Americans of all political stripes are becoming increasingly frustrated with the partisanship of present-day politics. Democrats and Republicans alike claim mandates on narrow margins of victory and are quick to condemn their opponents as enemies of the public good. The Framers of the Constitution understood that such divisions are rooted in the political factions inherent in democracy. Their solutions were federalism, the separation of powers, bicameralism, judicial review, and other structural constraints on majority rule. Over the course of US history, some of those constraints have been eroded, as American politics have become more democratic and less respectful of the liberties and freedoms the Framers sought to protect. American Factions advocates for a renewed understanding of the problem of political factions and a restoration of the Constitution’s limits to revive a politics of compromise and bipartisanship.

The creation of a federal structure in which sovereignty is divided between the state and national governments was generally agreed to be a significant constraint on political factions. The lawmaking authority of the national government was conferred on a Congress of enumerated powers, leaving all other inherent powers of government in the states. Factional efforts would be fragmented across multiple and overlapping seats of power.

A popular belief in democracy as the core value of the Constitution has contributed to several innovations that circumvent the Framers’ constraints on democracy. Primary elections for selecting candidates including for the president have empowered the political parties and their core constituencies. The Supreme Court’s one-person-one-vote mandate for all state legislative elections has disempowered local communities, gerrymandering has become the norm for the creation of representative districts, and the 17th Amendment has diminished the influence of states as distinct political entities. Direct democracy in the form of referenda and initiative has compromised the filtering benefits of representation.

In drafting a constitution for the democratic republic of the United States, the Framers took elaborate measures to control the hazards of minority and majority political factions. The Framers’ conclusion that factions are inevitable is confirmed by the partisan nature of modern American politics.

The Framers’ design provided for a separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial functions to be performed in each case by different public officials. The design also provided for some overlap in functions as a means for allowing each branch to protect itself against the other two. The overlap of powers has proved effective, but a combination of overreach and willing yielding of powers on the part of Congress and the expected aggrandizement by the executive and undue deference on the part of the judiciary have created numerous opportunities for political factions to exercise influence.

From the founding of the Constitution, there has been a steady expansion of national power and an erosion of state powers. Notwithstanding the enumeration of its powers, Congress has enacted legislation impacting almost every aspect of American life. The Supreme Court has, with rare exceptions, accommodated the Congress’ intrusions on the powers of the state governments.

As the Framers anticipated, factions remain a powerful force in American politics. The founding generation disagreed about much, but there was a broad consensus that factions, the inevitable companions of democracy, lead to democratic excess and the abuse of power. Ironically, the factor most responsible for the continued influence of factions and particularly for the dominant influence of majority faction has been the steady democratization of the American constitutional system. The Framers would not be surprised. The best prospects of constraining the negative influences of faction are restoration of the balance between state and national powers and acceptance of the need for constraints on simple majority-rules democracy.

Many in the founding generation believed that a virtuous citizenry would protect against abuses of power in a democracy. But their experience during the period of the Articles of Confederation revealed the limits of republican virtue as a check on abuses of power and underscored the challenge of limiting the opportunities for minority and majority factions to impose their will on their fellow citizens.

The founding generation condemned political parties as the archetypal manifestation of political factions. Yet they quickly sorted themselves into the Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican parties. As the Framers anticipated, the nation has experienced growing partisanship and a winner-takes-all, majority rules, understanding of the political process. A result has been what might be called a soft tyranny of the ruling majority faction.

The Framers’ overarching theories for the control of faction included representation as a filter of popular passions, union, and an extended republic to limit the influence of factions by multiplying the number of distinct and competing interests, and divided sovereignty between the state and national governments. The theory of representation was familiar from their British heritage, but their theories of an extended republic and divided sovereignty between the national and state governments diverged from accepted political principles of the eighteenth century.

With the combined experience of an abuse of power by the British monarch and an absence of executive authority under the Articles of Confederation, the Framers faced the challenge of establishing an executive authority of effective, yet limited, powers. It was generally agreed that the role of the executive was limited to the execution of the laws enacted by Congress, but the number of executives, the manner of selection, and length of tenure in office were considered important to restraining factions.