Less ambiguous – for a modern
audience, at any rate – than certain of Madison’s explanations in No. 51 for the
structure of the federal government was his assertion of the danger presented
by unchecked majority rule. Though the government that he and his colleagues
had designed relied heavily on the common notion that a majority, be it
elective or legislative, possessed inherent legitimacy, he was careful to note
that the rights of the minority did not disappear simply because they were the
minority. Under the system of government framed by the proposed constitution,
the winner of an election for a seat in the House of Representatives was the
candidate that received the most votes, and a piece of legislation put before
the federal Congress became law when a majority of those present voted in its
favor. That being said, Madison cautioned in No. 51, the residents of a given
congressional district who voted against the eventual winner did not give up
their right to be represented, and even an overwhelming majority in Congress
could not be permitted to abrogate the liberties of those whose representatives
were in the minority. “In a society,” he accordingly asserted in the tenth
paragraph, “Under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and
oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign, as in a state of
nature [.]” In order to prevent such an outcome from playing out within the
proposed national government, some kind of safeguard was necessary.
Before moving on to discuss the
counter that Madison offered in Federalist No. 51 against the scourge of popular
tyranny, the basic assumption he put forward perhaps bears some thought. In the
United States of the late 18th century, legislative authority was
almost universally trusted to a great extent than executive authority. As a
result, many state constitutions, and even the proposed national constitution,
placed a great deal of power in the hands of legislative authorities and
consequently a great deal of trust in the concept of majority rule. This was
acceptable, Madison argued in No. 51, or even preferable. Rapid, arbitrary
decision-making – a king deciding to raise an army on his own authority, for
instance – was made far more difficult by diffusing power across a large body
of legislators, each of whom nurtured their own personal set of interests and
priorities. That being said, he warned, majorities were no freer from sin than
any man. The decisions of the Massachusetts General Court, the Pennsylvania
Legislative Assembly, or the federal Congress may well have carried the weight
of law and the confidence of the people, but each of these bodies was still as
capable of infringing upon the rights of man and citizen as any king, governor,
or president. Majority rule is a simple and durable logic by which to govern,
but a majority that abuses its power and violates the liberties of those that
fall outside of its consensus effectively abdicates its claim to legitimacy. Founder
par excellence James Madison believed
this, and said as much, in 1788.
Without picking out any specific
examples, it would be difficult to argue that subsequent generations of
Americans have always held to this principle. Across the history of the United
States, spanning the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st
centuries, state legislatures and Congress alike have been guilty of abusing
their collective ability to make law in order to oppress or sideline ethnic,
religious, and political minorities considered by the mainstream as falling
outside the orthodox definition of responsible citizenship. Native Americans,
African-Americans, Chinese Americans, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Socialists,
and Communists, to name but a handful, have all been victims of popular tyranny
– of “we the people” – at one point or another. And though many of the worst
abuses have since been remedied, the temptation and the ability to visit
similar offenses upon equally outnumbered populations remains ever-present.
This, Madison tried to make clear in Federalist No. 51, is why constant
vigilance is required of every responsible citizen of a republic. Not only is
it essential, he asserted, that every person vigorously guard their own rights,
but they must fly to the defence of their neighbor’s rights as well.
Governments that are subject to election are subject to change; and so
majorities change, and so laws change. The difference between being “in” and
being “out” can at times boil down to a handful of votes, and so it behooves
every person, whether they are at the helm of power or not, to rally against
the abuse of those outside the consensus of the moment. There are few more
valuable lessons than this that documents like No. 51 have to impart, and fewer
yet more clearly applicable to the American historical and political context.
Madison’s solution to this problem,
his answer to the requirement that a republic, “Guard one part of the society
against the injustice of the other part [,]” was an unusual one for its time.
Unlike a monarchy, he argued in the tenth paragraph of No. 51, which could rely
on the existence of an entity removed from the electorate –a king or an
aristocracy – to guard the rights of the minority, the United States was
required to look internally for protection against the inescapable threat of
popular tyranny. Fortunately, he observed, the American republic occupied a
vast swath of territory and held within its borders a similarly large and
varied population. Therein lay the key to the country’s salvation. Counter to
the contention advanced by French philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron
de Montesquieu (1689-1755) – perhaps the single most popular European thinker
among the colonial American elite – that stable republics could only exist
within a small geographic expanse, Madison maintained in No. 51 that the great
size and diversity of the United States actually made the nation more secure,
its citizens safer, and its government lest given to abuse. The reasoning
behind this claim, a truly revolutionary notion for its time and place, was
exceptionally simple.
Encompassing such a large expanse
of territory, the United States was home to a great number of people spread
across a set of geographically diverse regions and engaged in a sizeable number
of different professions. As a population, Americans recognized different
religious faiths, spoke a fair number of different languages, and nurtured a
great many different individual and community priorities. They were unalike, to
put it simply, and could be said to agree on very little. This, Madison argued,
was a great virtue. “In the extended republic of the United States,” he
declared in the tenth paragraph of No. 51,
And among
the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a
coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any
other principles than those of justice and the general good.
Smaller populations could boast of
no such inherent protection against majoritarian tyranny. Products of the same
geography and more likely to share the same customs and cultural experiences, a
republic of three thousand or five thousand citizens could very easily fall
prey to a political consensus that prioritized the mainstream and ignored or
punished the outsider. The United States of America, by comparison a nation of
approximately three million as of the mid-1780s, was less likely to give rise
to such exclusive majorities because there was almost no single faith, sect,
profession, or culture that was truly and unequivocally dominant. Thus robbed
of the opportunity to further the priorities of their particular creed by
numbers alone, Madison believed that his fellow Americans would have no choice
but to forge alliances and build majorities around only those ideals – liberty,
stability, reason, justice, etc. – that accorded with the rights and
sensibilities of all.
While there can be no denying that James
Madison was a brilliant and innovative political philosopher and statesman, and
that his ideal of the “extended republic” was both ingenious and theoretically
sound, a moment’s consideration of modern American political culture reveals
beyond any doubt that the even the vaunted Founders could not foresee all that the
United States would become. The U.S. is, as Madison observed, a very large
country. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, its three million square miles
currently contains upwards of three hundred million people. These figures are far
in excess of what Madison believed sufficient to ensure a diverse and divided
population, and, true to form, American politics at the dawn of the 21st
century can fairly be described as combative. Disagreements at the state and
national level over the purpose of government and the needs of society have
made consensus relatively rare, and the debates that spin out of national
elections frequently reveal the great diversity of interests and priorities
nurtured by the voting public. In spite of this abiding diversity, however (and
as mentioned previously), majorities have emerged throughout the history of the
United States that have served to disempower and disenfranchise whomever fell
outside the reigning consensus. Entire communities, ethnic, religious, or
otherwise, have been barred from owning property, from voting, and from
attending the schools and patronizing the businesses of their choice. The
reason for this evident contradiction, between what Madison assured his readers
was impossible in 1788 and what 21st century observers cannot fail
to recognize, stems from the emergence of something the Founders widely
rejected and consequently failed to account for: political parties.
The
antipathy the Founders nurtured towards the concept of partisan politics has
been discussed in previous posts in this series. Having inherited, in large
part, many of the political assumptions and customs of their British radical
antecedents the Whigs, supporters of the American Revolution and American
republicanism accordingly shared their forebears’ distrust of any faction or
individual in government whose motivation were anything other than outwardly
virtuous or self-sacrificing. To be “interested” was to have an agenda other
than the promotion of the public good, and to worse yet be a member of an
organized party or faction was to tacitly admit that the public good was itself
perhaps less important than jockeying for power or advantage. Because the Founders
endeavored to create, in the various states and at the national level,
governments whose primary function was the protection of individual rights and
the betterment of society as a whole, the existence of entrenched parties –
viewed as inherent disruptive – was never factored into their designs.
Madison’s assertion in Federalist No. 51, that the abiding diversity of opinion
in the United States would be enough to prevent any one sect or interest from
rising to a position of power, speaks to this very assumption. He did not
consider the possibility that people would rally around something other than
their faith, their regional identity, or their profession, or that the factions
they formed could expand to the point of exerting a tremendous influence on the
national political agenda. This, of course, is exactly what modern political
parties are, and this is exactly what they do.
Ethnic
identity is a marker of political self-identification that, if it moves at all,
moves at a glacial pace. People think of themselves as Black, White, Hispanic,
Chinese, Arab, or Austronesian (for instance) based mainly on who the parents
were, what language they speak, and the culture they identify with. Religious
faith, while in many cases a matter of personal choice, is also a relatively
static political identifier because established belief systems tend to evolve
very slowly, over decades if not centuries. Party identification is conversely
flexible, fluid, and highly porous. Established parties are often centrally-led,
coalesce around specific issues, actively try to expand their electoral
support, and undergo constant change. Being a Democrat, consequently, is not
like being Hispanic. There is no Hispanic National Committee that controls
membership, defines a central platform, engages in public relations exercises,
and tries always to get more people to be Hispanic. There are, however,
Democratic and Republican national committees that do all of these things. And
the fundamental goal of both of these parties, whether they have stated as much
or not, seems to be the eventual and complete domination of American political
life. Democrats would like it if everyone was a Democrat, and Republicans would
like it if everyone was a Republican. In pursuit of this goal, American political
parties – including 19th century Whigs, Democratic-Republicans,
Federalists, Know-Nothings, et al. – take every opportunity to build majorities
around divisive, often morally-charged, issues. From the French Revolution to
slavery to same-sex marriage, partisan politics in the United States have
almost always used the most contentious terms to build the broadest possible
consensus.
The
struggles of generations of party faithful, and the alarmist, epithet-slinging,
pot-banging politics that accompanied them, are a large part of the reason why
the promise of America has been denied time and again to unoffending and
inoffensive minorities within the general population. The United States
Constitution, though designed with many an ingenious and time-tested safeguard
in mind, was not constructed with political parties in mind. As a result, they
have to some degree subverted the expectations and intentions of the Founders
and the Framers by creating a new axis upon which American politics pivots. Not
culture, not language, not faith, and not vocation, they are a kind of tribal
identification that constantly and quickly shifts from one moment to the next. Madison
did not foresee this, as No. 51 makes clear. He believed, peering out at the
world through the lens of the late 18th century, that the size and
diversity of the United States would prevent the political rise of any one sect
or faction. Doubtless he also believed that as the country expanded the
accompanying growth in population and the distances involved would only
maintain and increase that diversity – after all, what could a farmer in
Massachusetts possible have in common with a merchant on the California coast?
The emergence of parties – parties
that are constantly trying to reach for the largest slice of the American
population – have of course elided this diversity and united large groups of people
around the same core sets of issues. Advances in communications technology have
greatly accelerated this trend, to the point that people in Maine, and Alaska,
and Florida, and California have been made to understand that they do indeed
have a great deal in common. To say whether this is a good thing or bad thing
is to attempt to judge objectively what it by its very nature subjective.
Political parties exist in America. They are. The Founders, that handful of
demi-gods whose words and deeds are ever a source of wisdom/validation in
matters public and private, utterly failed to account for their existence, as
Federalist No. 51 helps illustrate. Does this matter? Are parties, therefore,
illegitimate? Again, these are not question that have simple answers. What is
clear, however, and ought to be remembered and repeated, is that there are many
things about what the United States has become that it creators could not, and
did not, predict. They were wise and intelligent men and women, and a great
deal can still be learned from the legacy they left behind, but oracles they
were not. Self-aware enough to understand this about themselves, they
accordingly did their best to design systems and frameworks of government that
would allow subsequent generations to decide for themselves the nature and
meaning of the grand experiment that is the United States of America.
But please, really, judge for
yourself:
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