James Madison was Right, Wrong, and Righter than He Knew

In Federalist No. 10, one of the most famous pieces of political philosophy ever written by an American, James Madison argued that the influence of factions on political society would be best controlled by a large nation, a federal union like that of the United States. It was an argument to counter the conventional wisdom that democracy couldn't scale to a large country like the U.S. Of course, now it's 200 years later, so we have a little bit of evidence as to whether Madison was right or not. My hypothesis is that he was right, wrong, and even more right than he thought he was.
Madison's hypothesis went basically as follows. Factions as he defined them were specific groups that sought to use the machinery of government not for the common good but for their particular good, at the expense of the rest of the populace. He then argued that factionalism was inherent in human nature, and the causes of it could not be removed. All of this is fairly uncontroversial; the argument as to the last part is that the two ways to remove the cause would be to either remove liberty or remove pluralism, either of which would be worse than the disease. What Madison then argued was that the best way to control the impulses of federalism was with a large, diverse representative democracy, on the grounds that in a large society it would be that much harder for any one faction to command a majority of support and thus hijack the government toward its own ends.

So, my hypothesis is that Madison was, serially, correct, incorrect, and correct even more fundamentally than he thought. Here are the examples of each. First, he was correct in that there is a fair amount of evidence, I think, that the United States government is much less plagued by factions who successfully control it than individual state governments. My AP Government teacher was always fond of telling us that while Nebraska's unicameral legislature was non-partisan, it didn't really matter because all of its members were from the ConAgra party. I think there may be a fair number of other examples of this phenomenon, including most farm states in much the same way. (And don't try to deny that agribusiness is a faction, seeking subsidies and price controls at public expense.) Texas and the oil industry springs to mind, or Alaska and the oil industry. Or probably a variety of others. Now, maybe within Nebraska the agriculture industry does not constitute a faction; maybe this brand of special-interest-ism consists of one state seeking to leech off of other states. Delaware would be an example of this, with its massively lax corporate regulations. Maybe it's unfair to call this factionalism, but I think it's worth noting that specific groups that seek advantage, especially monetary advantage, have a much easier time persuading their local state governments to support them than they do the federal government.

And how was Madison wrong? Well, he argued that in a large nation there would be lots and lots of potential factions, and so it would just be staggeringly unlikely that any one of them would get a majority. The only problem is that factions are not mutually exclusive: one individual can belong to a whole bunch of different groups that might seek to govern in a selfish, factional manner. Someone might wear their farmer hat one minute, and their white person hat the next (I apologize to both the right wing and to factions for my constant association of the two of them with each other; they'll like the last segment a little better), and on agriculture issues they will caucus with the farmer and on racial issues they'll caucus with the whites. So while there will be lots of factions, there will also be at least some issues on which the issue-specific factions are rather few in number and broad-based, and thereby able to get a majority. For instance, the group "white people" was able to administer the federal government and most state governments as well factionally, for their own self-interest at the expense of the rest of the populace (blacks and native Americans) into the 20th century. So while it is true that a large and diverse nation will have lots and lots of factions, that won't necessarily prevent any one of them from controlling the national government on issues germane to their specific causes.

There may be, admittedly, a difference between a small group of individuals who simply want to take control of the government and enrich themselves with it and a broad-based demographic group that wants to adopt government policies that favor itself. If there is, then I think Madison was so right that it's not very interesting to keep arguing about it (though I might mention Cheney and Halliburton), and the more interesting part is these quasi-factional demographic groups. But anyways, I digress.

What I think is most interesting is the way in which Madison was so right it might even have surprised him, or those who agreed with him at the time. Because I think that one of the things about a large, diverse nation that discourages factionalism is broad-based partisanship and ideology. My theory is that Big Philosophical Disagreements, like those about basic economic principles (equality vs. opportunity, etc.) or those about social issues (civil libertarians vs. religious moralists) can split a potential faction down the middle and prevent it from acting institutionally in furtherance of its own interests. I have a variety of examples to demonstrate what I mean.

One group that might naturally construct itself into a faction would be the wealthy. They have a lot of power, the government is a rival power center, it makes sense that they might try to take it over and use it toward their own ends. And some rich people often make an attempt to do just that. But wait! Rich people voted for Obama in 2008. Especially the very rich. And a group of millionaires just sent Obama a letter requesting to be taxed. What gives? Well, the rich are well educated which correlates with liberal social values, and moreover some of them may have genuine beliefs about economic policy that don't originate with their narrow self-interest. And some of those people might genuinely believe in a left-wing economic program, as a matter of broad-based ideology, even if it is to their own detriment economically.

Of course, the poor could also naturally become a faction. They don't have very much power per person, but they have a lot of people, and if the poor voted in a thoroughly factional way they could probably move public policy radically left on economic issues in this country. But they don't. Sure, Obama won two-thirds of the lowest income group, but that's a long way from a genuine factional voting pattern (examples coming below). Why are one-third of the very poor voting for John McCain, a flagrantly anti-poor candidate? Well, maybe they are conservative Christians who prefer McCain on social policies. Maybe they ideologically believe in the opportunity value that conservatives tend to hawk. They aren't just voting their narrow self-interest, though.

The one group in American politics that I'd say currently constitutes a faction in terms of its voting pattern is African-Americans, 90% or more of whom routinely vote for Democrats. Black people are just not that liberal, ideologically speaking. They are certainly not much more socially liberal than whites, and there's not necessarily any evidence that blacks are more ideologically inclined to favor the equality model over the opportunity model, except that they perceive the opportunity model as something that has been used to deny them prosperity for decades (rightly, in my opinion), and therefore oppose it on pure self-interest grounds. The reason blacks vote 90% democratic is simple: Democrats are the party of civil rights, i.e. pro-black policies, and Republicans are now the party that opposes civil rights. (Two side notes: you can make an argument that blacks do not advocate any policies that harm the rest of the populace, and thus are not really a faction, and in any event I'd say that they have a bit of a right to be a faction, given 200 years of factionalized oppression by whites.)

So how does this constitute Madison's being "righter than he knew"? Well, a large, diverse republic, I think, promotes the development of broad-based political parties that can be competitive in many different places. If, say, the State of Rhode Island were an independent nation, our political party system would probably be pretty narrowly tailored to Rhode Island circumstances, and I think it would be much easier for parties to align neatly with interest groups, so to speak. In the United States of America, however, the Democrats and Republicans both have to have at least some appeal in California, Wyoming, Texas, Kentucky, Florida, Rhode Island, and Alaska. How do you make parties based on interest groups and factions that will be even remotely competitive across these states? Will a farmer's party be competitive nationally? No; they tried that in the 1890s, and it failed. The same would go for other kinds of parties based on factions. The only nationally competitive parties will be those that can invoke a coherent, broad-based political ideology in their support, one which will be able to appeal across factions and therefore across the breadth of our pluralistic society. Lo and behold, of course, that's exactly what we have, and they appear to curtail the ability of factions to organize themselves exclusively for their special interests.

Moreover, as to Madison specifically, he and Thomas Jefferson created the first political party in this country and, possibly, in world history, while Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington were crying "faction! faction! faction!" and denouncing the Democratic-Republicans as traitors. Now, of course, I am arguing that it is political parties of precisely the kind formed by Jefferson and Madison, and opposed and feared by George Washington, that keep factions in check and prevent them, in many instances, from organizing and mobilizing for their own narrow advantage. So not only was Madison right that a large country would curtail factionalism, and right in a way that I don't think he anticipated, but he was the instrument of that broader reason becoming reality. It's kind of fitting, I think.