Our Founding Fathers understood that every government becomes more susceptible to tyranny as it amasses more wealth and power. Any leader . . . will become a tyrant, and likely will become a tyrant, unless his powers are carefully limited. The Founders also knew that, although local governments are capable of tyranny, the risk is less severe than it is at the national level. That’s because local governments operate closer to the people, making them more responsive to the people’s needs and desires.
--Senator Mike Lee, The Freedom Agenda, 25
Tea Party (and Utah) Senator Mike Lee is exactly right about the views of the Founding Fathers who opposed the ratification of the Constitution. But he is exactly wrong about the views of the Founding Fathers who supported the Constitution. Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and most of the other signers of the Constitution—while concerned about the dictatorial potential of national government—perceived a much greater threat to liberty in the actions of individual states and local governments who, in the name of responsiveness to the majorities within their jurisdictions, often deprived their other citizens of even the most basic civil and political rights. This, in fact, is the main point of the most widely read and cited of all of the Federalist Papers: James Madison’s magisterial and prophetic Federalist #10.
Madison’s primary objective in Federalist #10 is to rebut one of the arguments against the Constitution that had gained a lot of traction in the State of New York: that the territory of the United States was too large to be incorporated into a functional Republic. The original source of this objection was the Baron de Montesquieu, one of the best known political theorists of the 18th century, who argued in The Spirit of Laws, his major work, that
it is natural to a republic to have only a small territory, otherwise it cannot long subsist. In a large republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too great to be placed in any single subject; he has interest of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy, great and glorious, by oppressing his fellow citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country.Montesquieu’s views on large Republics were first introduced into the ratification debate in a 1787 essay by the Anti-Federalist crusader known as “Brutus,” who was almost certainly Judge Robert Yates, who had been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and had left without signing. In the first of his sixteen Anti-Federalist essays, Brutus quotes Montesquieu and argues that the sheer size of the thirteen colonies, and the distances that must be travelled to any capitol, will prevent any kind of effective representative government. “In a large extended country,” he insists, “it is impossible to have a representation, possessing the sentiments, and of integrity, to declare the minds of the people.”
By citing The Spirit of Laws, Brutus was quoting scripture against Madison and the Federalists. Montesquieu’s ideas of the separation of powers had contributed significantly to the foundation of the proposed Constitution. It is largely on the French philosopher’s authority that the delegates divided the government into three separate functions—legislative, executive, and judicial—and gave each branch ways to check the power of the other two. Brutus’s arguments, backed by the same authority as much of the Constitution, raised serious doubts about the Constitution among New York’s educated elites.
When Madison teamed up with Hamilton and Jay to create “Publius,” he understood that his first task must be to refute Brutus, the most forceful and articulate of the Anti-Federalist writers active in the State of New York. It would not do to argue simply that a large republic would not trample individual rights. Such an argument would turn Brutus’s negative into a neutral, but Madison was not one to play for a tie. He wanted to win, and that meant showing that large republics could protect individual liberty in ways that small republics could not. Using ideas that he had initially worked out on the floor of the Constitutional Convention, Madison crafted his first contribution to the Federalist Papers around the revolutionary proposition that only a strong national government could control what he called “the violence of faction.”
For Madison, a “faction” was something like what we would call a “special interest group” today—a collection of individuals, either in the majority or the minority, “who are united . . . by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Among the potential factions in the United States, Madison mentions religious sects, supporters of paper money, and advocates for the equal division of property. He believed that the tendency to form factions lay deep within human nature and that, “as long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.”
Madison saw factions as a non-negotiable, non-preventable byproduct of freedom. No truly free society can keep factions from forming or to prevent them, once formed, from trying to advances their agendas at the expense of other people’s rights. As long as a faction does not constitute a majority within a nation, then the rule of the majority will ultimately keep them in check. However, when a faction becomes a majority in a democratic society, it gains the ability to impose its will on a minority. And this, Madison believed, was the greatest threat to freedom that a republic faced.
In Federalist #10, Madison proposes a way to solve this problem and, in the process, offers a brilliant rebuttal to both Brutus’s argument and Montesquieu’s political theory. The way to prevent a permanent majority from forming, he argues, is to make sure that the republic is large enough to contain so many factions that none of them can ever stay in the majority for very long:
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.With this single masterstroke, Madison takes one of the Constitution’s greatest perceived weaknesses and turns it into a powerful strength. A large republic such as the United States will contain so many different factions, parties, and interest groups that none of them will ever predominate. Temporary coalitions between different interests will form to pass certain issues, but they will be continually forming and dissipating, making it almost impossible for a single faction to seize power long enough to damage the rights of the minority.
For Madison's idea of a republic to work, the primary guarantor of liberty in a free society must be a centralized government with more authority than its constituent units--for only such a government is capable of resisting the majoritarian impulses that have always plagued democratic societies. This places Madison directly at odds with the majority of 21st century conservatives who call themselves “Madisonians.”
