A Dysfunctional Conspiracy

Part 2: ­­­Factionalism, a Conspiracy of History?

Factionalism: a condition in which a group, organization, government, etc., is split into two or more smaller groups with differing and often opposing opinions or interests. Here, we look at thirteen colonial factions, all with different and opposing opinions and interests.

Under the broad heading of a Conspiracy of History, we must first recognize that this conspiracy is always before us, 24/7, in both fact and fantasy. In the midst of history, we exist materially, and by our material existence, we exist ideologically. It is only within the past two hundred years, via Freud, Marx, Marcuse and Fromm, et al., that we’ve come to recognize the origins of ideology and its power to shape our world through its impact on political doctrine and social theories. If such ideological recognition remains difficult for us today, that it went completely unseen in the 18th Century was to lead the 1787 Philadelphia Convention into uncharted political waters. In other words, in 1787 there was little way for the historical actors to foresee a complete picture of the practical issues arising from the attempt to unite thirteen colonial factions.

The colonies were all established between 1606, (Virginia) and 1732, (Georgia), with each colonial faction possessing relative economic interests that would hamper inter-colonial cooperation. Political questions then (as now) typically revolved around short term and immediate fixes, not grandiose visions. Each one of these thirteen colonial factions had a different backstory, a different origin, a different catalyst, all reflected in the different establishment charters. As will be suggested later in this essay, this historically engineered design for the thirteen colonies feeds nearly seamlessly into a factional institution that undermined nearly all future political cooperation: Congress.

This antecedent colonial factionalism was to evolve into history’s tip-of-the-spear skewering of the American political system and preventing it from responding to popular input. It was this historical “conspiracy” — the fait accompli of the thirteen colonial charters — that was to be subliminally woven into the political fabric of the Constitution by the regional demands of the day. In other words, what we are discussing here — the original issue of colonial faction — is not some focused and intelligible product like that which later emerged from the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The colonial backdrop for designing political factions — i.e., the conspiracy of history working through thirteen Royal charters — is the primal, preexisting foundation underwriting (or as progressives might characterize it, “undermining”) the 1787 Constitution. This antecedent reality of historical colonial factions proved to be unavoidable, yet at the same time a useful factor for the colonial elite in the development of the 1787 Constitutional design. In short, the pre-existing economic and political factions alive in the thirteen colonies hugely influenced and encouraged the development of a constitution where one-citizen-one-vote was successfully buried.

Factionalism arrived at the Constitutional Convention as both historical and inescapable, yet useful to many of the planners. One of the chief architects of the Constitution, James Madison, took this presence of faction to task in a most interesting and clever way: the way to cure the wickedness of faction, Madison argued, was to generate so many factions that they cancel each other out.[1] Originally, of course, the Senate and Chief Executive were out of popular reach. So, in 1787, they proposed to give the general citizenry (i.e., propertied, white males) a House of Representatives, broken into smaller and smaller pieces, each piece representing a narrow band of interest different from the other pieces, then scatter them all over the country, and now let them attempt to form a majority. As we are reminded every day, consensus and bipartisanship eternally struggle to keep their heads above the waters of American realpolitik. When the dust settles, we remain the same as in 1787 — broken into two camps: There are the rich and everyone else.

“Gridlock is what our system is designed for.” — Anthony Scalia

James Madison states unequivocally that “the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.” What was invented by Madison was a way to hamstring a majority rule that might foment a more equitable distribution of wealth. Madison’s intent was to create so many antagonistic centers of interest that a coordinated, united effort supporting popular rule became all but impossible. Madison’s special design for fragmenting democratic efforts though regional and factional antagonism gave us what we live with today — political gridlock and a complete stalemate that stalls both policy questions and effective answers to persistent social and economic problems.

As the conservative jurist Anthony Scalia reminds us, political gridlock and stalemate are not accidents or happenstance, but a deliberate intention of the Founders. To fully grasp Anthony Scalia’s claim is to understand that factionalism, the poison dripping into the veins of our body politic, has a long and storied opposition to popular suffrage. First and foremost, factionalism denies the formation of a coherent, popular center and therefore denies any notion of the common good as a practical political outcome. Factionalism perceives the political struggle not in pluralist terms,[2] but as being between mutually exclusive economic centers of power. Madison himself assumed that these centers of power would in general revolve around two specific groups — the popular masses and the elite. Madison also assumed that these two groups would stand in permanent and hostile opposition to one another. By fragmenting the “majority,” not only was popular cohesion denied, but by this denial it was ensured that the rights of the “minority,” (i.e., the propertied elite) would be protected from any democratic movement to redistribute wealth.

The US government is politically dysfunctional by conscious design, and with rare exceptions, (e.g., war, natural disasters, etc.) has been since its conception. Although the bouncing ball was set in motion much earlier in our history, the eventual and horrible comeuppance for this well-crafted stalemate was the Civil War. The tension of political dysfunction finally became so severe that it could only gain release through a tidal wave of blood. Whether the death of 600,000 Americans brought any balance to the historical scales is open to debate — but all indications suggest that aside from revamping the Southern economic model, switching it from chattel slavery to wage slavery, and escalating the rise of a powerful manufacturing and financial elite class in the North, nothing much changed: Racial animus has survived and is rampant, the white power structure of wealth and privilege has grown and prospered, civil liberties have eroded, judicial equality has become a joke, the police have become an increasingly militarized force occupying American cities, and most obviously, DC gridlock is still the name of the game. This was not a historical fluke. Gridlock, Scalia points out, was deliberately introduced into the system. This fragmentation of majority-will was purposefully engineered by a designing elite of slave owners, financiers, merchants and carried out by their attendant political allies, petty bureaucrats, judicial members, government employees, and of course, elected representatives themselves. Why? We’ll let John Jay explain:

“The people who own the country ought to govern it.” — John Jay

Nothing could be clearer. Minority rule by the “first class,” as Hamilton was fond of calling the colonial gentry, was the goal, and for James Madison, and many other Founders., factionalism was the key to undoing the popular will. The next question is, was there a triggering event for this 1787 fear of the popular will. The answer is yes. His name was Daniel Shays.

[1]A complete understanding of this topic necessitates a close reading of Madison’s Federalist Paper #10.

[2] An in-depth examination of pluralism is the topic of an upcoming essay