Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 93

Eighty-five essays were written by Publius. In a contemporary introduction to the essays, compiled as a book, one scholar calls them, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, part of “the sacred writings of American political history.”²⁴ Putting them on a par with holy things is probably a mistake. Far from being divinely inspired, The Federalist Papers are quintessentially the work of human beings. They are clever, well thought out, and logical, but they are also tricky and persuasive examples of the “hard sell.” Their archaic language makes The Federalist Papers generally difficult reading for contemporary students. However, the arguments in support of the Constitution are laid out so beautifully that it is worthwhile to take the trouble to read them. It would be a good idea to turn to them now and read them carefully.

In Federalist No. 10, Madison tries to convince Americans that a large country is no more likely to succumb to the effects of special interests than is a small one (preferred by the Anti-Federalists). He explains that the greatest danger to a republic comes from factions, what we might call interest groups. Factions are groups of people motivated by a common interest, but one different from the interest of the country as a whole. Farmers, for instance, have an interest in keeping food prices high, even though that would make most Americans worse off. Businesspeople prefer high import duties on foreign goods, even though they make both foreign and domestic goods more expensive for the rest of us. Factions are not a particular problem when they constitute a minority of the population because they are offset by majority rule. They do become problematic, however, when they are a majority. Factions usually have economic roots, the most basic being a difference between the “haves” and “have nots” in society. One of the majority factions that worried Madison was the mass of propertyless people whose behavior was so threatening to property holders under the Articles of Confederation.

factions groups of citizens united by some common passion or interest and opposed to the rights of other citizens or to the interests of the whole community

To control the causes of factions would be to infringe on individual liberty. But Madison believed that the effects of factions are easily managed in a large republic. First of all, representation will dilute the effects of factions, and it is in this essay that Madison makes his famous distinction between “pure democracy” and a “republic.” In addition, if the territory is sufficiently large, factions will be neutralized because there will be so many of them that no one is likely to become a majority. Furthermore, it will be difficult for people who share common interests to find one another if some live in South Carolina, for instance, and others live in Maine. (Clearly, Madison never anticipated social media or even the telegraph.) We discuss Madison’s argument about factions again when we take up the topic of interest groups in Chapter 11. In the meantime, notice how Madison relies on mechanical elements of politics (size and representation) to remedy a flaw in human nature (the tendency to form divisive factions). This is typical of the Federalists’ approach to government and reflects the importance of institutions as well as rules in bringing about desired outcomes in politics.

We see the same emphasis on mechanical solutions to political problems in Federalist No. 51. Here Madison argues that the institutions proposed in the Constitution will lead neither to corruption nor to tyranny. The solution is the principles of checks and balances and separation of powers we have already discussed. Again building his case on a potential defect of human character, he says, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”²⁵ If men tend to be ambitious, give two ambitious men the job of watching over each other, and neither will let the other have an advantage.

Federalist No. 84, written by Hamilton, is interesting politically because the Constitution was ratified in spite of it, not because of it. In this essay, Hamilton argues that a Bill of Rights—a listing of the protections against government infringement of individual rights guaranteed to citizens by government itself—is not necessary in a constitution. The original draft of the Constitution contained no Bill of Rights. Some state constitutions had them, and so the Federalists argued that a federal Bill of Rights would be redundant. Moreover, the limited government set up by the federal Constitution didn’t have the power to infringe on individual rights anyway, and many of the rights that would be included in a Bill of Rights were already in the body of the text. To the Anti-Federalists, already afraid of the invasive power of the national government, this omission was more appalling than any other aspect of the Constitution.

Bill of Rights a summary of citizen rights guaranteed and protected by a government; added to the Constitution as its first ten amendments in order to achieve ratification

In Federalist No. 84, Hamilton explains the Federalist position, that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary. Then he makes the unusual argument that a Bill of Rights would actually be dangerous. As it stands, he says, the national government doesn’t have the power to interfere with citizens’ lives in many ways, and any interference at all would be suspect. But if the Constitution were prefaced with a list of things government could not do to individuals, government would assume it had the power to do anything that wasn’t expressly forbidden. Therefore government, instead of being unlikely to trespass on citizens’ rights, would be more likely to do so with a Bill of Rights than without. This argument was so unpersuasive to Americans at the time that the Federalists were forced to give in to Anti-Federalist pressure during the ratification process. The price of ratification exacted by several states was the Bill of Rights, really a “Bill of Limits” on the federal government, added to the Constitution as the first ten amendments.

Would we have more freedoms today, or fewer, without the Bill of Rights?