Well the argument for that at the time was that the only people who really received any halfway decent education were wealthy white landowning men. The idea being that education's important for comparing policy and making a good decision re: representation, or more generally that an educated populace is important for a functioning democracy.

And in that I kinda agree; an educated population is Important for a functioning democracy. While the mindset/culture/resource limitations of the time resulted in that being both discriminatory and classist, it's different today since we have universal standards of education.

Whether our current standards are good enough is a different argument

Fine, then look with even more context. You're forgetting that the founding fathers didn't actually care about white landowning men specifically, that was a product of their time. They thought of women and minorities voting back then like we think of people under 18 voting today -- so normal and "obvious" that you don't even question it.

And their writings about representative democracy and fears about the typical citizen not being qualified to make policy decisions applied to those white landowning men. The voting population was entirely aristocratic equals and yet they still didn't think direct democracy would work.

> Let's not look at a model where less than 2% of the population could vote as some brilliant stroke of foresight

Yeah umm that is just completely false.

You may be right, but that still wouldn't say anything about their decision to construct a representative democracy. It just sounds like you have an ax to grind against a bunch of dead guys.

It's still true that only about 2% of people can vote in America today. That's because it's a right restricted to members of the privileged citizen class. You might say that foreigners shouldn't vote because it doesn't affect them, but it does. America has a lot of influence over other countries whose citizens are as helpless as blacks and women back then.