The Role of Institutions in American Politics: Navigating Factionalism and the Imperative of…

The Role of Institutions in American Politics: Navigating Factionalism and the Imperative of Constitutional Principles

While I agree in the sense that, “The problem confronting journalism and politics in the contemporary United States is not at its core the intermingling of fact and fiction, not a confusion of propaganda with hard-bitten, fact-based policy but rather the breakdown of institutions that facilitate valid social learning across diverse, disagreeing groups”, I disagree in the sense that the solutions proffered herein cannot and will not ever be decisively top-down or, unilateraly accepted.

Here’s the American Realpolitik:

1. We will forever and always disagree in American politics.

2. Power in our representative republic is where and how change occurs.

As John Dewey has suggested, “Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume — an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.”

All solutions need to accept and wrestle with the following as a raw, incontrovertible fact of reality — factions exists and, they will always exist.

Accepting the above fact is a helpful first step away from seeing the world from the obscured Mannichean view that suggests that the battle for truth in meaning is a battle of the forces of light versus the forces of darkness (eg. politics as good versus evil).

Taken as a whole, the Federalist papers justifies a representative republic rather than a participatory democracy. Specifically, Madison’s Federalist #10 offers two possible solutions to remove the cause of factions: the first solution is to destroy liberty and, the second solution is to expect every citizen to hold the same opinions, passions, and interests.

Madison stated that destroying liberty is a “cure worse than the disease itself” and, he made clear that the second solution, expecting everyone to be unified, was also entirely unrealistic and impracticable.

Thusly, the U.S. Constitution was created to cope with the damage that can be caused by factions — the best we can do as a Nation is to hold up the principles of this foundational document as well as all those pesky amendments, starting with the First one.

A denial of the First Amendment as well as the overt suggestion that one political party holds the single unified truth as well as the final, ultimate solution is the first step towards facism.