Founding Father knew how to save a big, corrupt republic
One of the many law firms advertising in Florida proclaims on a big billboard: “Size matters.” The crude innuendo is hackneyed. But America’s tiniest Founding Father, James Madison, would have agreed. Size matters a lot.
James Madison was 5 feet, 4 inches tall, but as “the father of the U.S. Constitution,” he was an intellectual giant who thought a great deal about size. In fact, Madison’s reflections on size help explain why Americans today tend to be so disgusted with their political system but often seem at a loss over what to do about it.
When Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers proposed a new Constitution featuring a relatively powerful central government, anti-federalist critics said it would never work because republics had to be small, like Greek citystates. The proposed republic, stretching from New Hampshire to Georgia, was clearly destined to grow still larger. The antifederalists dismissed Madison as a would-be powercentralizing aristocrat, and short too.
But Madison argued that small republics easily became corrupt or tyrannical because it was relatively easy for one special interest or group to form a majority, capture the government and oppress a minority. In a vast continental republic like the Unites States, however, there would be so many competing interests that none were likely to become powerful enough to take control of the government. Instead, those many interests would check each other. Our large American republic, Madison concluded, had a good chance of being just, stable and durable.
Madison’s theory, outlined in Federalist No. 10, held up reasonably well for the first 60 years of the American republic, until an extremely powerful faction — the slave-based economy of the Southern states — rose up in rebellion, resulting in the American Civil War, which is to this day both the nation’s bloodiest war and its most epic contest with a special interest.
After the Civil War, the power of the federal government began to grow. Progressives demanded government oversight to combat various social problems. The New Deal and Great Society expanded the government’s role in the economy and created
large entitlement programs. The Cold War birthed the military industrial complex.
For good or ill, depending on one’s politics, today the federal government is many orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than the one imagined by Madison and his fellow founders. And that reality throws a big monkey wrench into Madison’s scheme for a government capable of resisting selfish interests. It is no longer necessary for a self-serving interest to gain majority support to corrupt the government, and thereby subvert the common good, because when government is immensely powerful it can serve innumerable selfish interests simultaneously.
Today, a voracious hoard of selfish corporate and political interests gorges itself at the trough of power at the public’s expense. The common and long-term well-being of the American people is an afterthought, at best.
The public understands this well. When asked in an NBC/ Wall Street Journal Survey, over 80 percent of respondents agreed with the following unattributed statement:
A small group in the nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.
The quote is from Donald Trump’s inaugural address.
Would 80 percent still agree if they knew Trump said it?
Probably not. Which points to another problem associated with size. In our time, it’s not only government that has become corrupted by interests. Large institutions that produce the knowledge, information and ideas that a republic depends upon are also compromised. Media, which once at least went through the motions of taking journalistic standards seriously, now relies on a views-and-clicks business model that sows division, and even hatred, among citizens. Tidal waves of corporate and politically driven government money have corrupted universities, funding narrowly confined agendas.
When politicians collude with corporate and other professional interests to form an entrenched political class, then the government no longer represents the people.
Madison feared this, though he never expressed it publicly, because it would have undermined his signature argument about the relative safety of a large republic. But, to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, Madison wrote:
As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may too easily be formed against the weaker party, so in too an extensive one, a defensive concert (author’s emphasis) may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those trusted with administration.
By “defensive concert,” Madison means is that in a large and diverse society, people are easily splintered into squabbling factions when, instead, unity is needed to resist corruption, or worse. Madison’s prescience is astounding since this is exactly where “we the people” find ourselves today — in need of concerted action against public institutions captured by special interests.
Today, whenever an isolated leader stands up to truly challenge the system, he or she is likely to be demonized and demonetized. Platforms are withdrawn, reputations attacked, voices censored, private lives harassed and employment terminated. For real leaders whose only desire is to serve the public, the public square has become an increasingly dangerous and authoritarian place.
We need, in Madison’s words, “a defensive concert.”
The first step to ending this corruption and authoritarianism should be obvious: Real leaders, on left and right, need to form a unified opposition. Currently, dissenting voices are hunkered down in their silos, building their own brands when they should be uniting to build a movement together. Each voice alone is too puny to make a real difference but uniting and organizing could change everything. And it must.
Madison would argue that such a movement should have a clear overarching mission: to remove from the political system every incentive that favors service to selfish interests, or factions, over the common and long-term good of the American people.
It’s an enormous and complicated task, but it’s the concerted action that Madison begs us to take.
Erickson is the founder of the American Common Ground Alliance, author of “What Would Madison Do? The Political Journey Progressives and Conservatives Must Make Together,” and coordinator of a campaign to promote better representative democracy through small, decentralized, web-connected legislative districts. This piece was originally published by Zocalo Public Square.