Reflection, Choice, and Ambition

Alexander Hamilton opens the Federalist Papers with a claim of historic significance. He states, “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” The convention, and subsequent debates, were an attempt to answer that question in the affirmative. The Constitution that emerged was not the product of historical necessity or class destiny. Rather, it was a product of deliberation, reason, and an understanding of human nature and of the conditions under which political power can exist in tension between effectiveness and restraint.

The national program of the Democratic Socialists of America advances a different answer to that question. It calls for the working class to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The DSA frames the existing constitutional order as an “anti-democratic structure” that protects private ownership, and therefore must be replaced and rebuilt from the ground up. In place of the current system, the DSA proposes the public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, the abolition of both the Senate and Electoral College, and the subordination of the executive and judiciary to the legislature. These are not moderate policy adjustments centered on welfare reform or bureaucratic regulations. They serve as proposals to alter, or abolish, the foundations of American government.

This treatise serves to examine the DSA program against the foundational principles of the United States. The comparison is drawn largely from the Lockean tradition as it appears in the Declaration of Independence, along with the structure of American government established in the Constitution, and alongside the Federalist Papers’ observations on human nature, faction, and the absolute necessity of institutional restraint. The inquiry is not whether the DSA program is well-intentioned. The inquiry, instead, is whether the institutional logic of the DSA program is compatible with the commitment to government by reflection and choice, to the control of passion by reason, and to the permanent necessity of ambition counteracting ambition.

The Declaration of Independence, which serves as the founding document, as well as philosophy, for what would become the United States of America, starts with a fundamental claim about the nature of persons by stating “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It goes on to state that the purpose of government is not to grant rights through authority and fiat, but to secure the fundamental rights that predate political society, and that a just government is constituted through the consent of those it governs. It further justifies revolutionary action only when government has not met, or has exceeded its specific authority.

This is the core of the American founding. The underlying Lockean philosophy can be summarized as every man has property in his own person, and that his labor, his work, is his and his alone. The state of nature is governed by an immutable law of nature that obliges everyone, being free and equal, to not harm another in their health, liberty, or property. Political society is formed by consent of the individual for the limited purpose of protecting these inherent rights, and that government has no other end or purpose beyond the preservation of property, understood as life, liberty, and estate, and when it deviates from these ends it is defined as tyranny.

By comparison, the DSA program is established upon a different foundation. While the text serves a more diagnostic purpose than an ideological one, there is a fundamental political philosophy embedded within the text. The diagnosis begins with the claim that the current American political and economic system is “built upon private ownership and profit at all costs.” Within the framework, the individual first appears not as an individual at all, but a member of class, either as a bearer of capital or the working class, whose rule will dissolve the relations of private ownership. Rights are not treated as constraints, but as the eventual end-state of a successful class project. Everything from housing, to healthcare, to transportation are declared as human rights to be secured through the public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, and by the construction of a new constitutional order. Through this formulation, rights are not pre-existent of the political order, but dependent upon and determined by it.

Though limited, there is a clear overlap with Marxist philosophy. Marxist ideology treats the individual as a bearer of class relations rather than a pre-political being with fundamental rights. Persons are reconstituted according to position within their relationship to production, and moral status is derived through that relationship, rather than held independent of it. While the DSA does not fully reproduce the full apparatus of Marxist theory line for line, it shares this reduction of an individual to their class status. Once that reduction is accepted, the moral barrier that would otherwise restrain action, or cause consternation should any action be taken, is lowered, if not evaporated entirely. The Lockean, and Declaratory tradition that followed, rejects such a reduction. The person is the bearer of rights that limit what any majority, including a working-class majority, may do. The free development of the individual cannot be purchased by dissolving the constraints that protect the individual.

Hamilton’s opening claim in Federalist 1 frames the American Republic as a test of constituting good government through deliberation, or whether governance is reactionary and revolutionary. This appears to be a reference to the British Constitution, which is not so much a constitution as it is a series of laws passed by parliament that make up the text of the British Constitution following successive civil unrest, as in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution (the premise of constitution through both accident and force in that context). The American Constitution was offered as an act of reflection and choice. It was debated, amended, and ratified through a process that assumed the capacity of a people to deliberate about the permanent conditions of their political existence.

The DSA asks a completely different constitutional question. To it, the existing constitutional order is not an imperfect, but amendable, product of deliberation. Rather, it is deemed an “anti-democratic structure” that protects the global system of capital. Complete victory, therefore, requires “building a new society from the ground up.” The new constitution is to be drafted by the working class once it has won the ultimate victory for total democracy. This language rests closer to the accident and force side of the ledger than to reflection and choice. It is worth noting here that force doesn’t immediately or necessarily mean armed insurrection, nor does it always serve as a revolutionary call to arms. The aims of the DSA are to be achieved through the existing system, and, once power is consolidated, the new framework is to be enacted. This traces back to John Locke, the Declaration, and the principle of consent of the governed. The language of deliberation can be traced to the principle of consent, whereas the lack of deliberation, or reaction, can connect to force. Winning power to govern under existing rules is different in kind to winning power to alter or abolish the existing rules, and the DSA treats the present constitutional order as an obstacle that must be cleared instead of a set of procedures that govern conduct once power is established.

A constitution that is the product of reflection and choice is, in principle, open to further reflection and choice (such as the amendment process and the seventeen additional amendments beyond the original ten in the Bill of Rights). Its authority rests on the capacity of a people to debate and deliberate about the terms of their conducting of relations with one another. A constitution that is the product of a class project, drafted after the working class has achieved governing power, and after the principle means of production have been brought under public ownership, is built on a different foundation. The program supplies no method of how subsequent generations, or dissenters within the working class, would retain the capacity to revise that constitution once the class project has been institutionalized. (Important to note at this point, in the spirit of fairness, that the DSA platform does not claim to be a governing document, held to the standards of outlining specific articles or amendments, when that is not what the platform serves as. It is an outline of the aims of the DSA as a whole. Any fair reader of this analysis should keep that in mind, though I do not believe it detracts from the fundamental philosophical observations I am making here). Reflection and choice are relocated to the moment of founding the new order and are not preserved as permanent features of the political system. This is the first point at which the program’s institutional logic diverges from the republican answer to Hamilton’s question.

Our attention now turns to Federalist 49, attributed to James Madison. In it, he writes “It is the reason of the public alone, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.” The passage occurs in the context of frequent appeals to the people for constitutional revision. Madison warns such appeals risk placing the passions of the moment in the position of final authority over the permanent structure of government (Note: we will broach the subject of structure further, as it relates to the Constitution and the proposed reforms to that structure by the DSA). The profundity of the statement is that government exists, in part, to subdue, or temper, the passions of the citizenry. If passion is regularly invited to reconstruct government, the regulatory function of government becomes inverted.

The DSA program’s call for a new democratic socialist republic, with a constitution drafted by the working class, after electoral aims have been achieved is precisely the kind of appeal that Madison is warning of. The DSA proposes the replacement of the current constitutional order by a new one whose legitimacy is defined by its capacity to realize a democracy of the working class. The passions that accompany a successful class mobilization, such as the included language that resents private ownership, the desire for material redistribution, and the identification of existing institutions as enemy structures, are given constitutive authority over the form of government itself. It is important to observe that reason is not eliminated, as the DSA platform uses reason to explain its position. However, reason is subordinate to the class project. The emergent government, as outlined by the DSA, is not one that regulates passion, but an instrument of passion that has been elevated to necessity.

This is contrary to the relationship of government to the people it serves. For Madison, the danger is not that the people will never be consulted. The danger is that they will be consulted so frequently, or under such conditions of collective excitement or unrest, that the reason of the public will be displaced by the temporary passions of majority. The DSA platform institutionalizes that displacement at the level of constitutional redesign. The new constitution is to be a product of class victory in which passion is most likely to predominate.

The DSA presents its proposals for a multi-party system, proportional representation, and ranked-choice voting as a means of checks on government. Under the heading of a democratic congress, it calls for the replacement of the two-party system with a multi-party democracy, an expansion of the current 435-member House of Representatives, the federalization of rank-choice voting, and the abolition of the Senate. These mechanisms are offered as the means by which the working class can govern without the risks of a concentration of power. The central claim is that a more proportional and coalitional legislature would prevent any single faction from consolidation of legislative supremacy, thereby supplying the internal restraint that other proposed institutional changes might appear to remove. To give the fairest reading of intentions to the DSA, I will use the Netherlands as an example. The parliamentary system of the Netherlands, as I understand it, functions as a close analog of what the DSA is proposing. It is a highly multi-party, proportionate parliamentary system, and its constitution prohibits courts from challenging the constitutionality of legislative acts, thereby granting legislative supremacy. The Netherlands are not an authoritarian regime. It cannot, in good faith, be defined as a legislative tyranny. However, the Framers, when embedding the checks and balances system into the structure of the Constitution, did not argue that lack of such features are guaranteed to devolve into tyranny, but that the potential for the concentration of power via faction increases as internal frictions are removed or non-existent.

In Federalist 10, Madison defines faction as “...I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The danger is not in the system outlined by the DSA itself, but in a majority united by a common interest adverse to the rights of others, fueled by the impulse of passion (tying back to Federalist 49).

Madison then turns to the deeper origin of the problem:

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.

There is a lot to process here, before continuing. First, through this reading, the unequal distribution of property is not an accidental or temporary distortion. Instead, it is the most common and durable source of faction, among a list of others, rooted in the nature of man and in the conditions of civil society. The DSA treats the unequal distribution of property as the central injustice to be overcome through public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. Yet, in Madison’s analysis of faction, the attempt to eliminate the diversity of property does not eliminate faction, but risks concentrating the interests and passions expressed by that faction. When the political project is defined as the democratic rule of those without property over the relations of property itself, the majority that emerges is organized by the most durable source of faction Madison identifies.

Tying back to the beginning of this section, Madison distinguishes pure democracy from the republican form:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

The error Madison attributes to theoretic politicians is directly relevant to the DSA’s institutional vision. The program seeks to establish greater political equality through multi-party competition, proportional representation, and ranked-choice voting, while simultaneously pursuing the equalization of property through the means already mentioned. Madison’s warning is that equal political rights do not produce equal possessions, equal outcomes, opinions, or even passions, for that matter. The attempt to force such equalization via government removes the checks that protect the minority. Pure democracy admits of no cure for the ambitions of faction precisely because a common interest will be felt by a majority and there is nothing institutional to check the potential of the authoritative body to remove those who stand in the way. Worth note that Madison, as I understand the text, seems to reference Athens, or the other Greek city-states, here in his definition of democracy, where the entire citizenry participates in governance. By contrast, the DSA platform still advocates for representative government, like the Netherlands example mentioned prior. However, this does not escape the error that Madison names, in that equal representation does not constitute a check against centralization once a majority forms around eliminating property, or class, distinctions.

This potential for tyranny of the majority is what Madison continues to argue. He posits that the republican remedy lies in the extended republic and in the delegation of government to a small number of citizens elected by the rest. “The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.” The larger the republic, the greater the variety of interests, and the less likely that a majority will have a common motive to impose on the rights of other citizens. Should such a common motive exist, such as the property reforms put forward by the DSA, the more difficult it becomes for those driven by such interests to discover their own strength and act in unison. “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”

The DSA’s multi-party proposals, while falling outside the pure democracy as defined by Madison, still addresses only one dimension of the problem identified. They may multiply the number of parties, make the composition of the monocameral legislature more reflective of the distribution of votes, and institute ranked-choice voting federally in order to reduce spoiler effects of minor candidates. Yet, these mechanisms operate entirely within the legislative system. They do not restore the institutional barriers that the program simultaneously proposes to abolish, such as the Senate as a check by the states against the federal, the independent executive and judiciary, or the requirement that a national executive assemble support across diverse states. More importantly, it does not address the deeper source of majority faction that the program cultivates through the organization of political life around a single, overarching class antagonism in which the working class will dissolve the relations of private ownership. A political system that coalesces around one source of friction, works against the tempering mechanism described by Madison from the outset, regardless of how proportionate or representative the legislative body may be. When that project is combined with the abolition of institutional checks, the result is a close approximation of the purely democratic conditions Madison warns of, in which a common passion or interest is felt by the majority and there is little left to stop the potential domination of the minority.

One of the most profound statements of the American constitutional design appears in Federalist 51, in which Madison writes:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

The entire structure of the Constitution follows from this. Because men are not perfect beings, and because those who hold power are apt to abuse it, the only reliable security lies in giving each mechanism of government both the constitutional means and the personal motivations to resist the encroachment of others. The separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and the legislative being further separated into two chambers, judicial appointments having life tenure, an independently elected executive authority, and the federal division of authority between the central and the states are all devices for making ambition counteract ambition. This isn’t just one philosophy of governance being implemented on a whim. Rather, it demonstrates a unique understanding of the nature of man by the Framers—Madison, in particular—and a fundamental and revolutionary attempt to restrain the nature of man.

The DSA proposes the systematic dismantling of these restraints. The Senate is to be abolished, removing state interests from federal deliberation altogether (Note: States have already been severely restricted via the progressive 17^th Amendment. Also of note, progressive is not used disparagingly toward one party over another here, as several early progressives were considered conservative, such as Herbert Croly, an early thought leader of the progressive movement). The Electoral College is also to be abolished, essentially disenfranchising the smaller states, which ties into the executive, along with the judiciary, being “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” The result is a single legislative center that selects its own executive and court that would also, under the program’s economic platform, control the largest corporations and essential industries. The institutional means by which ambition might counteract ambition are dissolved. The personal motives that attach officeholders to the constitutional rights of their offices are thereby eliminated because those places, themselves, are either redefined, or abolished entirely. (It is of note that a subordinate executive and judiciary resemble the failed Articles of Confederation, which we will examine in another essay on those specific points. The main point is that the Constitution was framed and ratified because the lessons were already learned from the failures of a system that shares an overlap with the DSA’s proposals.)

The assumption underlying this redesign stands in conflict with Madison. The program assumes that once the working class holds power through democratic procedures, the problem of abuse is largely solved by the class character of the governing body.

The Articles of the Constitution remove the philosophical principles of the founding from the realm of the abstract and into the concrete. Article I establishes a bicameral legislative body with different modes of election, different term lengths, and different constituents, with the House representing the total population and the Senate representing the interests of the several states. Article II establishes the independent office of President of the United States, with the Electoral College serving as its constituency. Article III establishes an independent body of jurists, appointed by the executive, on the advice and consent of the Senate, with life tenure for good behavior. The amendment process in Article V is made deliberately difficult, requiring a majority of two-thirds of both houses of Congress to pass, and ratification by three-fourths of the several states to enact. These arrangements are not arbitrary administrative procedures, but serve as the expression of the commitment to government by reflection and choice, to the control of passion by reason, and to the permanent necessity of ambition made to counteract ambition, as well as the commitment to government through the consent of the governed.

Against this framework, the DSA’s proposals are wholly incompatible at every critical juncture. The abolition of the Senate eliminates a key check of the states against the federal. The abolition of the Electoral College eliminates the requirement that the federal executive assemble support across diverse states (another removal of the governed from the process of consent). The subordination of the executive and judiciary to Congress collapses the separation of powers into legislative supremacy. The call for a new constitution drafted after the working class has achieved its stated ambitions bypasses the process of amendment established in Article V. The public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries places the material basis of independent economic life under the same political center that would exercise concentrated constitutional authority.

A constitution that can be replaced once a particular class has achieved power is not a constitution in the American sense. The Constitution of the United States was designed to be a permanent fixture precisely because the Founders did not trust any temporary majority, even if wholly virtuous, to restrain itself. That trust is the point at which the overlap with Marxist political theory becomes incompatible with American republicanism, because both treat the accumulation of power in the appropriate class as an end, rather than something requiring restraint.

The DSA platform is coherent on its own terms. It offers a vision of material security and collective self-governance, and it insists that this vision can be pursued through the current institutional means. Yet, its logic is incompatible with the philosophical foundations of the American republicanism. Where the Declaration determines rights as prior to politics, the program treats rights as the eventual product of a successful class reorientation. Where Federalist 1 frames the American experiment as a test of government by reflection and choice, the DSA frames constitutional reordering as the task of a class that has won the battle for democracy against its ideological enemies. Where Federalist 49 insists that the reason of the public should temper government, and a public passions should be regulated by the government, the DSA places the passions of a successful class mobilization in the position of authority over the form of government itself. Where Federalist 10 identifies the unequal distribution of property as the most common and durable source of faction and warns that pure democracy admits of no cure for the interests of faction, the program organizes politics around that common and durable source via public ownership and then offers multi-party proportionality as a sufficient institutional restraint. Where Federalist 51 insists that ambition be made to counteract ambition because men are imperfect, the DSA assumes that the class character of the governing force largely solves the question of the nature of man and therefore dismantles the institutional devices designed specifically to temper and restrain man tendency toward iniquity.

Where the DSA platform overlaps with Marxist ideology, via a reduction of the citizenry to class potential, the concentration and accumulation of power as a precondition for political transformation, and the assumption that the working class does not require the same restraints as earlier forms of rule, serve to clarify why the DSA’s institutional proposals cannot be reconciled with American foundational principles. American republicanism answers the question posed by Hamilton by constructing a system in which reflection and choice are defining characteristics, passion is regulated by reason, factions are diluted by federalism, and ambition introduces friction against ambition. The DSA answers the same question by proposing the construction of a democratic socialist state where a successful class reordering becomes the source of constitutional authority and in which devices of restraint are treated as contrary to the collective good.

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Democratic Socialists of America. “Workers Deserve More.” National Program. https://program.dsausa.org/

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689.

United States. Declaration of Independence. 1776.

United States. Constitution of the United States. 1787.