Get Out The Vote

One of the main differences between the America of 1788 and now is, essentially, who gets to vote.

Madison, like many of the Founding Fathers (and especially the members of the Federalist Party), thought that the average citizen wasn't really capable of making political decisions on their own.

For every qualified voter, they saw a ton of folks that they thought only deserved the training wheels of government participation. Well, not even that—more like the fake steering wheel your mom puts on the passenger's side in front of your carseat.

Yeah. Madison's a big, fat snob.

As such, they instituted a voting system where only people who owned land could vote, and only land-holding white men at that. They tossed up a lot of reasons for not letting the rest of the country into the voting clubhouse, like saying employees weren't qualified to vote because they were in the pockets of the people who payed the checks.

While populist movements existed—Shays' rebellion's a prime example of one—they weren't really allowed to work within the system. They would only be brought into the voting fold during Andrew Jackson's presidency. At that point, voting was the hobby of the rich, alongside polo and collecting Fabergé eggs.

Today, grassroots organizing is a hugely strong political force, and thanks to grassroots organizing there's more and more pressure on representatives to actually represent the people they stand for.

A Fraction Of Factions

In regards to faction politics, they've pretty much existed before Federalist 10 and 51, alongside Federalist 10 and 51, and beyond Federalist 10 and 51. They're kind of an American staple.

In the election of 1796, two organized political parties locked heads for the first time and ever since we've had a two-party system. Our recent past has been a time of all-out partisan catfights, with each side so dedicated to laying the smackdown on the other that they can sometimes forget common good entirely. The government shutdown crisis of 2013 was a great example of faction politics grinding the government to a halt—literally.

Madison optimistically hoped that a representative democracy would keep down the power of faction, but that was definitely not in an era where two organized factions would stretch across the entire United States. In retrospect, the writing was on the wall for Madison's whole "greater variety of interests" idea when he himself stood up as one of the party leaders for the Democratic-Republican Party.

In theory, his theory made a lot of sense: there are going to be a lot of different interests groups in a big republic: urban against rural, rich against poor, ranchers versus farmers, and so on.

But one of the biggest features of the two-party system has been their ability—and their need—to forge alliances between smaller groups that might not necessarily agree with each other on most things, but do on a specific set of issues. We know these as Party Platforms today, and creating them and recreating them to capture enough voters to win elections is a constant tight-rope walk that both parties have to walk in order to stay in the race.

Group Hug?

A modern example of factions in party politics would be the Tea Party's relationship with the larger Republican Party, which has to balance religious conservatives and fiscal (that's financial) conservatives into one big voting bloc. Majorities are hard to manage without some kind of universal issue, and finding one is usually the golden ticket to the White House.

Other than that, though, Madison was right that one faction isn't getting a massive majority and crushing the other down. While they do take turns being the most influential, they both, sometimes begrudgingly, have to work together to keep the ship of state sailing. In that sense, Madison's plan for managing faction warfare has been more or less successful.

Madison's views on how the legislative branch should be structured has still proven to be a happy compromise, at least in regards to balancing power between the states. Each state gets equal representation at the Senate, and each state gets proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

Speaking of the different branches from Federalist 51—the election of a Supreme Court Justice was another political flashpoint in the wake of the death of Justice Scalia. Yet, it still ended with a successful election and a compromise after a turbulent faction toss-up.

The wheels of government have been slowed by faction conflict, but they haven't been stopped.