21 Century Revolutionary Jeffersonian Democracy 2: Preventing Tyranny,James Madison's Federalist 10
Channel: aligzanduh
Date: 2012-11-26

Part 2 in a series on 21st Century Jeffersonian Democracy, Locke, Aristotle Transcript: https://docs.google.com/a/microtopia.org/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=bWljcm90b3BpYS5vcmd8bWljcm90b3BpYXxneDozNjk0MGE4NDdjYTgzMTQ2 http://archive.org/stream/thefederalistpap01404gut/pg1404.txt 
18th century phrases in modern terms.
1. A well constructed union's primary advantage is preventing one faction or 'power structure' from dominating.
2. A plan which can protect against this is critical.
3. The American Constitution, which was thought perhaps the best work on popular Government at the time by many, is understood not to be full proof.
4. Can Government be designed to protect the public good in the conflicts between rival parties.
5. "measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
6. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.
a. This also begs the question of whether mankind can be trusted with ever sacrificing the short term for the long term. 
7. A faction is any group which unites under some impulse, interest or passion, adverse to the rights of other citizens or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community as a whole
8. There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.
9. 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.
10. Eliminating Liberty to cure faction is to destroy political life itself. The cure is worse than the disease
11. Eliminating faction through eliminating differences of opinion  is equally impractical.  A Government based on equality of opportunity, but not equality of condition, will inevitably lead to different interests and opinion. Each person has different interests and capabilities, which will result in different levels of resources and wealth, which will intensify over time. By protecting the rights of people to obtain property through their efforts, inequality will occur, which will result in different interest groups based on in particular the possession different degrees and kinds of property. "As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.  
12. Opinions and interests differ in matters of religion, Government and many other matters in theory as well as in practice. Attachments to different leaders and personalities, have divided mankind into parties and inflamed animosity, and conflict has more often been the case than cooperating for the common good.  So strong are these divisive tendencies, that even the most minor frivolous issue can cause great conflicts and controversies to break out.
13. Wealth inequality is the most common source of division. Additionally the different industries have different interests.The regulation of these competing and interfering interests is the principle task of legislation. "The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.  

Conclusion: Madison and Jefferson were thought to carry similar "Anti Federalist Views" -- and in fact the arguments espoused by Madison in Federalist 10 that are most troubling are in fact Federalist views, if my understanding that Federalism understood that elites would govern, and Anti Federalists persisted in attempting to protect the free holder as the bulwark of democracy as well as the republic. Hamilton and Jefferson had more in common than in disagreement. They both sought to create a successful vibrant country, with different emphasis on where power lay and was distributed. Here we see elitist assumptions hidden under fine rhetoric that would lay a seed in the union that have born bitter fruit in my opinion. The fruit of a people first dispossessed of their republic, and second the republic overthrown, with a mere shell as my father said long ago "A corporate dictatorship with a veneer of democracy, and with 9-11 and the Patriot Act, an autocracy and dictatorship that has driven our legal rights back to before 1215 A.D. (The elimination of Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus (1679) and Posse Comitatus (1878).
http://merrill.olm.net/mdocs/pop/colonies/colonies.htm http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/opinion/24conley.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print