From Gordon S. Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different:
Americans, Adams now believed, were as driven by the passions for wealth and precedence as any people in history. Ambition, avarice, and resentment, not virtue and benevolence, were the stuff of American society. Those who argued that Americans were especially egalitarian were blind to reality....
Only a handful made their way to the top in this ferocious struggle for superiority, but unfortunately there was little guarantee that these few would be men of talent and virtue. The republican hope that only real merit should govern the world was laudable but hollow....
It seemed that noting meritorious in those who reached the pinnacle of society except their ability to get there. And once on top the few would seek only to stabilize and aggrandize their position by opprssing those below them. Those on the bottom of the society, meanwhile, driven by the most ambitious, would seek only to replace and to ruin the social leaders they hated and envied....
The English Crown had not been, as many in 1775 believed, the source of colonial America's corruption and factionalism after all. social struggle and division were endemic to every society, and America possessed no special immunity....
It was impossible, said Adams, to reconcile the "diversity of sentiments, contradictory principles, inconsistent interests, and opposite passions" of America "by declamations against discord and panegyrics upon unanimity...." "Nothing," he said, "but Force and Power and Strength [in the form of a powerful, disinterested Executive] can restrain them."
