The Federalist on Factions

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 10.

Over two centuries ago, the authors of the United States constitution were remarkably prescient in their anticipation of the turmoil that blankets the United States today.

The United States in 2025 is in the clutches of a faction that wants to remake the country into something it imagined existed in a mythical near past. Mounting a diatribe against the faction is tempting, but here I will only discuss why factions are undesirable and how they rise rather than fume over the details current factional fever.

The problem with factions is, as James Madison pointed out in his definition above, is that a faction places the impulses of one group over the rights of other groups and the interests of the wider community. In the eighteenth century, propensity toward factionalism was noted as a flaw in democratic governments and a reason for forming the United States as a republic rather than a democracy.

Here, republic and democracy are used precisely. A town hall that is open to all and gives an equal vote to each attendee is a pure democracy. A city council meeting in which only the elected council members have a vote is a republic. In both cases, the ultimate authority stems from the citizens, but control is less direct in a republic. In historical republics, such as the classic Roman republic, membership in the governing council might be be freely elected but was often limited to people of wealth, land ownership, special families, etc.

Madison’s argument was that factions form with more difficulty in a republic and dissipate more quickly in a large republic. This argument may not have greatly swayed decisions on the U.S. constitution, but we now have what Madison wished for: a large republic of federated states.

I’m not sure that today’s prevailing faction is a majority. In my estimate, although Donald Trump officially won both the popular and the electoral vote, the November 2024 election was too close to confirm his supporters as a majority. Nevertheless, the election has given a faction a tight grasp on the reigns of power in America and the winners intend to do as much as they can to reshape the country to their tastes.

I ask what caused the current faction to prevail, contrary to Madison’s expectation. Before I sail off into speculation, I quote Madison again, simply because he wrote so well:

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.”

Since the turn of the twenty-first century liberty has reached new levels; we have computer networks that offer almost everyone the liberty of their own platform for broadcasting to the world. In the last decade or so, social media have added the equivalent of anabolic steroids to the computer network: likes and shares on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others. Those pernicious buttons have enabled virality; today, within a few clicks, a catchy post spreads like the measles at an anti-vax birthday party.

Ubiquitous platforms and virality have transformed our American republic to a brood stall for factions. Virality is all about “fast thinking,” the shoot-from-the-hip thoughts that are fight or flight reflexes rather than considered, judged, and reasoned responses; in other words, an aliment which is gasoline to the fires of faction.

Madison expected that a large republic would quickly engulf factions with reason.

Instead, technology has added an accelerant.

Paradigm Shifting

Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark’s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.

Simply mentioning “paradigm shift” brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.

Up until that class reading, I understood science as a steady progression of discoveries starting from formulating a hypothesis, then confirming or disproving the hypothesis with experiments that eventually led to established scientific law; science forever changing as knowledge accumulates, but a gradual incremental process.

Oh how naive that farm boy was.

Kuhn ended that neat scenario. Instead of a steady progression, he amazed me with a series of revolutions from Aristotle to Galileo, on to Newton and Einstein. Each revolution came as an abrupt change following a period of a growing doubt that the reigning paradigm could answer or explain increasingly pressing issues.

I liked the notion of paradigms so much that twenty years later I jumped on the bandwagon to name one the first software products I designed and developed. We called it “Paradigm Trouble Ticketing.”

A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can’t help myself.) During a shift, the obvious and important is in flux, making paradigm spotting difficult while the shift occurs and seldom plain until the dust has settled.

This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.

G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”

I am afraid that America’s “unconscious democracy” is the paradigm that is going by the wayside, destroyed by the 2024 election. I fear that the assumption of equality that sustained the United States for the previous century has been rejected and replaced by faith in oligarchy, government by the wealthy.

We saw it in the conclave of billionaires at the inauguration, we read it in the executive order to abolish the directive against racial discrimination in federal hiring.

But paradigms don’t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don’t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.