James Madison's Defense Against Human Nature

“The government cannot endure permanently if administered on a spoils basis. If this form of corruption is permitted and encouraged, other forms of corruption will inevitably follow in its train. When a department at Washington, or at a state capitol, or in the city hall in some big town is thronged with place-hunters and office-mongers who seek and dispense patronage from considerations of personal and party greed, the tone of public life is necessarily so lowered that the bribe-taker and the bribe-giver, the blackmailer and the corruptionist, find their places ready prepared for them.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1895

Mob: (Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, 155) the mob is not the industrial working class or the people as a whole, but it is “the refuse of all classes”; citing Arendt, the mob is “the riff-raff of bohemians, crackpots, gangsters and conspirators”; James Madison: impetuous mobs are factions, which he defined in Federalist 10 as a group “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”, wherein (i) factions arise when public opinion forms and spreads quickly, but (ii) they can dissolve if the public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather than short-term gratification

An article The Atlantic recently published, America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare, is one in a series that asks if democracy is dying. The author, Jeffrey Rosen, argues the barriers that Madison helped design to prevent mob rule have failed. Rosen argues that Madison tried to design a representative democratic form of government that would avoid the fate of “ancient and modern confederacies,” which had fallen to rule by demagogues and mobs. Madison felt that direct democracy would always fall to demagogues who stir mob passions on their way to political power. Madison wanted to avoid government where “passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. . . . . Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Rosen writes:

Madison and Hamilton believed that Athenian citizens had been swayed by crude and ambitious politicians who had played on their emotions. The demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more hawkish toward Athens’s opponents in the Peloponnesian War, and even the reformer Solon canceled debts and debased the currency. In Madison’s view, history seemed to be repeating itself in America.

Madison referred to impetuous mobs as factions, which he defined in Federalist No. 10 as a group “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.” Factions arise, he believed, when public opinion forms and spreads quickly. But they can dissolve if the public is given time and space to consider long-term interests rather than short-term gratification.

The US Senate was intended to be an institution to cool inflamed mob passions that would invariably arise from the House. Mechanisms to cool mob passions included a Senate comprised of natural aristocrats chosen by state legislators. And, instead of directly electing the President, “the people would vote for wise electors—that is, propertied white men—who would ultimately choose a president of the highest character and most discerning judgment.”

Rosen describes the failure:

What would Madison make of American democracy today, an era in which Jacksonian populism looks restrained by comparison? Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.

The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.

The executive branch, meanwhile, has been transformed by the spectacle of tweeting presidents, though the presidency had broken from its constitutional restraints long before the advent of social media. During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.

From the very beginning, the devices that the Founders hoped would prevent the rapid mobilization of passionate majorities didn’t work in all the ways they expected. After the election of 1800, the Electoral College, envisioned as a group of independent sages, became little more than a rubber stamp for the presidential nominees of the newly emergent political parties.

Rosen goes on the describe other phenomena that foster mob rule, e.g., (i) media polarization, (ii) social-media platforms that spread misinformation and inflame partisan differences, and (iii) the physical sorting of people into communities of like-minded citizens. He sees no short-term solution to the problem. Free speech cannot be suppressed, so dark free speech (lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity, irrational emotional manipulation, etc) is now a permanent fixture. It is also coming from America's enemies, especially Russia and China, so the social damage is impossible to accurately assess.

Rosen mentions a potential at least partial remedy that Madison proposed: “The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. . . . . Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry.” Regarding public education, the Funders, Rosen and this channel are similar pages. Rosen and the Founders, looked to education about how the Constitution and government work.

This channel adds to that, education in cognitive biology and social behavior. Without at least a modest understanding of the human mind and how it works or fails to work, any defense against the dark arts of opacity, propaganda, lies and unscrupulous manipulation will be incomplete and probably much less effective than it could be.

This is a link to other articles in the series.

B&B orig: 1/1/19