The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party. . . . Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. –James Madison, Federalist #10
Since I first read the Federalist Papers as an undergraduate, I have considered Madison’s Federalist #10 to be the high-water mark of the volume—an opinion shared by many who study the original documents. Though it was the tenth paper published under the pseudonym “Publius,” #10 was the first contribution by James Madison; as such, it provides a good introduction to his overall arguments in the series. It has also become a standard anthology piece in rhetoric textbooks (I have actually anthologized it myself) because of the intricate parallelism that Madison uses to frame his arguments about factions, which he defines quite clearly as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
And what are his arguments about factions? Well, they mainly go like this:
1) Factions cause problems because they tend to produce decisions that are “not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”
What the framers feared most was not an overreaching federal government, but the development of a permanent faction capable of rendering democracy useless by harnessing the power of a majority to oppress a minority. Remember that, in 1776, "democracy" was a dirty word in most of the world. People saw it as, potentially, the most oppressive form of government around. A slim majority, they reasoned, could vote themselves into power and do just about anything they wanted to the other 49% of the people. Experience since that time has confirmed that this is precisely what happens when permanent majorities are allowed to form--think of the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, or, to a lesser extent, the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq. Majoritarian tyrrany, the dark side of democracy, can be as horrible as any dictatorial regime.
2) There is no way to remove the causes of faction without destroying liberty.
Factions exist because people have different ideas about stuff. Even people who have the same ideas about stuff one day have different ideas about stuff the next. Nowhere is this borne out more than in the lives of the two principal authors of the Federalist Papers. Hamilton and Madison collaborated closely to pass the Constitution, but, once it passed, they found themselves on different sides of the most important political issue of the day, which was (much as it is today) the proper role of the Federal government.
Since “The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man,” there is no way to control factionalism without changing human nature. And—as we have learned over and over again—the only material change that a government can make to human nature is to change “alive” to “dead.” Otherwise, we are stuck with our primitive tribalism and territorialism. Its just the way that we are. “Liberty is to faction,” Madison argues, “what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency
3) It is impossible to prevent the effects of factions in a democracy, but it is imperative to prevent any one faction from obtaining, and perpetuating, a permanent majority.
Madison believed that controlling the undemocratic instincts of different factions and interest groups “forms the principal task of modern legislation.” But since there is no way to do away with either the causes or the results of factions, the principal function of good government is to prevent any one faction from being in the majority for too long. This is not done by shrinking factions (which is impossible anyway) but by multiplying them—by structuring the government in such a way that it encourages too many factions to ever coalesce into a permanent majority.
This means, first of all, that the primary guarantor of rights must be a large federal government rather than a smaller regional one. In a large country like the United States, it is much less likely for any one faction to gain permanent control of the legislature than it would be in a smaller, relatively homogenous state (think of the way that African Americans became a permanent oppressed minority in many Southern states from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement). It also means that the constitutional apparatus of a society should do what our First Amendment indeed does: guarantee the freedom to have, to speak, and to distribute as wide a variety of ideas as possible. The more factions we have in the country—be they religious, political, cultural, or any other –al—the less likely any of us will ever be on the minority end of a permanent majority.
What all of this ultimately means is that most of the things that people hate about our government were put their on purpose. They are not what’s broken; they are what’s working. The way to keep freedom secure, Madison knew, is to make sure that the political process has large doses of gridlock, stalemate, demogaugury, acrimony, and mutual recrimination. A functional democratic system must encourage interest groups to form, coalitions to arise and win majorities. As soon as they have won a majority, though, a coalition must be structurally encouraged, to overreach—to push for greater and greater ideological purity until the majority breaks apart and the pieces reassemble themselves into new coalitions and new majorities.
It also means that Glenn Beck et. al are doing exactly what they should be doing: forming coalitions, demonizing their opponents, attracting followers, ticking people off, and doing their best to advance the interest of their faction.
And it means that people like me feel compelled to try--quixotically to be sure--to “break and control the violence of [this particular] faction” by staying up nights and blogging to the wind.
