Page 59 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information Revolutions
extended republic; that is, filtering out the bad majorities while permit-
ting good ones to govern. 18
Some influential observers claim that Publius offers no adequate so-
lution to the filter problem. This is a grave charge, because if the govern-
ment is to govern democratically, majorities with just aims must form
and be permitted to act. 19 The idea that the Federalist design cannot
discriminate between factious and nonfactious majorities once fueled
acceptance of the Beardian interpretation of the Constitution, namely,
that by indiscriminately frustrating majorities, the framers locked in
place a system of elite privilege. In his 1956 A Preface to Democratic
Theory, Robert Dahl saw the problem as insuperable and argued that by
failing to filter, the government vested an elite minority with a vast veto
power over proposals both inimical to and supportive of the larger public
20
good. For Gary Wills, it is simply a matter of Publius’s failure to define
factiousness. 21
That approach to the filter problem short-changes Publius. Certainly,
he was cognizant of the objection. In the well-known passage in 51 that
“a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on
any other principles than those of justice and the general good,” Madison
asks readers to trust that majorities will form in his system, and that
when they do, those majorities will tend to form on the basis of agreeable
principles. 22 It is not the case, Madison would have us believe, that the
extended republic dilutes and divides interests so as to make majorities
unworkable. The extended republic somehow biases majority politics in
the direction of the common good. But how is this to happen?
Part of the answer, Carey observes, is that national representatives
come from heterogeneous districts, each containing multiple interests,
so that no representative is entirely beholden to a particular faction. 23
District interests do not necessarily constrain lawmakers; therefore, each
representative must reflect upon and compromise among contending

18 George W. Carey, The Federalist: Design for a Constitutional Republic (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1989).
19 James Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government (New York: Macmillan,
1907); Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New York:
Macmillan, 1913).
20 Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1956).
21 Gary Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and
Company, 1981).
22
The Federalist, p. 353.
23
George W. Carey, The Federalist: Design for a Constitutional Republic.
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