The Glorification of Faction

Last week, a young democratic campaign strategist named Jeremy Bird appeared on the Colbert Report announcing his ambitious plan to ‘turn Texas blue’. Bird, the mastermind behind the grass roots effort that helped president Obama win in both 2008 and 2012, proudly shared his plan to tap into growing minority demographics in the traditionally conservative state in order to get them to vote for Democrats, a strategy he calls ‘Battleground Texas’. This strategy is an extension of the one used in both prior campaigns, namely targeted ground level communication with young women, minorities and millennials. Bird haughtily stated that he and his team planned to give a voice to otherwise marginalized voters in order to make the election process more democratic and inclusive. However, what this strategy actually involves is campaigning on single race, age or gender specific issues, pandering to the immediate wants and fears of demographic factions. This strategy, while obviously effective, is deeply troubling and a far cry from the democracy the founders had intended.

In Federalist 51, James Madison made the case for expanding the size of the republic based on the theory that pluralism of interest would abet the damaging effects of faction, as it would be harder for factions to form and politicians would be forced to appeal to the general will of all to win elections. That was after all the intended purpose of a constitutional republic, to work slowly and prudently toward the common good. The founders hoped to design a system that appealed to the highest faculties of the people, to their sense of universal justice and the long term collective good. Instead, the Obama administration, under the guise of social justice and inclusion, has grossly distorted Madison’s logic in trying to encourage participation with the express purpose of creating political factions.

Members of racial and ethnic minorities, women and the young are not appealed to as individuals, capable of carefully considering complex economic or foreign policy issues, but instead as pawns in a political machine, expected to react in systematic and reliable ways to carefully constructed political tactics. As a young woman, Bird will not offer me the democratic stance on debt reduction or job growth, but instead will use a fictitious wage gap or the promise of free birth control to envelop me into a voting bloc. If you’re a young person, the Bird strategy hopes to divert your attention away from challenging issues like entitlement reform and unemployment with the promise of cheap student loans and meaningless youth targeted rhetoric. And now, Bird plans to use this strategy on minority groups in Texas, reducing millions of individuals into means toward a political end. To Bird, the millions of Hispanic men and women in Texas are not persons capable of critical thought and diverse opinion, but instead are defined entirely by their ethnicity.

The implication then, is that if a candidate fails to make racial, ethnic, age or gender specific promises, then he is marginalizing a group, when instead he is merely considering minority, female or young individuals as individual voters. That these factional, reductive practices are endemic to democracy is and may have always been an unfortunate truth, however when they are now marketed as progressive advances towards social justice, it is a troubling indication of how far we’ve strayed from our founders’ vision for our democratic republic.