The best interest of the nation, according to James Madison in Federalist 10, was defense of “the first object of government,” which was protection of “diversity in the faculties of men.” The public realm existed for the sake of differentiation of the individual from others. In Madison’s eighteenth-century view, government existed to “protect” individual pursuits and the outcomes of those pursuits, particularly as those individual differences would be manifest in unequal and varied attainments of property. Government exists to protect the greatest possible sphere of individual liberty, and does so by encouraging the pursuit of self-interest among both the citizenry and public servants. That “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” is conceived as the way by which separated and divided powers will prevent any particular person from centralizing and seizing power; but at the same time, the government itself is to be given substantial new powers to act directly on individuals in order at once to liberate them from the constraints of their particular localities, as well as to promote especially expansion of commerce as well as the “useful arts and sciences.”
This political technology of liberalism aimed to liberate individuals from partial loyalties to particular people and places, and rather make us into individuals who, above all, would strive to achieve our own individual ambitions and desires. Part of the new technology of modern republicanism is what Madison called the “enlarged orbit,” which not only would give rise to political leaders of “fit character” but would inculcate civic indifference and privatism among the citizenry. Madison hoped one consequence of enlarging the orbit would be heightened levels of mutual distrust among a citizenry inclined to advance particular interests, rendering them less likely to combine and communicate: “Where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.” A portrait arises of citizens who each face a large mass of fellow citizens whom they are inclined to mistrust, and a class of representatives who—while elected by the citizenry—take it upon themselves to govern on the basis of their views of the best interest of the nation.
It was Madison’s hope that once the populace recognized its relative powerlessness in the public realm, the people would instead focus their attention on achievable private aims and ends. The political realm would attract the ambitious and those drawn to power, but would direct the growing power of the central government to increase individual prospects for the private ambitions of the individual, encouraging at the same time liberation from interpersonal ties and connections, fostering mistrust toward others so that interpersonal relations would be tenuous, fleeting, and fungible. One of the ways that it was hoped that modern republicanism would combat the ancient problem of political faction was not by commending public spiritedness but rather by fostering a “mistrust of motives” that would come about due to the large expanse of the republic, constantly changing political dynamics, the encouragement to “pluralism” and expansion of diversity as a default preference, and thus the shifting commitments of the citizenry. The ancient commendation of virtue and aspiration to the common good was to be replaced by the basic motivation of modern republicanism—the pursuit of self-interest that leads to the overall increase of power and thus fulfillment of desires.
The resulting liberal polity thus fosters a liberal society—one that commends self-interest, the unleashed ambition of individuals, an emphasis on private pursuits over a concern for public weal, and an acquired ability to maintain psychic distance from any other human, including to reconsider any relationships that constitute a fundamental limitation on our personal liberty. If Madison largely believed that this expression of individual differentiation would be manifest mainly through property, we can easily discern how this “external” form of differentiation was eventually “internalized” to forms of personal identity that would similarly require an active and expansive government to “protect the diverse faculties of men”—or whatever identity one might wish to assume. The idolization of “diversity” in the form of personal identity was sewn into the deepest fabric of the liberal project, and with it the diminution of a common civic and fostering of a common weal. The only common allegiance that would remain was to a political project that supported ever more individuation, fragmentation, and expansion of “diversity of faculties.”
PUBLIC GREATNESS FOR PRIVATE ENDS
The very origins of mass democracy, then, appear to be bound up with efforts to minimize the creation of an engaged democratic citizenry. The dominant American political narrative—consistent from the time of the Founding to the Progressive Era and even to the present day—was simultaneously one that valorized democratic governance while devising structures that insulated government from excessive popular influence. More recent examples of the diminution of popular input and control over governance include the rise of “blue-ribbon commissions” and the growing influence of quasi-governmental but largely insulated agencies like the Federal Reserve.
Classical and progressive liberals shared not only the ambition of constraining democratic practice and active citizenship but a substantive vision of what constituted “good policy.” Good policy for the Founders and progressives alike were those that promoted the economic and political strength of the American republic and the attendant expansion of power in its private and public forms. Liberalism sought not the taming and disciplining of power, along with the cultivation of attendant public and private virtues like frugality and temperance, but institutional forms of harnessing power toward the ends of national might, energy, and dynamism. As Publius—the pseudonym chosen by Federalist authors Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay—explains in defending the Constitution’s bestowal of flexible powers upon the central government, unforeseeable future circumstances, particularly in the realm of foreign affairs, require the potential for the central government to wield incalculable, hence unlimited, power. “There ought to be a CAPACITY,” writes Hamilton in Federalist 34, “to provide for future contingencies, as they may happen; and as these are illimitable in their nature, so it is impossible safely to limit that capacity. . . . Where can we stop, short of an indefinite power of providing for emergencies as they arise?”14 It is, in fact, the very nature of the regime being planned—specifically, a commercial republic—that will prove an attraction for foreign ambitions, hence require the provision of “indefinite power”: “If we mean to be a commercial people,” continues Hamilton, “it must form a part of our policy, to be able one day to defend that commerce.”15 The argument echoes Machiavelli’s: the Prince must have access to act with limitless power in defense of the State; the State’s unleashed ambitions will lead to national wealth and greatness, making it more likely that other nations will seek to appropriate and invade; and thus, by a kind of iron syllogism, the ambition for national greatness and wealth makes the accumulation of unlimited power necessary and inescapable.
The Founders were aware that if their architecture was well designed, people’s allegiance would shift from their natural affections for their local places and light instead on the power and magnificence of the capital. For this to occur, the intuitive understanding of liberty as the practice of self-government would need to be replaced by the experience of liberty as expanding “diversity of faculties”—whether unbounded increases in property and wealth or the experience of “more Being” that philosopher Richard Rorty described as the consequence of advancing liberal democracy. The Founders would not be surprised that a populace shaped by the modern form of private, material, individual, expressive liberty would displace allegiance to local and civic liberty, and that all attention and focus would be redirected to Washington, D.C., as the source and guarantor of expressive liberty.
This end would be advanced through an electoral arrangement that the Framers hoped would ensure the election to national office of men of particular distinction. The “enlarged orbit” of the nation and the prospects for greatness at the federal le
vel would prove a draw to men of singular ambition whose interests aligned with the project of American national greatness. In an argument meant to dismiss fears of antifederalists that the central government would usurp the activities of the states, Hamilton actually confirmed that this was exactly the aim of the new federal government, thereby revealing the type of character that he believed would be drawn to the central government:
I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of mere domestic police of a state appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition. Commerce, finance, negotiation, and war seem to comprehend the objects which have charms for minds governed by that passion: and all the powers necessary to those objects ought in the first instance to be lodged in the national depository. . . . It is therefore improbable that there should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the [local] powers. . . . The possession of them . . . would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, and to the splendor of the national government.16
Hamilton’s argument points to an expected tendency in the new constitutional order, one promising, over time, that the role of the central government would be to increase the sphere of individual freedom through its particular auspices, and that the populace would eventually come to regard not only the central government as the protector of its freedoms but more direct and local forms of self-governance as obstacles to that freedom.
While many conservatives today claim that the Constitution sought to preserve a federalism that would ensure strong identification with more local identities, the underlying argument of The Federalist contradicts that claim. The Federalist lays out the conditions that would ensure that the populace would come eventually to identify more with the central than with the local and state governments. Both Madison and Hamilton acknowledge that humans naturally have greater affection for that which is in nearest proximity to themselves—albeit with an important caveat. Madison writes in Federalist 46 “that the first and most natural sentiment of the people will be to the governments of their respective states,” while in Federalist 17 Hamilton writes, “It is a known fact in human nature, that its affections are commonly weak in proportion to the distance of diffusiveness of the object.”17 Both acknowledge that it is an abiding aspect of human nature to prefer what is close and more immediately “one’s own” to that which is distant and less familiar.
To this forthright claim, however, each adds an important qualification. Hamilton goes on in Federalist 17 to reinforce this natural propensity to prefer what is near at hand, with an important exception: “Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood than to the community at large, the people of each state would be apt to feel a stronger bias towards their local governments, than towards the government of the union, unless the force of that principle should be destroyed by a much better administration of the latter.”18 Madison echoes this stipulation in Federalist 46: “If, therefore, as has been remarked, the people should in the future become more partial to the federal than to the state governments, the change can only result from such manifest and irresistible proofs of better administration, as will overcome all their antecedent propensities.”19 Better “administration” will cause the natural fidelity to the close, the local, the familiar, to be “destroyed”; and by better administration, what is meant is governance by competent, enlightened, and effectual leaders who can effectuate the main commitments of the regime.
Unsurprisingly, Hamilton admits that this exception to the natural attraction of humans for the more local circumstance is likely to apply under the arrangements of the national system to be created by the Constitution. The concentration in the central government of men so disposed to regard as mere “slender allurements” the activities of the state governments is among the reasons that led Hamilton to conclude that it is to be expected that over time the federal government is likely to be better administered than those of the particular—that is, the state—governments. In Federalist 27 he includes the larger electoral districts and likelihood of attracting “select bodies of men” as among the “various reasons [that] have been suggested, in the course of these papers, to induce a probability, that the general government will be better administered than the particular governments.”20 Reading this conclusion of Federalist 27 back into or forward to the caveat expressed in papers 17 and 46, we see that Publius clearly believes and intends that better administration at the federal level will lead to the displacement of local loyalties and engagement, and the redirection of attachments to the central government.
There can be little doubt who was right concerning where our attention would be focused: the authors of The Federalist understood that local devotions could ultimately be overcome by the power of the state to increase the “diversity of faculties,” and to claim this definition of liberty as the only one worth possessing and pursuing. To be a democratic citizen entitled one to the expansion of individual ambitions and experiences, and one’s civic duty was fulfilled by supporting a government that constantly advanced forms of expressive individualism. “Progressives” thus have had little success reining in the expansion of the private realm devoted to increasing acquisition of property and economic power. “Conservatives” have likewise had little success thwarting the expansion of individual expressivism, especially thwarting the advance of the sexual revolution. If anyone wants to know why the Republicans have failed to make the federal government smaller and to devolve power back to the states in significant ways (as they have claimed they seek to do at least since Goldwater, if not since FDR), we should recognize that such a reversal would go against the logic and the grain of the regime. It was designed so that power would accumulate at the center, and especially designed to attract to the center the most ambitious—those who will endeavor by dint of their constitutional ambitiousness to ensure that power continues to accumulate at the center. Commerce and war are the activities that most define the center, and those activities which accordingly have increasingly come to define the nation.
For all their differences, what is strikingly similar about the liberal thinkers of the Founding Era and leading thinkers of the Progressive Era were similar efforts to increase the “orbit” or scope of the national government concomitant with increases in the scale of the American economic order. Only in the backdrop of such assumptions about the basic aims of politics could there be any base presupposition in advance of the existence of “good policy”—and that policy tended to be whatever increased national wealth and power. In this sense—again, for all their differences—the Progressives were as much heirs as the Founders to the modern project of seeing politics as the means of mastering nature, expanding national power, and liberating the individual from interpersonal bonds and obligations, including those entailed by active democratic citizenship.
The Founders and the Progressives alike sought to increase the influence of the central government over disparate parts of the nation, while increasing economic efficiency and activity by means of investment in infrastructure and communication. Just as the Founders could promote the “useful arts and sciences” as one of the main positive injunctions of the Constitution, so the progressive John Dewey’s praise of Francis Bacon as “the real founder of modern thought” would be frequently manifest in his praise of technological advance as tantamount to the advance of democracy itself.21 For all of Dewey’s valorization of “democracy,” it should not be forgotten that his definition of democracy is bound up in whatever outcome would ultimately favor “growth.” For the Founders and the Progressives alike, the expansion of what Madison described as “the empire of reason” should be paramount, and on that basis stated trust in popular government was to be tempered above all by fostering a res idiotica—a populace whose devotion to the Republic was premised upon its expansion of private ends
and expressive individualism.
ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY, RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD
Writing of the township democracies he visited during his journey to America in the early 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed amazement over the intense commitment Americans exhibited toward their shared civic lives: “It is hard to explain the place filled by political concerns in the life of an American. To take a hand in the government of society and to talk about it is his most important business and, so to say, the only pleasure he knows.”22 Even as Tocqueville was to predict that the course of American democracy would lead to “individualism,” isolation, and civic passivity, he observed in practice a phenomenon almost wholly its opposite: “[If] an American should be reduced to occupying himself with his own affairs, at that moment half his existence would be snatched from him; he would feel it as a vast void in his life and would become incredibly unhappy.”23
Tocqueville observed practices of democratic citizenship that had developed antecedent to America’s liberal founding. Its roots and origins, he argued, lie in the earlier Puritan roots of the American settlement, and in particular from the widely shared understanding of Christian liberty that he believed served as inspiration for the practices of democracy. Early in Democracy in America, Tocqueville describes “a beautiful definition of liberty” that he drew from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New-England:
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