There is a particular kind of intellectual honesty that consists of describing, with great accuracy, a trap — and then walking directly into it. James Madison was capable of this. So were Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams. Between them, these men produced some of the most lucid writing in American political history about the dangers of organized partisan factions, and between them, they proceeded to construct the partisan factional system that has governed American politics for two and a half centuries.
This is not a story about hypocrisy, exactly. It is a story about the limits of self-knowledge when self-interest is involved — a story that has been running, in various costumes, for the entirety of recorded human experience. The Founders were not uniquely weak or uniquely blind. They were human, which is to say they were subject to the same psychological dynamics they had so carefully theorized.
American voters who feel trapped in a two-party doom loop, who describe the choice between the major parties as a choice between varieties of dysfunction, are not diagnosing a modern failure. They are observing the mature form of a system whose foundational contradictions were visible, and named, before the Constitution was ratified.
Madison's Warning, In His Own Words
Federalist No. 10, published in November 1787 under the pseudonym Publius, is the document most frequently cited when the Founders' views on factions are discussed. It deserves that citation. Madison's analysis in that essay is, even by contemporary standards of political psychology, remarkably precise.
He defined a faction as any group of citizens — whether a majority or minority of the whole — united by a common impulse, passion, or interest that is adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. He did not treat this as an exotic pathology. He treated it as a near-universal feature of human social organization, rooted in what he called the diversity of faculties of men — the simple fact that people have different abilities, different economic circumstances, and different resulting interests, and that they will organize around those interests given the opportunity.
Madison's proposed solution was not to eliminate factions, which he regarded as impossible without eliminating liberty itself. It was to design a republic large enough and complex enough that no single faction could achieve permanent dominance — a system in which factions would check each other through sheer multiplicity. The extended republic, in his framework, was the structural answer to a psychological problem.
What he did not fully account for — what the design of Federalist No. 10 does not resolve — is what happens when two factions grow large enough and organized enough to crowd out all the others. The multiplicity solution requires actual multiplicity. It does not function as designed when the field collapses to two dominant actors who have every institutional incentive to maintain their duopoly.
The Speed of the Reversal
The ink on the Constitution was barely dry before the men who had theorized against factions began building them.
Alexander Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury, assembled a political coalition around his economic program — the assumption of state debts, the national bank, the broad interpretation of federal power — that became the nucleus of the Federalist Party. He did this deliberately, systematically, and with the full understanding that he was constructing an organized political interest. Jefferson and Madison, alarmed by what they saw as Hamilton's monarchical tendencies, organized the opposition that became the Democratic-Republican Party. By the mid-1790s, the United States had a functioning two-party system, roughly a decade after its Founders had published extensive arguments against exactly that outcome.
John Adams, in a letter to Jonathan Jackson written in 1780 — before the Constitution was drafted — stated the anti-faction position with particular force: There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution. Adams wrote those words. He then spent his presidency leading one of those two great parties in active opposition to the other, with a bitterness that permanently destroyed his friendship with Jefferson.
George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 — the document most associated with the anti-party warning — was itself a partisan act. It was drafted with Hamilton's assistance, timed to influence the upcoming election, and aimed in significant part at discrediting the Democratic-Republican opposition. The warning against factions was delivered by a coalition, on behalf of a coalition, in service of a coalition's interests. Washington was sincere. He was also, simultaneously, a participant in the very dynamic he was warning against.
Why They Did It Anyway
The question worth sitting with is not whether the Founders were hypocrites. It is why intelligent people who had articulated a clear theory of partisan danger proceeded to construct partisan organizations within years of articulating that theory. The answer illuminates something important about why the current system persists despite widespread dissatisfaction with it.
Organized opposition is almost always more immediately effective than principled non-organization. A politician who refuses to build a faction because factions are dangerous will, in most circumstances, lose to a politician who has no such scruple. The Founders understood this. Jefferson, watching Hamilton's Federalists consolidate economic and institutional power through organized coordination, faced a straightforward choice: organize in response, or cede the field. He organized. The logic was not irrational. It was, in fact, exactly the logic that Madison had described — self-interest, operating through available mechanisms, producing collective outcomes that no individual participant would necessarily endorse in the abstract.
This is Madison's trap, and it is still sprung regularly. Every election cycle produces earnest arguments for third parties, for ranked-choice voting, for some structural modification that will release American politics from its binary constraint. Some of those arguments are well-reasoned. None of them has yet overcome the institutional incentives that two large, entrenched organizations have spent two centuries building into the system — incentives that Madison himself helped design into the constitutional structure, and that he then exploited with considerable skill.
What the Founders Actually Left Us
The Founders left Americans two things simultaneously: a written warning about the psychological tendency that produces partisan capture of democratic institutions, and a working demonstration of that tendency operating in real time through their own careers. This is, in its way, a more honest inheritance than a clean theory would have been.
Federalist No. 10 is not a solution. It is a diagnosis. Madison saw the disease clearly. He did not find a cure, and the evidence of his subsequent career suggests he was not certain one existed. What he left was the vocabulary — faction, interest, passion, multiplicity — precise enough that any American who reads it carefully can apply it to the present moment without distortion.
The two parties that dominate American political life in 2024 would be recognizable to Madison not as aberrations but as the mature expression of dynamics he described in 1787. They have grown more organized, more institutionally entrenched, and more resistant to competition than he might have predicted. The underlying psychology that produced them is identical to what he observed in his own time, because it is the same psychology — unchanged, as it has been unchanged for the full span of recorded human experience.
History does not repeat. People do. And people, given the opportunity to organize around their interests in opposition to other people who have organized around theirs, will take that opportunity — regardless of what they have written, in other moments, about the wisdom of doing so.
