What was the founders’ broad vision for the U.S. Constitution?

0:05The US Constitution was created to allow a divided society to hang together. That was its purpose. That was the core aim of its framers. It offers us a lot of tools that we now rarely think about. We tend to think about the Constitution as part of the problem when it comes to polarization.

0:22In some ways, of course, it is. But we tend not to see the ways in which it is intended to address exactly the problem we now have, the challenge of how to hold together a divided society and allow it to govern itself. The Constitution assumes that division. It assumes that we will always be a diverse society and in some important respects, a divided society. It tries to help us work through that by rooting itself in an idea of unity that means not that everybody thinks alike, but rather that Americans can act together in our politics.

0:57Almost every element of the Constitution, one way or another is an answer to the question, given that we don't all think alike, how can we act together? That's why it balances powers and forces and factions the way that it does. That's why it tries to find a balance between majority rule and minority rights. That's why it puts negotiation and competition and a productive tension at the center of everything that it does. It assumes that the purpose of our politics is always going to resolve disputes and work through disagreements. I do think it's important to see that this was the problem that the Convention was trying to address. The core challenge was, how do we not fall apart? If you look at the

1:40Federalist papers, the first 16 of the Federalist papers are actually all about why we need Union, and why we should not welcome the dissolution of the Union that had seen the American Republic through the war and the early post war years. To me, the key thinker in this respect is James Madison. James Madison is a very unusual figure. You can find some familiar modes of thinking in the American founding generation. Familiar in the sense that we still know them today, that they fall into left and right. Their concerns are about the breakdown of social order on the one hand or of social justice on the other.

2:18For example, Alexander Hamilton, who certainly cooperates both in thought and action with Madison in those early years, thinks especially about social order. Hamilton is worried about chaos and a government that is too weak to maintain order. Somebody like Thomas Jefferson who was not at the Convention, but of course, a very important American figure in the early Republic, thinks especially about what we would think of as social justice. How do we make sure that basic rights are protected and that American political life is not an arena for despotism. Those divisions order on the one hand, justice on the other. Those are something like what the left and right have been thinking about for three centuries

2:59in the Anglo-American tradition. But James Madison, unlike almost anyone in our political tradition thinks about cohesion. The problem he worries about is the problem of faction, which is the breakdown of society into deep differences. Now, faction can lead to injustice, and Madison worries about that very much. It can lead to majority tyranny, and a majority faction is particularly dangerous. Faction, of course, can also lead to chaos. That's in a sense where it points. But Madison's distinct worry is faction itself. Unlike anybody else in the American tradition, and in this sense, Madison's federalist papers are very different from Hamilton's.

3:40He is really worried about how to handle the undeniable and permanent fact of factionalism in American political life. So that this will be an argument that really rings and echoes with Madison. Madison is all over the argument, because unlike anybody else in that generation. I would say more than anybody else since, Madison is the political theorist of national cohesion in a diverse republic, and we have a lot to learn from him just now.