Madison Didn't Trust You Either: What Federalist No. 10 Actually Says About the Mess We're In

The following represents the opinion of the author and not the editorial position of The Long Game.

Every few years, a politician delivers a speech lamenting the death of bipartisanship. The speech typically includes a reference to the Founders, an invocation of unity, and an implicit suggestion that the current state of partisan warfare represents a betrayal of some original American ideal — a fall from grace, a departure from a more virtuous founding era.

I want to suggest, as respectfully as possible, that this is almost entirely wrong. And that James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 10 in November of 1787, told us so.

What Madison Actually Said

Madison opens Federalist No. 10 with an observation that most readers speed past on their way to the more quotable passages: that the "instability, injustice, and confusion" produced by faction have been the primary cause of the death of popular governments throughout history. He is not describing a distant theoretical risk. He is describing what he believes to be the central vulnerability of any democratic system.

His definition of faction is worth quoting in full: "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, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

Notice what is not in that definition. Madison does not define faction as a party, or as an ideology, or as a movement. He defines it as any group organized around a shared interest that conflicts with the broader common good. By this definition, virtually every organized political actor in American history qualifies. Your party qualifies. The other party qualifies. The Founders' own coalitions qualified.

This was not an oversight. It was the entire point.

The Dark Assumption at the Heart of the Constitution

Madison's argument proceeds from a premise that is psychologically sophisticated and politically uncomfortable: you cannot remove the causes of faction without destroying liberty, because faction arises from human nature itself. "The latent causes of faction," he writes, "are thus sown in the nature of man."

Read that sentence slowly. Madison is not saying that some people are selfish and others are not. He is not saying that better education or civic virtue will eventually solve the problem. He is saying that self-interest is constitutive of human psychology — that it is baked in, ineradicable, a permanent feature of any political landscape populated by actual human beings rather than the idealized citizens of philosophical treatises.

The civics-class interpretation of this passage treats it as a historical curiosity — a quaint 18th-century worry about political parties that the modern reader can nod at and move past. But Madison was not being quaint. He was being precise. He was describing something that every large-scale study of human social behavior since his time has confirmed: people reliably prioritize in-group interests, rationalize self-serving positions as principled ones, and apply different epistemic standards to information that supports their existing beliefs versus information that challenges them.

Madison did not have access to the behavioral economics literature or the social psychology research on motivated reasoning. He had something arguably more reliable: the entire recorded history of republican government up to his moment, from Athens to Rome to the Italian city-states to the English Civil War. The sample size was not large, but the pattern was consistent.

The Machine He Built

If you cannot eliminate faction, Madison argued, you have to design a system that neutralizes it. His solution was the extended republic — a political structure so large and so heterogeneous that no single faction could ever accumulate enough power to dominate all the others simultaneously.

The constitutional architecture that followed from this logic was not designed to produce harmony. It was designed to produce managed conflict. Separation of powers, bicameralism, federalism, staggered elections, the veto — these mechanisms do not exist to help the government function smoothly. They exist to make it difficult for any one faction to function without the cooperation of others who have competing interests and independent bases of power.

The system was, in a very literal sense, designed to make factions bleed each other out.

This reframes the contemporary complaint about gridlock in a way that should give everyone pause. When commentators lament that "Washington can't get anything done," they are frequently describing the system working as intended. The friction is not a bug introduced by modern polarization. The friction is load-bearing architecture.

Where Madison's Model Strains

None of this means the system is infinitely robust. Madison's model has a specific structural vulnerability that he acknowledged and that has become considerably more salient in the current political environment.

The extended republic argument works on the assumption that factions remain genuinely plural — that the diversity of interests across a large nation prevents any single coalition from achieving durable dominance. The model begins to strain when one faction acquires disproportionate control not just over policy but over the mechanisms that adjudicate between factions: the courts, the rules governing elections, the administrative apparatus that enforces norms.

Madison worried about majority faction — a dominant popular coalition that simply outvoted everyone else into irrelevance. He was somewhat less focused on the problem of institutional capture: a faction that loses popular majorities but retains structural control over the referees.

This is not an argument for any particular partisan conclusion. The accusation of rigging the rules has been leveled, with varying degrees of credibility, by virtually every major political movement in American history. What matters for present purposes is the structural observation: the machinery Madison designed depends on no single faction controlling both the game and the rulebook simultaneously. When that condition is violated — by any faction, from any direction — the self-correcting mechanism loses its corrective capacity.

What the Long Game Looks Like

The appropriate response to this is not despair, and it is not the ritual lament about lost civility. Madison did not want civility. He wanted competition. He wanted factions to check each other so aggressively that none of them could do permanent damage.

The more useful question, sitting here in 2024, is whether the institutional structures that channel and constrain factional competition are still functioning — or whether they have been gradually hollowed out in ways that leave the underlying human psychology of self-interest without adequate friction to slow it down.

Madison's genius was to take an unflattering view of human nature and build something durable around it. His bet was not that Americans would rise above their self-interest. His bet was that their self-interest, properly arranged, would keep the whole enterprise from flying apart.

That bet is still on the table. The question is whether we are still playing by the rules of the original wager.