The Fear of Faction- The American System Under Pressure - A New Series
What the Founders Built to Contain and What We Now Reward
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge… is itself a frightful despotism.”
— George Washington, Farewell Address
Where We Left Off
In my last post, A Republic Under Strain, we examined the pressures bearing down upon our constitutional system, the steady growth of executive habit, the weakening of public confidence, the slow erosion of shared restraint. We named the strain.
But strain doesn’t arise without cause. It accumulates. It is fed. It is sustained by forces that often operate quietly before they become visible.
Here we turn to one of the forces the Founders feared most, and we ask whether what was once guarded against has become something we reward.
The Word They Used
They called it faction.
When James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, he didn’t assume unity would define the republic. He assumed division. He assumed ambition. He assumed that citizens would gather in parties animated by interest and passion.
He didn’t fear disagreement. He feared domination.
A faction, he wrote, was any number of citizens united by a common impulse adverse to the rights of others or to the long term interests of the community. The definition was spare because the danger was real.
Liberty gives rise to faction. To remove its causes would be to remove freedom itself. The causes, Madison observed, are sown in the nature of man. Differences of opinion, unequal faculties, divergent pursuits, these are constants, not anomalies.
The problem wasn’t how to prevent faction from forming. The problem was how to prevent faction from ruling unchecked.
The Constitution wasn’t written to purify human nature. It was written to restrain its excesses.
Madison’s answer startled many of his contemporaries. Rather than fear the size of the republic, he argued that its breadth would temper faction. Extend the sphere, he wrote, and you multiply interests and perspectives. In that multiplication lies difficulty for any single faction to consolidate permanent control.
Pluralism, ordered by structure, could moderate passion.
He didn’t trust virtue to prevail consistently. None of them did. They trusted design to contain what character could not always master.
Friction by Design
The architecture that followed was deliberate.
A legislature divided against itself. An executive independent of it. A judiciary insulated from both. Elections staggered across time. Authority divided between national and state sovereignties. A Bill of Rights guarding minorities against majority impulse.
They placed obstacles in the path of power because they understood its appetite.
Ambition, Madison wrote elsewhere, must be made to counteract ambition. The system presumes rivalry. It presumes jealousy among institutions. It presumes that no coalition should rest comfortably in dominion.
Even George Washington warned that the spirit of party, inflamed by revenge, could become a frightful despotism. He didn’t imagine faction would disappear. He feared its consolidation.
The system assumes competition. It doesn’t assume coordination.
And here is the question that presses upon us.
What becomes of a republic when ambition ceases to counteract ambition and instead aligns with it?
From Guardrail to Applause
The shift needn’t be loud to be profound.
When faction is feared, institutions resist it. When faction is admired, institutions bend toward it.
The Constitution was framed in suspicion of concentrated loyalty. It was designed to cool passion through time, distance, and division of power. Yet if citizens prize dominance over deliberation, if they reward those who intensify division rather than moderate it, then the safeguards remain in form but weaken in effect.
No clause vanishes. No structure dissolves.
But incentives shape conduct.
If office is secured by inflaming loyalty to a single banner, if compromise is treated as surrender, if restraint is branded as weakness, then ambition discovers new alignments.
Madison assumed ambition would check ambition. He didn’t assume that ambition would discover greater reward in harmony than in resistance.
The structure remains. The appetite shifts.
Ambition in Alignment
Each age introduces its own instruments. The passions themselves remain.
When representatives fear displeasing faction more than betraying institution, moderation becomes perilous. When executives discover that swift assertion yields greater acclaim than patient negotiation, unilateral action tempts. When judges conclude that narrowness invites less fury than clarity, caution becomes habit.
Each decision may appear prudent when viewed alone. Each actor may claim necessity.
But when ambition seeks harmony with faction rather than resistance to it, friction diminishes. And when friction diminishes, concentration follows.
The design of the Constitution depends upon resistance within power itself. If that resistance softens, the balance tilts.
Tribal Passion and Moral Absolutism
Faction begins in interest. It matures in identity.
In every age, men are tempted to fuse political cause with moral destiny. When that fusion occurs, opponents cease to be rivals. They become enemies. Error becomes wickedness. Disagreement becomes threat.
This isn’t new. It is perennial.
Human beings seek belonging. They seek affirmation. They seek the comfort of shared narrative and the clarity of shared adversary. When political allegiance becomes the primary vessel of belonging, it acquires moral intensity.
And moral intensity resists restraint.
The Constitution presumes that citizens will tolerate defeat because they trust the system. It presumes that losing an election doesn’t imperil existence. It presumes that institutions endure beyond momentary passion.
But when political identity becomes existential, loss feels annihilating. Under such conditions, extraordinary measures appear justified. Procedure appears obstructive. Delay appears dangerous.
The design slows action by intent. Passion seeks immediacy by instinct.
If faction becomes sacred, limits appear profane.
Here lies the deeper danger.
Not that citizens disagree, but that they elevate faction to virtue. Not that they contest elections, but that they sanctify victory and demonize defeat. Not that they love their cause, but that they subordinate the republic to it.
Once politics is framed as survival, structural restraint is recast as betrayal.
The Accumulation of Strain
The consequences unfold gradually.
Legislative impasse invites executive assertion. Executive assertion invites judicial hesitation. Judicial hesitation deepens distrust. Distrust hardens faction. Faction intensifies loyalty. Loyalty weakens institutional rivalry.
The cycle feeds itself.
In A Republic Under Strain, we examined the pressure placed upon the constitutional order. Here we see one of its engines. Not disagreement, but the moral elevation of division. Not ambition alone, but ambition untethered from countervailing ambition.
The Founders feared faction because they understood human nature. They assumed we would be tempted by it. They assumed we would rationalize it. They assumed we would, at times, celebrate it.
So they built a structure to restrain what they knew could not be eradicated.
A republic can endure disagreement. It can endure noise, volatility, even sharp conflict. It can’t endure the permanent enthronement of faction as virtue.
The structure remains.
Whether it holds depends less upon parchment than upon what we reward.
If ambition no longer checks ambition, if loyalty to faction eclipses loyalty to institution, then strain won’t be mysterious. It will be the predictable outcome of elevating the very force the Constitution was designed to contain.
The Founders feared faction because they knew it would arise.
The question before us is whether we still regard it as something to restrain, or something to revere.
Up Next
In the next essay, Slow by Design: When Deliberation Feels Like Failure, we turn to Congress itself. We’ll examine whether what is dismissed as gridlock may in fact be a constitutional feature rather than a defect. There is a difference between friction and paralysis, and understanding that distinction may determine whether we abandon deliberation in the name of speed.
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