Madison’s extended republic and its critics
In the 2017 episode with Frank H. Buckley, Bob Zadek framed Madison’s theory of factions: Madison believed a large republic could work because factions in a big country would neutralize each other, with no national party but only factions forming around specific issues, putting together coalitions, and diluting power. Zadek noted that the founders feared any accumulation of power and designed the structure of the country to eliminate it, adding that it probably failed but that was the goal. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Buckley’s book The Republic of Virtue takes an ironic stance toward its own title. Buckley told Zadek that a corruption-free government is not the goal, that the optimal level of corruption is not zero, and that wanting a totally corruption-free government means Robespierre cutting off people’s heads. He argued for a better sense of federalism, pointing to Louisiana and Illinois as corrupt states where residents pay through inefficient government, wasteful government, and a decline in wealth. Buckley’s remedy for state-level corruption is locational choice: people move to less corrupt places, as from Louisiana across the border to Texas. But when power is centralized in Washington, he said, you cannot escape federal corruption by moving across state borders. He described looking across the Potomac at what he called the greatest concentration of influence and patronage ever seen in the world, centered on K Street with the lobbyists and Congress, and tied the accumulation of power in Washington and the decline of federalism to corruption. [[episodes/f_h__buckley_on__the_republic_of_virtue|F.H. Buckley on The Republic of Virtue (2017)]]
Public choice theory and the Senate
In the 2021 episode with Ilan Wurman, Zadek raised Madison’s Federalist 10 and the problem of faction. Wurman said Madison thought he solved it by the extended republic, where there would be too many factions to actuate the impulses of a majority, whereas in a small republic or small nation-state it is very easy for factional passionate minorities to get control of power. Wurman added that Madison might have been wrong, because public choice theory shows that factions are still good at getting their policies enacted: factions are intensely interested in one particular issue that the rest of the general public is only diffusely interested in, so a legislator will take money from the faction intensely interested in that one issue and vote their way. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Wurman described a proposed Senate oath: each senator would pledge by oath or affirmation to promote the common good and long-term welfare of the nation and not the interests of any party or class. He said the design does not bar senators from promoting their state’s interests, and that it reintroduces indirect election of senators through the state legislatures, on the theory that protecting state prerogatives and the division between national and state power advances the long-term welfare of the nation and the common good. Wurman said he has no illusions that senators will still find ways to engage in rent-seeking and to bully people into giving campaign finance contributions in order to enact favorable legislation, but hoped the oath puts a thumb on the scale and nudges their consciences to deliberate for the common good as opposed to any particular faction. He also noted that the actual United States Senate deliberated in secret for its first six years before opening to the public. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Gerrymandering and self-districting
In the 2022 episode with Ned Foley, Zadek described Madison’s view of factions offsetting factions: because different members and component parts would ally only for the purpose of one issue being resolved and then the coalition would dissolve, there would be no dominant class generation after generation. Zadek said Madison, in his fondness for factions offsetting each other, was describing a parliamentary system, and that England was a parliamentary system. Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022)
Foley said he shares Zadek’s starting point and that if he could wave a magic wand he might replace the American system with the kind of thing Canada or Britain has, but that amending the Constitution is so difficult it is not going to happen. He proposed starting with the House of Representatives because it is the part of the system most like a parliamentary system, and addressing gerrymandering, which he described as self-interested politicians manipulating boundaries to protect themselves from voters. Foley argued gerrymandering creates a cultural environment where politicians think they can manipulate any rule to hold on to power, and that January 6th and the refusal to count electoral votes, though not gerrymandering per se, is a product of gerrymandering both in who inhabits the seats and in the mindset that subversion is what we do to hold power. Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022)
Foley’s proposed remedy is self-districting: giving voters themselves the power to identify what district they want to be on, rather than politicians choosing districts and manipulating boundaries. He said this is closer to what other parliamentary systems use for proportional representation and might appeal to Americans nervous about how people in Europe structure their politics. He noted that the requirement to have districts is not in the Constitution but an act of Congress first adopted, he thought, in 1842, and that in the old days some states chose statewide or at-large elections for their House seats, citing New Jersey in the 1830s with six or seven seats all elected statewide. Zadek said he had presented a gerrymandering cure almost identical to Foley’s, that 96% of seats are uncompetitive through gerrymandering, and that this makes it fake democracy. Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022)
Factions and partition in Iraq
In the 2014 episode with Ivan Eland, Zadek asked whether Iraq was an unnaturally formed country drawn on a map, and whether the factions that do not feel they are all Iraqis explain what is going on there. Eland agreed, saying that after World War I the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side with Germany and Austria-Hungary and collapsed, and that despite Woodrow Wilson’s saying it was a war to spread democracy and self-determination, the opposite happened and the allies grabbed more territory in the Middle East. Eland said the British wanted oil in Iraq and glued three provinces of the Ottoman Empire together, provinces that had little relationship to each other before, though they all had a relationship with the central Ottoman government. He called Iraq an artificial country, and said Lebanon and Syria were artificial in the same manner, drawn on the map by the British and the French. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Eland said that in a 2009 book, Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, he recommended that when the US would leave Iraq, before they went, they would negotiate with the three different groups—the Sunnis, the Kurds, and the Shias—and help them moderate a partitioning of the country. He said you could still have an Iraq, but each group would control its own autonomous area and the central government would be weak. Eland described the problem in Iraq and Syria as a government controlled by one group which oppresses the others: in Iraq since the British established the monarchy, Sunni rulers governed although Sunnis are a minority, the last being Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown, after which a Shia ruler, Maliki, oppressed the Sunnis and the Kurds. Eland argued that a partition into a loose confederation of autonomous states with a weak central government means the groups do not fight over the central government because they provide their own security and their own judicial systems within their own autonomous areas. United Iraq Falls: Ivan Eland on Partitioning for Peace (2014)
Across episodes
The topic recurs across four episodes spanning 2014 to 2022. In the 2014 Eland episode, factions appear as ethnic and sectarian groups—Sunnis, Kurds, and Shias—whose mutual hostility makes partition the recommended remedy. In the 2017 Buckley episode, factions are tied to corruption and the decline of federalism, with locational choice as the escape from state-level corruption and centralized Washington as the trap. In the 2021 Wurman episode, Madison’s extended republic is tested against public choice theory, and the proposed Senate oath is offered as a nudge against factional rent-seeking. In the 2022 Foley episode, Madison’s theory of offsetting factions is recast as a description of parliamentary coalition-building, and gerrymandering is treated as a structural distortion that makes the House unrepresentative. The excerpts show no single line of development; each episode treats faction through its own subject matter.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the outcome of any proposed reform, nor do they report whether any of the described remedies were adopted. They do not give the full text of the proposed Senate oath, the details of the 1842 act, or the holding of any case. The excerpts also do not resolve whether Madison’s extended republic succeeded or failed, beyond Zadek’s remark that it probably failed and Wurman’s suggestion that Madison might have been wrong.