I'm reading a book about cities from Ancient Greece and Italy. What's surprising is that almost all of them went back and forth between aristocracy ruling and democracy. The aristocracy is almost always the rich people that continue to get richer, at which point there's a revolution into democracy where the people take the property and distribute it more "fairly." A new class of rich people emerges which then becomes the aristocracy and the whole cycle begins again.

It's no wonder that before the American Revolution, most people had a very bad impression of democracy. It was almost always something like socialism/communism driven by envy.