The Sentimentalizing of Federalist Ten

A mood still prevailing in the liberal resistance to Trump keeps pushing us backward.

Former president Barack Obama recently addressed the Democracy Forum, an effort of the Obama Foundation, to discuss the role of what he calls pluralism in fending off Trumpist attacks on American democracy and strengthening both resistance to those attacks and our democratic institutions themselves. I gather this is the third such address: in ‘22, he talked about the problem of disinformation; in ‘23, he talked about the problem of wealth concentration (I think that involves an irony, given some of his policies as president). This year, he was talking about the need to reject what he calls ideological purity tests in order to “find ways to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”

I’m not super-interested in that kind of talk—not that I never agree with some things Obama might say—and I’ve never seen the former president as a realistic thinker in the areas most important to me. But I am interested in the prominent people who are interested in what he says and who do take his thinking seriously. They represent a force in political liberalism that’s held cultural sway during the past eight years. I think their sway is having a deleterious effect on liberal discourse regarding Trumpist authoritarianism, ways to combat it, and, especially important to me, the history of American democracy in general.

I don’t think nonspecialist Americans need to have a deep understanding of the realities of that history in order to fight tyranny. I do think having fantastical ideas about the history can only hurt.

In the December 7 edition of her extraordinarily popular blog “Letters from an American,” the eminent historian Heather Cox Richardson praised Obama’s address by saying that it echoed James Madison’s thinking in what’s probably the most famous essay in what are often called The Federalist Papers: #10. The essays as a whole were propaganda, often disingenuous. A New York convention was assembling to debate the validity and usefulness of the proposed new national constitution. The essays urged ratification, and while New York did in the end ratify, they had no effect at all. For a long time they’ve nevertheless been taken as a useful guide to understanding the Constitution.

Regarding the origin and purpose of Federalist #10, Richardson tells her readers, “in 1787, many inhabitants of the fledgling nation objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution. They worried

that such a government could fall under the control of a majority that would exercise its power to crush the rights of the minority. Madison agreed that such a calamity was likely in a small country, but argued that the very size and diversity of the people in the proposed United States would guard against such tyranny as people formed coalitions over one issue or another, then dissolved them and formed others. Such constantly shifting coalitions would serve the good of all Americans without forging a permanent powerful majority.

Following that line of thought, Richardson traces, throughout Obama’s address, the moments where Obama took positions reminiscent of those Madison took when addressing what Richardson calls the fears of those who opposed ratifying the Constitution. She thereby casts Obama’s pluralism as fundamental to American democracy.

Obama’s U.S. history has always been astonishingly superficial. Not superficial for a politician—they live on bad history—but for someone widely accepted as a serious thinker. In the address, he sets up, just to knock down, the postwar consensus period where democracy “seemed to run relatively smoothly,” observing that the only reason it did was that so many people were left out of the kind of pluralism that he says prevailed in that day.

Way too much to get into there. But just as a start, it might be worth wondering how smoothly things seemed to be running in 1948, say, when the Democrats split into three parties: one the mainstream party of the incumbent Truman; one the party of the racist South, behind Strom Thurmond; one the ‘30’s-left-revival party behind Henry Wallace. The mainstream Republican opposition, meanwhile, led by Thomas Dewey, was fighting tooth and nail to maintain itself against an onslaught from the new right led by Robert Taft. It really doesn’t matter that “everybody,” supposedly, “watched ‘Gilligan’s Island’” in the early ‘60’s: Obama’s clichéd dream about a postwar pluralist America, with the Constitution its “rulebook,” is fantastical anyway, regardless of how really non-pluralist it all was. These are not history lessons for grownups.

On the other hand, some things did work well! if not always smoothly, after the war—yes, mainly for those not left out (given the nature of Jim Crow, “left out” is an awfully polite way of putting it), but even for some among the left-out. The postwar “consensus” isn’t just a strawman to knock down, as if it existed only because of goofy TV shows and being racist and sexist. It had positive reasons for existing, and I don’t think they had to do with limited, shared entertainment (people burned Elvis Presley records, just for one famous culture example), or with the whole pluralism theme, which is purely cultural and ignores politics and economics.

What worked, nationally, in that period emerged from a recently developed structure of antimonopoly and labor law, with a novel role for the federal government in regulating commerce and high finance, often in ways that big corporations and Wall Street saw as hostile to their aims. That’s the same regulatory structure that, in 2006, the soon-to-be presidential candidate Obama assured Wall Street executives he was not in favor of reviving. In taking that position, he was only following in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter, the 1980’s Democratic Leadership Council, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, et al, who had spent thirty years committing the party to other aims and leaving the old New Deal consensus behind. [UPDATE: I’d originally thrown Robert Bork in there because of bipartisan adoption of his conservative standard on antitrust—but he wasn’t involved in the Democratic Party, so he’s out. Thanks to Nick Birns for catching the illogic.]

Obama’s 2008 attacks on NAFTA and criticism of Hillary Clinton for being too close to Wall Street, as well as his sympathetic noises about Occupy Wall Street in 2011, were intellectually inconsistent. The real action for him—and for the brand of liberalism he represents—is on the one hand to reject the postwar consensus, not just because it left people out but because it opposed big, corporate wealth concentrations; and on the other hand to get the groups he calls left out “a seat at the table,” which really means the big table, the C-suite, thereby pluralizing a system that it seems fairer and fairer to call not democracy but oligarchy.

Opposition to getting those people their rightful seats then becomes, in this narrative, the sole cause of the rise of Trump. And thanks to Obama’s fabled delivery, it all sounds so informed, so logical.

It’s very thin. And it's very slippery.

Regarding James Madison, then, Richardson is right—but in a way I don’t think she intends. In Federalist #10, Madison was conjuring, like Obama, a vision of pluralism. And like Obama, he had at heart the protection not of democracy but of oligarchy.

The burden of the essay, as Richardson says, is to clarify for the nervous how effective the Constitution will be in restraining the majority and protecting the minority, but Richardson doesn’t note the brute fact that when Madison says “majority,” he and his readers mean quite specifically those who want to democratize public finance and use the power of government to restrain the power of great wealth, in part by broadening the electoral franchise to include all free white men regardless of property ownership. When they say “the minority,” they mean the few rich men who had the vote.

Many people today insist that Madison’s opposition to democracy was only an opposition to referendum—not representative government but “pure” democracy, where every proposed measure of government is put to a vote by the qualified public. In #10, Madison does object to that kind of democracy, but the objection is throat-clearing, even deflection. The main line of the essay is about how representation should work. The main thrust has to do with structuring such representation to defeat what Madison calls the “wicked projects” of democratic finance.

For Richardson is right, too, when saying that many in the ratifying conventions “objected to the idea of the strong national government proposed under the new constitution.” What she refuses to see is the political and economic context in which the Federalist essays addressed those objections. It’s true that the people who objected to the Constitution, members of the governing and financial elite, were afraid their states would lose power. But they were equally afraid of what had been going on in their states to restrain, via the assertion of majority will, the formerly unrestrained power of their money. The latter fear is what had gotten many of the delegates to the convention in the first place. In #10, Madison is pitching the holdouts on the Constitution’s power to protect their financial hegemony by restraining the will of the democratic majority.

Federalist #10 is just one of many places where the ideas of the founders are inimical to any realistic effort to defend democracy from Trumpism. Obama was either wrong or bullshitting, on election night 2012, when he said “the promise of our founders” is that “if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or who you love. . . whether you're black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American. . .or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight. If you're willing to work hard, you can make it here in America if you're willing to try.”

To that, the founders would have said “Huh?” The freedom and equality Obama referred to were brought about by movements of the people, majorities and minorities often at risk of life and liberty, acting in direct opposition to founding structures designed to impede those movements, whose successes are now being pushed back. The founders can’t help us with that. Invoking their anti-democratic theories only pushes us further backward.

Many in the most visible segment of the liberal U.S. history establishment have embraced, in their effort to oppose Trumpism, Obama’s and others’ fuzzy ideas about our country’s origins and progress, ideas that have always led to the same foregone and by no means democratic conclusions. In the horrible moment of reelection we’re now facing—still not by a majority of voters, but getting closer—I can’t see how that mood is in any way sustainable intellectually, politically, morally. And yet I know that given the popularity of, as a leading example, Richardson’s blog and books, I’m still out here in the wilderness.

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If you’re interested in the realities of the American founding, less popular but funnier and more harrowing than anything you’ll read anywhere else, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, the whole thing is right here in THE HAMILTON SCHEME.