Our Misplaced Faith in Factions

“There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism,” said Alexander Hamilton. We are this year in one of those seasons—a presidential election year.

Hamilton had a turbulent life and career. He was born in the mid-1770s in the West Indies of unwed parents and essentially orphaned at age eleven. In 1804, at age forty-nine, he incurred the wrath of Aaron Burr, whose election defeat in the gubernatorial race in New York had been assisted by Hamilton. A duel resulted, in which Hamilton was mortally wounded and died shortly after. However, in between he crafted an influential career as one of the American founders, in particular in matters of the Constitution and finance. He wrote 51 of the 85 installments of the Federalist Papers, much of which content still influences constitutional interpretation today. Under President George Washington he served as the first Secretary of the Treasury and helped to found the U.S. Mint and the first national bank.

Much of Hamilton’s professional life coincided with the rise of “factions”—political parties—with Hamilton aligning with the Federalists, while founders such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson emerged in the ranks of the Democratic-Republicans, at the time known as Republicans, though not to be confused with today’s Republican party. This early Republican party dominated the presidency from 1801 to 1825—in succession, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams. This Republican party was the direct predecessor of the modern Democratic party.

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both wrote about the dangers of partisan politics in the Federalist Papers, numbers 9 and 10 respectively. With uncanny insight and prescience, Madison in the latter paper wrote:

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for preeminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

The American founders had faith in the common good and feared that factions, or political parties, would damage the democratic union they lived and died to establish. Today’s powerful factions, the Republican and Democratic parties, are contending in a manner that is accomplishing what the founders feared. In particular, the Republican party has increasing emerged as Hamilton’s “factious men,” clamoring with false patriotism not for the common good but for political power to enrich further the already wealthy and to empower corporations as “people” under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United (2010). A leading factious voice for this party, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, reduced the party’s objective of power over people to a much-quoted statement: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Now millionaire candidate Mitt Romney, backed by a millionaire old boys’ club of corporate bigwigs, is putting teeth into the proposition that the United States should abandon democracy in favor of a corporate oligarchy form of governance, though they stop short of saying this honestly. This movement, too, is something that the American founders recognized and warned against. It was a warning reiterated by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, the year before his assassination:

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country…. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Now, one hundred fifty years after Lincoln gave voice to this fear, we are on the brink of this reality. The Republican push to conflate partisan politics and corporate greed and to convince the unsuspecting by “working upon the prejudices of the people” is indeed imperiling our republic. No threat to the common good of American democracy has ever been greater than this internal, insidious movement now making inroads under cover of a once-respected political party.