit, but they could work a crowd, the Electors should weed out the unfit candidate. Check the Federalist papers on that one.
That went sideways when national political parties came about, but that's life.
The lifetime SCOTUS appointment was a concession toward attempting to keep the judiciary independent from the political arena and at least constrain the politics to appointment time. Even then, most nominations are encouraged to be of a fundamentally balanced nature, with track records that also encompass going across the aisle, and not taking undue liberty with interpretation of the law. Again, not perfect, but it mostly worked. It got us to the point where you and I are having a reasonable discussion over whether or not there was foul play at the heart of architecting things such that one or another group is kept at a severe disadvantage; which in all my research I haven't found clear evidence of. The emphasis has always been maintaining a governmental edifice that works, and changes with the mores of the time.
There have been undeniable bad calls by the government in history to be sure, but those weren't "all according to plan". They were emergent reflections of society at the time, just as the chaos we're experiencing now almost assuredly is. I never in my life dreamed the American System and way-of-life could end up in the painful straits we're in, but neither did any of my forefathers when they had their civic faith tested.
I shed a tear everyday, because at a minimum, the change we're experiencing is the system working as intended. Assumptions long unquestioned getting their due attention. This is it. This is the Legacy of the Founders, the marvelous machine they built, for the good or ill of their descendants. The winds o
You can credibly say that it sure smells like an aristocracy nowadays, and I won't argue. Back then though? Absolutely not, and never with a clear premeditation to create an underclass, a characteristic of Greek civics they despised as I recall.