What Madison Knew
To understand our crisis, it helps to go back to the founding, and then consider how the progressives responded to James Madison’s emphasis on the diffusion of power in our system. Across history, republics tended not to succeed. They also tended to be small regimes, covering not all that much territory. The res-publica was a regime with a thick common culture. Madison found that a large republic, covering an extensive territory, would tend to minimize the danger of majority tyranny by making it less likely that there would be a national majority bent on tyranny or self-dealing. As he put it in Federalist #10, “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” Hence, he concluded, “in the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”
There’s a second element that we often forget in Madison’s thinking. Such an extended republic would be a federal republic. Recall that for Madison, “a reliance on the people” is the primary check on bad government. By contrast, checks and balances inside the system were, to him, merely “auxiliary precautions.” Popular control was consistent with the federal aspect of the system. In Federalist #51, he noted that we have “a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will controul each other; at the same time that each will be controuled by itself.” Classically, republics were small, and they governed life intimately. By contrast, the extended republic governed with a much lighter hand. Such a republic did not assume all Americans would share a common way of life in the robust way that is often the case in small communities. Recall that Madison is the author of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, protesting overreach by the federal government. In other words, Madison believed that our system only works when the legislative powers of Congress are “few and defined,” as he put it in Federalist #45.