At Mt Rushmore from one of the viewing areas is a set of quotes from each president.
For G Washington: “... this is an experiment.”
So does this mean that every Republic — every attempt to bring citizens into political decisions by ballot will degenerate into democracy and from that into centralized tyranny?
The Founders tried to mitigate that by the Electoral College and limited participation (landholders) but that did not stand the centralizing forces.
Bruno Leoni in Freedom and the Law suggests that a completely independent judiciary (English Common Law, Roman Law, Irish Law) could control that force.
Maybe so. America's had quite a good run compared to the typical republic.
One point of interest: Rome had a more than four hundrd year run. In Roman law, property rights were all-but absolute. One of the things that did in Rome was too many freeholders falling into debt traps and losing their land. They eventually formed the core of the "deserving poor" that got the brad and circuses.