What’s Wrong With America’s Factions?

While in Virginia last week, we went to Montpelier, James Madison’s old estate. If you’re ever in the Charlottesville area, it’s worth a visit. Madison doesn’t command the name power (or controversy power) of his old neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, but he was an important man, and he remains important. Father of the Constitution. A rather significant child to have sired.

A number of things jumped out over the course of our morning, but one, from a video in the visitor center, continues to rattle around. If you’re familiar with Madison, it’s the “extend the sphere” idea.

Madison evidently believed that the United States could be protected from the danger of one faction taking outsized control by means of its breadth. The larger the sphere, the reasoning went, the more factions held within it. The more factions within the sphere, the reasoning continued, the less power held by each individual faction. I believe he wrote about this in Federalist No. 10.

The logic, for me at least, tracks. The more legs a table has, the stronger its balance, and if factions have to work with one another to get anything made into law, the more extreme edges of each faction’s interests figure to be worn away. The history, again at least to me, seems to back this up. Our republic has survived for nearly 250 years now. Not a lot of republics last that long. But, of course, our republic is currently troubled. And so we come to examine factions.

I do believe there’s a positive reflection of this idea in our current system. While extreme policy has snuck through, and while some might prefer more extreme policy to make its way to law, many of the most extreme ideas do fall by the wayside, especially at the national level, where the sphere is larger. But, again, our republic is currently troubled. We live in extreme times. Three thoughts on that:

First, it’s troubling how many rather independent sets of issues have become correlated as our factionalism has become so binary. If someone cares about both gun issues and the corporate tax rate and you learn their stance on one of those two things, there’s a good chance you can guess their stance on the other. Factions, in the two-party culture war, dissolve into one another. The balancing effect is lessened.

Secondly, our major party primary system isn’t helping. A faction that’s rather extreme in the national sense can hold a large share of power in its party, partially because it’s in a pond half the size and partially because many primaries, notably the Republican presidential primaries, are structured to get a winner declared fast. 35 states had cast their votes before Donald Trump topped the 50% mark among a single state’s voters in the 2016 campaign. His faction didn’t need to command the majority, even just within its own party. It simply needed to be the largest of the many Republican factions.

Thirdly, the combination of lobbying and campaign fundraising gives individual special interest groups outrageous power. American shipbuilders are a tiny faction, but we still have the Jones Act.

There are solutions to be made for the second and third. Campaign finance reform and ranked-choice voting, to name two. The first is harder. I don’t have a solution to the first. But then again, gun rights groups have recently lent aid to the challenge against Texas’s law restricting abortion, so perhaps there’s enough overlap here that we’ll be ok. I hope we’ll be ok. I’d like to know what Madison would think.