Happy Birthday, Federalist 10
Okay, so it’s not exactly the birthday of Federalist 10; this essay was published on November 22, 1787, under the pseudonym Publius. The three authors were Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, and their identities were an open secret.
I’m focusing on Federalist 10 today because we regularly hear about the virtues of “minority rule,” which is the only justification for the Senate filibuster and other unusual features of America’s political system. These features are usually touted along the lines of “we’re not a democracy, we’re a republic” and “the founding fathers feared direct democracy” so they built into the Constitution features that protect against what some have called “mobocracy.”
This is both accurate and inaccurate. In Federalist 10 Madison lays out a compelling argument for a nuanced balance between majority rule and minority rights. Here’s how his arguments go (I made this chart 30 years ago when I was teaching AP American Government. It’s a good chart, if I must say so myself).
I’ll go through this for you.
Madison starts out with an assumption – Faction is bad, and property is the cause of faction
Here’s what this means. First, by “faction” Madison meant temporary alliances of political groups formed around a particular issue. The assumption at the time was that these factions would go away once the problem they were addressing was resolved. They did not anticipate the emergence of a permanent array of political groups.as we see in every representative democracy around the world. This is because they did not understand how representative democracies work. They can be excused for their ignorance; they were in the process of inventing the first formalized representative democracy, so they could not be expected to understand how it would work.
Madison also noted that property – specifically, the unequal distribution of property – was the fundamental reason why factions exist. People’s opinions are driven, Madison says, by their property interests.
There are two ways to deal with factions: you can eliminate their causes or control their effects. Madison quickly dismissed the first option – which would require either limited freedom to act in one’s best interests or a forced equality of economic resources. When Karl Marx observed the same phenomenon – that people were driven by economic incentives – he chose the options that Madison rejected
So, Madison says that we have no option but to try to control the effects of faction. But first, he differentiates between minority faction and majority faction. A minority faction, he says, should not concern us. Minorities will lose the political battle, so they will not be a problem. The danger, he says, is in majority factions – political alliances that encompass electoral majorities. He acknowledges the danger of “majority faction” and notes that the division of power devised under the Constitution will combat the rise of a “Tyranny of the majority” which could then deprive the minority of their rights. A system of Checks and Balances at the national level and a system of Federalism to govern the relationship between the national government and the states, he says, is just the ticket.
You will never find, anywhere in the debates or discussions about the Constitution or in the letters and other writings of the Founding Fathers, any desire for minority rule. They didn’t want the majority to be tyrannical – but their concern about the tyranny of the majority was more a concern for their own property rights. They did not want the majority of people (who did not have as much wealth as most of the Founding Fathers) to have the power to take away their property. They were not protecting the little people – they were protecting themselves. But you won’t find any support for the idea that they were creating a system of minority rule. People who say that this is what the Founders wanted are either ignorant or making shit up.