After Federalist No. 10 | National Affairs - 0 views
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Federalist No. 10 pertains to the orientation of personal appetites toward public ends, which include both the common good and private rights. The essay recognizes that these appetites cannot be conquered, but they can be conditioned.
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Madison's solution to the problem of faction — a solution he confines to the four corners of majority rule — is to place majorities in circumstances that encourage deliberation and thus defuse passion.
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Any republic deployed across an extended territory should be relatively free of faction, at least in the aggregate.
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Yet Madison's solution depends on certain assumptions. Federalist No. 10 assumes politics will occur at a leisurely pace. The regime Madison foresees is relatively passive, not an active manipulator of economic arrangements. And he is able to take for granted a reasonably broad consensus as to the existence if not the content of the public good.
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These assumptions are now collapsing under the weight of positive government and the velocity of our political life.
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Given the centrality of Federalist No. 10 to the American constitutional canon, this collapse demands a reckoning. If a pillar of our order is crumbling, something must replace it.
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That challenge may call for a greater emphasis on the sources of civic virtue and on the means of sustaining it.
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The possibility that virtue might be coded into the essay is evident at its most elemental level: Federalist No. 10's definition of a faction as a group "united and actuated 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."
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this definition hinges on an objective understanding of the public good; one cannot comprehend Madison from the perspective of contemporary relativism.
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Its reader must be committed to a normative concept of the good and occupy a polity in which it is possible for such a concept to be broadly shared.
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[T]hose who do not believe in an objective moral order cannot 'enter' Madison's system." Thus, belief in such an order, even amid disputes as to its content, constitutes a first unstated assumption of Federalist No. 10.
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Madison presents a series of choices, repeatedly eliminating one, then bifurcating the other in turn, and eliminating again until he arrives at his solution. One can remove the causes of factions or control their effects. The causes cannot be removed because the propensity to disagree is "sown in the nature of man," arising particularly from the fact that man is "fallible" and his "opinions and his passions...have a reciprocal influence on each other."
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Precisely because this influence arises from the link between "reason" and "self-love," the latter of which distorts the former, property accounts for "the most common and durable source of factions," the key being its durability.
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Whereas David Hume's analysis of parties said that those based on self-interest were the most excusable while those based on passions were the most dangerous, Madison warns of the reverse. Those rooted in emotion — including "an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power" — are the least worrisome precisely because they are based on passions, which Madison believes to be transient.
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A second assumption of Federalist No. 10 is consequently that irrational passions, which Madison understands to be those not based on interest, are inherently unsustainable and thus are naturally fleeting.
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if a group is impelled by ill motives, the intrinsic conditions of an extended republic will make it difficult for it to become a majority.
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A third assumption, then, is that both geographic and constitutional distance will permit the passions to dissipate before their translation into policy.
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Finally, Madison cautions Jefferson in correspondence about a month before Federalist No. 10's publication that the extended-republic theory "can only hold within a sphere of a mean extent. As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may be too easily formed agst. the weaker party; so in too extensive a one, a defensive concert may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those entrusted with the administration."
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To recapitulate, the assumptions are as follows: The people will share a belief in the existence of an objective moral order, even if they dispute its content; passions, especially when they pertain to attachments or aversions to political leaders, will be unsustainable; government will not dictate the distribution of small economic advantages; geographic and constitutional distance will operate to dissipate passions; and, finally, the territory will not be so large that public opinion cannot form.
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It is almost universally acknowledged that moral relativism is ascendant in contemporary American society.
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The question, rather, is whether the foundational assumptions of Federalist No. 10 can withstand the pressure of contemporary communications technology. There is reason to believe they cannot.
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There is a balance to be struck: Communication is useful insofar as it makes the "mean extent" that was Madison's final assumption larger by enabling the formation of a "defensive concert" through the cultivation of public consensus against an abusive regime. But on Madison's account, the returns on rapid communication should diminish beyond this point because there will be no space in which passions can calm before impulse and decision converge.
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what is clear is that there are enough opinions dividing the country that any project attempting to form a coherent public will seems doomed.
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The Madisonian impulse is to look first for institutional solutions that can discipline interest groups. Constitutional mechanisms like judicial review, then, might be used to inhibit factions. But judicial review can be done well or poorly.
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The empirical conditions not merely of an extensive republic but of 18th-century reality aided in Madison's effort. The deliberate pace of communication did not require an institutional midwife. It was a fact of life. It need hardly be said that, 230 years after the essay's November 1787 publication, this condition no longer obtains. The question is what replaces it.
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The answer is that the converse of each assumption on which Federalist No. 10 relies is a restraining virtue.
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If Federalist No. 10 assumes at least consensus as to the existence of an objective morality, pure moral relativism must be challenged.
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If the immediate translation of preferences into policy is possible but detrimental, patience must intervene. I
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If technology has erased the constitutional distance between officeholders and constituents, self-restraint and deference may be required.
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If it has also shrunk attention spans to 140 characters, an ethic of public spiritedness will have to expand them.
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What unites these is civic virtue, and thus the American regime must now get serious about its recovery
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He wrote in Federalist No. 55: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.
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At Virginia's ratifying convention, similarly, Madison noted the propensity to assume either the worst or the best from politicians. He replied:
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But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.
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Still, the traditional means of inculcating virtue — the family and institutions such as local schools — are themselves under pressure or subject to political capture.
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A national effort to instill civic virtue would almost certainly careen into the kind of politicization that has been witnessed in Education Department history standards and the like.
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Consequently, subsidiarity, the diffusion of authority to the most local possible level, would be vital to any effective effort to revive civic virtue. That is, it could not be uniform or imposed from on high. Political leaders could help in cultivating an awareness of its necessity, but not in dictating its precise terms.
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The first part of this combination is moral virtue, which the ethic of subsidiarity teaches is likelier to come from the home than from school, and from life lessons than from textbooks.
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Students as early as elementary school routinely learn the virtues of the Bill of Rights, in part because it is shorter and simpler to teach than the main body of the Constitution.
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The success of civic education is nowhere clearer than in the arguably distorting effect it has had in provoking what Mary Ann Glendon calls "rights talk," the substitution of assertions of rights for persuasive argumentation about politics
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Of these virtues, patience will surely be the hardest to restore. This is, to be clear, patience not as a private but rather as a civic virtue.
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It asks that they consider issues in dimensions deeper than a tweet or, more precisely, that they demand that those they elect do so and thus do not expect their passions to be regularly fed.
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Perhaps the best that can be achieved here is refusing to allow the positive state to reach further into the minutiae of economic life, generating more spaces for minority factions to hide
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As any reader of Lincoln's Temperance Address knows, neither heroic self-restraint nor clobbering, moralistic education will succeed in inculcating such virtues as patience and moderation. A combined educational program is necessary, and politics in any modern sense can only account for part of it.
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civic education can achieve constitutional ends. Of course, rights as contemporarily understood are entitlements; they supply us with something. Civic virtue, by contrast, demands something of us, and as such presents a more substantial political challenge.
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The second is a shift in civic education from the entitlement mentality of the Bill of Rights to the constitutional architecture of the overall regime, with the latter engendering an appreciation of the cadences and distances at which it is intended to function and the limited objects it is intended to attain.
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While Madison's "mean extent" for a republic has, in the modern United States, far exceeded the scope possible for forming a public will with respect to most particular issues, it may still be possible to form a coherent if thin understanding of the regime and, consequently, a defensive concert to safeguard it.
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a recognition that virtue is more necessary now than it used to be — when empirical conditions imposed patience and distance — does not rely on virtue in any blind or total sense. It does not, for example, seek to replace the institutional mechanisms Madison elucidates elsewhere with virtue. It simply recognizes that the particular assumptions of Federalist No. 10 no longer operate without added assistance. In other words, as Daniel Mahoney has argued, we must theorize the virtue that the founders could presuppose.
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The issue, then, is not that civic virtue is all that is important to the Madisonian system; it is that civic virtue is more important than it used to be for one pillar of that system.