You can drop the Marxist "landed gentry" stuff, owning a piece of property does not make one landed gentry. As you yourself pointed out, a solid two-thirds of Americans own their own home. Those two-thirds are far from being gentry, landed or otherwise.
Here's the point behind this entire debate.
The Founders' idea was that an informed voter, with skin in the game, made for the best voter, and since there as no direct taxation of incomes the tax revenues necessary to run the government came primarily from property owners and owners of businesses, these individuals, directly impacted by all laws and statutes passed by elected public servants, had a vested interest in understanding the policy and governing ideas of political candidates, and opted to keep taxation and governmental interference with private enterprise to a low.
People who did not own property or owned a business had no reason to inform themselves of the issues and political ideology of candidates, since those decisions seldom affected them. Their votes, if allowed to be offered, would be based on nothing but guessing, limited knowledge, or influence by the popular media of the day... does this have an ring of familiarity? This notion that limiting the vote to "landed gentry" (your words) would be a bad thing and offensive to liberty is very much a collectivist view of society, and frankly quite mistaken. It is in fact the best way to preserve liberty. The practice of trading votes for entitlements was one that the Founders wanted to avoid in the American system of government, since it would corrupt the political process and destroy liberty by subjecting the minorities (those with above average wealth) to the whims of an omnipotent majority when it came to taxation. That is the very antithesis of a Constitutional Republic.
Obviously, universal suffrage became the rule of law, driven by the Jeffersonian ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and here we are today. with less liberty than those people enjoyed prior to suffrage, higher taxes, and a runaway entitlement system (voted into existence by voters who supported politicians based on the "what will you give me in exchange for my vote?" line of thinking) so out of control that it is now being used as a center piece to attract people from other countries to come here and live off of it, so that politicians can manipulate a polity that will support further expansion of that entitlement State by trading votes for gifts from the public coffers, where those coffers are filled with the wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
So, the greater danger to liberty, and the system that has in fact turned us all into slaves to the State via a national debt created by the State is the Universal suffrage system that's in place right now, not the original vision of the Founders long dead.
I'm glad the term "landed gentry" stings - it was supposed to.
Your willful historical blindness is surprising. In every country where the vote has been denied to a significant portion of the populace, war has inevitably broken out once the subjugation by those with the vote became unbearable. Was South Africa peaceful, were individual liberties generally respected, during Apartheid? Was India peaceful, were individual liberties generally respected, in India prior to independence in 1947? Was Russia peaceful, were individual liberties respected, in Russia prior to the Revolution? Was the Soviet Union peaceful, were individual liberties respected, between 1917 and 1989? Was East Germany peaceful, were individual liberties respected, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall? Do I have to go on?
Are there risks from universal suffrage? Of course there are. Not the least is the risk, evident in some countries of late, that the voters will elect authoritarians who then seize power and abolish the vote. But those risks pale into insignificance in the face of the bloodletting that inevitably takes place if a significant portion of the populace is denied the vote.
If African Americans had been allowed the vote back in 1789, do you think they would have long consented to remain slaves? Do you think the Civil War would have been inevitable as it was in that circumstance?
When a significant part of a country's populace is denied the vote, the only civil rights or individual liberties that get respected are those of the remainder who do have the vote.
As to the wisdom of property owners: every single democrat in Congress is a property owner. Are they informed of the issues of the day and attuned to the protections of individual liberty? Barack Obama owns property; is he a paragon of wisdom because of that? Tom Steyer is a very substantial property owner; is he in the least bit fully informed of the issues and does he take prudent, responsible positions on those issues?
The existence of the current entitlement system is the death-knell to the myth that property owners are, qua property owners, wiser and better at making political decisions that affect everyone, including those who do not own property. Why? Because it was created by property owners: the property owners in Congress and the majority property owners in this country who nonetheless support the members of Congress who set that system up. Property owners are the majority in this country and therefore the entitlement system cannot be laid at the feet of the propertyless, of those whose votes are, under your assumption, purchased in exchange for government largesse, because even if every single one of us accepted that offer, it would still not be enough to elect enough such politicians to create the entitlement system against the interests - and voting power - of those who own property.
As to the belief of some of the Founders that the vote should have been limited to property owners: they weren't infallible; the fact that they wrote into the Constitution the very seeds of the Civil War by retaining the institution of slavery is proof enough. They were wrong on slavery and those who believed that limiting the vote to property owners would guarantee liberty were also wrong.
There's an old canard about the idiocy of the under-21 drinking age: 18 year olds are old enough to fight and die for their country, but not old enough to have a beer before or after. That goes double for the idea of limiting the vote to property owners: those who own nothing could - would - still be drafted to fight and die for their country, but would have no say in whether they were to be impressed into service.
