actually, in the context of their time, the framers (who, specifially, do people mean when they refer to Founders?) of the constitution were not radical...and one doesn't need to rely on the likes of Herbert Aptheker, Staughton Lynd, or Michael Parenti to arrive at this conclusion...a contemporary republican (note lower case r) like historian Gordon Wood (_The Radicalism of the American Revolution_) has pointed out that the writers of the constitution were the conservative wing of the American Revolution...as Wood notes about the revolution, one class did not overthrow another nor did the poor supplant the rich, and the constitution was intended to insure against such happening...Madison, the 'father (perhaps that should be 'godfather') of the constitution, became so frustrated at one point about the 'democratic excesses' of the 1780s that he opined about the need to restore the good parts of the British monarchy...
as for Daniel Shay and others like him, the framers of the constitution did think he/they were ruffians...Shay's Rebellion was only the most famous of a number of popular insurrections in the 1780s...most were about preventing foreclosure of farms by creditors and so-called 'force' laws requiring creditors to accept paper money issued by the state, measures already adopted in Rhode Island...RI, which also expropriated/redistributed land of large estates and imposed heavy progressive taxation on inheritance, sent no delegates to the 1787 consitutional convention...it is not a coincidence that the writers of the document empowered the national gov't to 'suppress insurrections' (Art. I, Sec. 8), restricted states economic powers (Art. I, Sec. 10), established extradition (Art. IV, Sec. 2) and empowered the national gov't to protect states against 'domestic violence' (Art IU, Sec 4)...they wanted no more of the likes of Daniel Shays, they wanted no more rebellions, they wanted no more egalitarianism of the likes of Rhode Island...
still, the constitution did include (in historical context) progressive features - monarchy and arbitrary/autocratic rule were rejected, federal officeholders were not subjected to property requirements or religious tests (both common among states at the time), regular elections eliminated lifetime tenure in federal office holding), and bills of attainder and ex post facto laws were prohibited...
a bill of rights (often violated in practice) establishing substantive & procedural limits upon the national gov't was added as a concession to secure ratification...bill of rights did not apply to states until US Supreme Court initiated process of 'selective incorporation' in *Gitlow v NY* (1925)... Michael Hoover