"Federalist Anarcho-idiocy"

In Three Parts

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.
So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

The inference to which we are brought is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.

James Madison - Federalist No. 10 (1787)

"I fancy that’s exactly what would happen to you if you were to set up your laboratory in the States. They don’t stand on ceremony with their institutions there.”

"I am not likely to go and see. Otherwise your remark is just,” admitted the other. "They have more character over there, and their character is essentially anarchistic. Fertile ground for us, the _States—~very good ground. The great Republic has the root of the destructive matter in her. The collective temperament is lawless. Excellent. They may shoot us down, but———”

"You are too transcendental for me,” growled Ossipon, with moody concern.

“Logical,” protested the other. “There are several kinds of logic. This is the enlightened kind. America is all right. It is this country that is dangerous, with her idealistic conception of legality. The social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices, and that is fatal to our work. You talk of England being our only refuge! So much the worse. Capua!* What do we want with refuges? Here you talk, print, plot, and do nothing. I dare say it’s very convenient for such Karl Yundts.”

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, then added with the same leisurely assurance: "To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to[54]see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple. That is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionists will never understand that. You plan the future, you lose yourselves in reveries of economical systems derived from what is; whereas what’s wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life. That sort of future will take care of itself if you will only make room for it. Therefore I would shovel my stuff in heaps at the corners of the streets if I had enough for that; and as I haven’t, I do my best by perfecting a really dependable detonator.”

Ossipon; who had been mentally swimming in deep waters, seized upon the last word as if it were a saving plank.

“Yes. Your detonators. I shouldn’t wonder if it weren’t one of your detonators that made a clean sweep of the man in the park.”

A shade of vexation darkened the determined sallow face confronting Ossipon.
(pp. 54-55)

Joseph Conrad - The Secret Agent: A simple Tale (1907)

His "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments" is the most closely reasoned argument for a separation of church and state ever written. As Ketcham puts it, it is "a defense of freedom for the human mind worthy of Milton, Jefferson or Mill. The Remonstrance argued that government suffered when religion was established, and that religion suffered the closer it got to government, and that human liberty suffered in elther case. Its phrases were clear and unequivocal."

"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties," Madison wrote. ". . . Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? that the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of only one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?"

Citizens had a right to follow any religion they wanted, Madison wrote. They had a right to follow no religion at all. The primacy of the individual conscience was paramount. His language was unsparing. Religion established by the state is of necessity corrupted. Madison "argues that religion will best support morality if it is free and pure, working up from its independent and spontaneous roots,” observes the historian Garry Wills. Moreover, Madison contends, the commingling of religion and government is inevitably a recipe for civic discord.

"Torrents of blood," Madison wrote, "have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm, to extinguish[129]Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinion." He notes that simply proposing the bill has led to great disharmony. "What mischiefs may not he dreaded, should this enemy of public quiet be armed with the force of a law?"

As in all things, Madison had done his homework. He rooted his arguments in one of the oldest precedents in Christendom; the adoption by the Emperor Constantine of Christianity as the official religion of what had become a fractious Roman empire. Constantine had brought in Christianity not as a moral code, but as a tool to enforce political unity.

"He attempted to use Christianity as a means of bringing order to society," writes the historian Charles Freeman. ". . . In many of his other laws, he maintained a traditional Roman brutality .... If a free woman had a sexual relationship with a male slave, both were to die, the slave by being burnt alive. Slaves who were found to be an accessory to the seduction of a young girl were to have molten metal poured down their throats Christians played very little part in Constantine’s administration and the army remained pagan."

This, Madison believed, was not a promising start for the notion of an established religion. "Madison agreed with [Joseph] Priestley and other Enlightenment Figures that the purity of Christian belief and practice was corrupted when Constantine made it a state religion," writes Garry Wills. "All the abuses of power through the Middle Ages reflected the entanglement of the spiritual with the worldly." What nobody anticipated fully was that both politics and religion would adopt the characteristics of the modern marketplace, that this would bring them into contact with each other, to the detriment of both, and that they wouldn't ...

Today, with the rise of the megachurch faithful and the interminable meddling in secular politics by various mall rat[130]Ezekiels whose theological credibility is calculated by the number of vacant parking spaces they have on a Sunday, we have a market-deformed politics influenced by a market-diluted religion. Niches are created and products tailored to Fill the niches. While modern evangelical Christianity has undeniable historical roots, its explosion over the past thirty years is a triumph of the Gospel According to Wal-Mart.
(pp. 130-131)

Charles Pierce - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue in the Land of the Free (2009)