MADISON AND WASHINGTON WARNED US, NOW WE DO IT ANYWAY

Democracies are actually fragile entities when we consider how few of them last. Right now we are forgetting how fragile and precious our Democracy is. When George Washington left office he saw that our country was in great danger of being victimized by the "factions" he saw all around him. Washington warned:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

The current death struggle style of political fighting between Left and Right, a fight that is getting dirtier and more vicious by the second, was something that the authors of the Federalist Papers feared most when they were considering the "new" democracy. James Madison, writing in Paper Ten, expressed the fear of factions, which he defined as:....

..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, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

It's obvious we'd call abortion, gay rights, and the "impeach Bush" crowd a faction that is dangerous on its face. But what about factions that succeeded in granting Blacks full civil rights? Or the one that formed labor unions? Some are good and some are not so good.

Madison urged rejection of both a "pure" democracy and a Confederation of states. Instead he urged the formation of a Republic as the best way to avoid the effects of factions on all government. He pointed out that everywhere factions had resulted in violence. Factions were dangerous to everyone.

The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice (factions).

He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

The Founders recognized that the "cure" for factions was worse than the disease because it is natural to have lots of disagreements, in fact the expressions of disagreements were a bedrock of democracy. They also recognized that if a minority held a violently different opinion a Republican government would contain it, but that if it were a majority opinion the Constitution (country) would destroy itself. So it was said that a Republican form of government would contain the EFFECTS of faction, not the faction itself. The events leading up to the Civil War showed the extreme result of powerful factions on our Republic and that extreme factionalism will tear asunder any form of government.

Are we at the edge of that disaster right now? I think we may very well be. The tone of the Left can be seen on all their blogs and discourses; the tone of the extremes on the Right brook no compromises on anything. We can only hope that events cure this extreme form of madness.

Republican government by itself cannot.