The danger is always the unconstrained leviathan

A very good piece, The Tribalism Bugaboo by Jay Cost. It is very frustrating to hear so many journalists and other talking heads opining on polarization, on the defects of the electoral college, on their desire for direct democracy. It is if they are flashing their ignorance as a large, flashing neon sign. I KNOW NOTHING OF HISTORY OR PHILOSOPHY they signal.

Cost, fortunately, is more knowledgeable.

The hot topic among intellectual types these days is the notion of “tribalism.” The problem with our country, the smart set is arguing, is that we are too focused on our own parochial cliques — economic, geographic, religious, whatever — so we cannot even think about the general welfare, let alone act together to achieve it.

Heather Wilhelm gave a good rejoinder to this anxiety last week: “Meh.” Most people, she suggests, express “displeasure with American politics at large, but with none of the gushers of faux outrage and over-the-top feigned surprise that regularly festoon social media.” I think that is about right. I am reminded of a great book by Morris Fiorina, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, which argued that while Americans are evenly divided, they are not deeply so. You will not get such a nuanced impression from cable news or social media, but that is just another good reason not to participate too much in either of those forums.

I would like to push this analysis a step further: Our system of government was in fact explicitly designed to handle the biggest problem of “tribalism,” which the Founders might have called the tyranny of the majority. And it accomplishes that task very well. In the United States, the persistence of tribalism is at worst an annoyance, rather than a calamitous threat to basic rights and public security.

Although the use of the world is relatively new, anxieties about tribalism are very old, for they point to the most basic question of government: How do we get people to look out for the good of the whole community, rather than just themselves? The ancients had a tragic answer to that question, envisioning government as an endless cycle between just and unjust versions. But early modern thinkers were more optimistic, reckoning that there were conditions under which good government was sustainable. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argued that one solution to tribalism was to be found in a “small republic:”

In an extensive republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views; it is subordinate to exceptions and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have less extent and, of course, are less protected.

This view was very popular in the United States in the 1780s, when the states held the balance of power. The feeling was that the government of a small polity such as New Hampshire or Georgia was best able to articulate the public interest. Everybody will more or less be on the same page, political leaders will reflect those shared values and act accordingly.

But this theory did not fare well during that tumultuous decade. The 13 states were often dominated by popular majorities that had no appreciation for the bigger picture. They instead empowered governments that harassed political minorities, frustrated neighboring states, and damaged the international reputation of the nation. It was this failure that induced twelve of the 13 states to participate in the Constitutional Convention, where James Madison introduced his radical alternative to Montesquieu’s notion of a small republic.

Like many political thinkers, Madison reckoned that “factionalism” (his word for tribalism) was part and parcel of human nature. The solution was not a small polity — because that could empower a single faction to run roughshod over everybody else. Instead, he recommended an extended republic that took in a variety of factions or tribes, each positioned in such a way as to check the self-interested designs of the others. Madison’s idea was that having factions share power with one another would result in the type of laws that were good for the whole country.

Indeed.

None of this is to say that tribalism is not a problem. Under the Madisonian schema, if the people cannot agree about what constitutes the general welfare, the result is often that nothing gets done. So the government often grinds its gears while public problems persist or get worse. But as frustrating as that is, it is far preferable to the tyranny of a single tribe that governs everybody else for its own purposes.

The majoritarian mob is certainly one of the key risks of factionalism but there is another, slightly different form stalking the land today; the minoritarian mob. Minor and/or narrowly supported positions which are made to seem to be majoritarian. Almost all policy positions stemming from the postmodernist social justice world view are harmful to most people but they are, through media and political theater, presented as widely received wisdoms.