Federalist No. 10 - “men of factious tempers”
by James Madison
The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection
Welcome to another Federalist Friday! In Federalist No. 10, Madison tries to identify the causes and methods of removing factions, which he defines 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.”
That’s just not an 18th century thing is it? What passions, interests, or rights (or desire to take away rights) drive factions today?
Madison observes that there are two ways to dissolve factions: “the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.” Madison explains the folly in defeating factions through attacks on their causes:
There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.
It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction 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.
The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves… The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.
And so Madison concludes that “the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS” (emphasis his). In defeating factions consisting of a minority of citizens, “relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.” In defeating majority factions, on the other hand, we rely on the formation of our government as a representative republic rather than a pure democracy, where “the great and aggregate interests [are divided among] the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.”
Notice that in either case, defeating faction is dependent upon our vote—for everything from your city council to the presidency. It’s not rocket science, but it does remain fundamentally difficult: 2022 had one of the highest turnouts ever in a nonpresidential election year, but that still means only about half of the citizen voting-age population voted! In the 2020 presidential election, two-thirds of us voted—but that means 77 million didn’t vote in a presidential election separated by only 7 million votes.
I have been critical both in this blog and in Decent Discourse of our two-party primary system, campaign finance, gerrymandering, and partisan pseudo-news that tip the scales toward one candidate or party and tend to make us feel like our individual votes don’t matter. But we can’t use those as excuses. We can sit around and doom-scroll about “them,” or we can get off our duffs and make sure our voice is heard. You can start right now: it’s an off-cycle year, so it’s the perfect time to click right here and register to vote if you haven’t already.
Thank you, dear reader, for not giving up on your part to defeat “[m]en of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, [who] may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”