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.

Faith in the People

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

Sadly, we have not followed Jefferson’s advice. The consequence is that corporations have increasingly come to dominate our national sense of direction, so much so that the United States now leans strongly toward corporate oligarchy as a form of governance. Is “we the people” becoming “we the corporation”?

In this election year we are seeing the effects of corporate “personhood,” as it is called, particularly in the arena of campaign finance. Much of the current presidential contest revolves around money, and not just Mitt Romney’s personal fortune and where he keeps it. It has become, to the disgust of many across the political spectrum, a tenet of the current conservative contenders that votes can be bought and lies passed off as truth if enough money is thrown into the mix. In the party of the wealthy, who has the money? Corporations, of course.

Two Supreme Court cases dominate. In Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Court held that political spending is protected by the right to free speech in the First Amendment. Then, crushing Jefferson’s hope, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) the Court held that corporations have a right to free speech under the First Amendment, just as though they were individuals. The latter decision opened the floodgates for corporate spending to promote the interests of monied elites—wealthy corporate entities—over those of individuals.

Democracy invests faith in the people to govern. The United States was founded on the democratic principle that all citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. This principle has yet to be fully achieved. But progress has been made incrementally over the past two-plus centuries, granting equal civic personhood through freedom and enfranchisement of various segments of the demos, such as African Americans and women.

In this progressive realization of our democratic principle, however, the granting of corporate personhood has been a misstep. When the powers of governance come to be held by a small number of people, an elite of any sort (the military, royalty, etc.), which is the danger of corporate personhood, then we trade democracy for oligarchy. For Aristotle, oligarchy was synonymous with the rich.

Most of us—the 99% much referred to this year—are not rich and are being disenfranchised, our individual personhood diminished, as wealthy corporations become an ascendant aristocracy. Whether the American “experiment” can survive will depend on whether we the people can revive the power of the demos in our democracy.