A MADISONIAN CONSTITUTION FOR ALL 1 ESSAY SERIES MADISON’S AMERICA: DELIBERATIVE REPUBLICANISM, POLITICAL COMMUNICATION, & THE SOVEREIGNTY OF PUBLIC OPINION BY COLLEEN SHEEHAN INTRODUCTION KIM: Captain, we’re being hailed on a subspace frequency. JANEWAY: Are there ships in the vicinity? PARIS: Negative. Tracking the source. Seems like it’s coming from an unmanned buoy, coordinates one four zero mark three one seven. KIM: It looks like a Kazon signal, Captain. JANEWAY: Take us out of warp. Open a channel.1 Officer Kim’s report to Captain Janeway of the Star Trek Voyager, “We’re being hailed on a subspace frequency,” has become a Trekkie catchphrase, indicating faster than speed of light communications and spawning a good amount of controversy. Is it possible for communications to exceed the speed of light? Some physicists take exception to Operations Officer Kim’s announcement, arguing that communications will never be faster than 186,000 miles per second.2 Others claim that, though it would seem to break the laws of physics, some “workarounds” hold “the tantalizing promise of allowing for faster-than-light, or ‘superluminal’ communication.”3 At present, however, light can only travel 50 times between New York and London in a second—which, nonetheless, is a whole lot faster than the six to 14 weeks it took for a letter to cross the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century! The improvements in communications technology have been tremendously beneficial on many fronts, including for people whose family or friends live at a distance; for those engaged in international trade; and for communications between nations, particularly in tense, dangerous times. Resistance to totalitarian regimes has been substantially aided by electronic media, as in the case of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, and the current battle against human rights violations in China, despite governmental attempts to squash its critics. The verdict is still out, however, about whether the warp speed communications of our time will prove more beneficial than not, particularly in respect to politics. It is common to hear someone say today that the world has become a smaller place. What they mean, of course, is that it is easier to get places, easier to communicate, and things once distant and foreign have become familiar, whether because one has traveled to far-away lands, or because he is acquainted with another country and its culture through television or the Internet. What the telegraph, telephone, and radio first did to revolutionize 1 Star Trek: Voyager, Season 2, Episode 26. 2 Bruce Dormine, “The Physics of Star Trek: Why Faster Than Light Communication Is Not In Anybody’s Future,” Forbes, August 24, 2015, retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2015/08/24/the-physics-of-star-trek-why-faster-than-light- communication-is-not-in-anybodys-future/#737c56901503. 3 Peter Ray Allison, “Will we ever speak . faster than light speed?” BBC Future, March 19, 2015, retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150318-will-we-ever-speak-across-galaxies. See also Clara Moskowitz, “Warp Drive May Be More Feasible Than Thought, Scientists Say,” SPACE.com, September 17, 2012. A MADISONIAN CONSTITUTION FOR ALL 2 ESSAY SERIES communications and shrink the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the television and Internet did in geometric proportions in the next 100 years. Today, one can watch CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX, or MSNBC to catch up with the daily political news. Depending on your location and access, you may also be able to tune into the BBC (UK), TRT (Turkey), RT (Russia), DW (Germany), IRIB (Iran), CGTN (China), i24NEWS (Israel), Al Jazeera (Qatar), ZEE (India), AfricaNEWS, France 24, and other international news broadcasting systems. The full reach and effect of electronic communications in making the world a smaller place are only beginning to be comprehended in our time. The Internet, Email, Facebook, Twitter. What’s next? Certainly, more will come, and the changes wrought will be innovative, considerable, and exciting. But will these changes, on balance, be good for us? Most people—certainly most parents—today are well aware of the social and psychological dangers associated with the electronic media age, and in particular with smartphones and messaging apps, social media sites and apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, online chatrooms, and the various forms of communications technology and social media that occupy so much of the time of America’s youth. (Ninety-four percent of “mobile teens” are online every day, and nearly a quarter of them are on their smartphones “almost constantly.”4) These problems, of course, aren’t restricted to teenagers, nor are they limited to the social and psychological domains. In the sphere of politics, the progressive leaps and bounds of electronic communications technology have had an enormous impact on the speed, the reach, and the nature of political communications. As early as 1992, for example, the third party candidate, Ross Perot, advocated adopting a system of “electronic direct democracy” in presidential elections. Knocking out the middlemen of representation, “e-democracy” would mean that all citizens can participate equally in the proposal, development, and enactment of laws. Further, proponents argue, this direct system of democratic participation and decision-making would achieve the freer and more equal practice of self-determination. While the feasibility of e-democracy was somewhat controversial in 1996, now, just over twenty years later, only a troglodyte would argue that it can’t be done. The more interesting question, of course, is whether less representation and less filtering of public opinion is politically beneficial. At first blush it may seem obvious that purer democracy would be good for democracy. We may recall, however, the words of James Madison in Federalist 58: Beware democratizing measures that make the “countenance of the government . more democratic, but the soul that animates it . more oligarchic.”5 Though we have not adopted e-democracy in the United States—yet, at least—in 2019 it is clear that many of the original spatio-temporal features associated with representational and deliberative politics, which served to decelerate the process and refine public opinion, have been weakened or devitalized. If deliberative republicanism starts with the clash of diverse sentiments and partial views, and is characterized by the filtering, moderation, refinement and enlargement of those views, ultimately producing public opinion, the current predominance of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” would seem to counteract that deliberative process. Rather than a political environment that tempers factionalized interests, prejudices, and views by setting them against other such factionalized opinions, allowing free argument and debate to do its dialectical work, a good amount of political information sources are chosen for their general ideological agreement with the consumer. This kind of balkanization of ideas, even perhaps ideological segregation, in which people hear only what they already believe allows them to escape the process of subjecting 4 Ann Brenoff, “7 Things You Need to Know About What Your Teens Are Doing: Follow Their Smartphones If You Want to Know What Your Teens Are Up To,” HuffPost, July 10, 2015, retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tk-things-you-dont-know-about-what- your-teens-are-doing-online_us_559e9023e4b0967291559170. 5 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay in The Federalist Papers 58: 358, ed. Clinton Rossiter, Introduction and Notes by Charles Kesler (New York: American Library, 1961). A MADISONIAN CONSTITUTION FOR ALL 3 ESSAY SERIES their ideas to critical examination. It is a dodging of the political deliberative process that is a fundamental requisite for republican government. Add to this the warp-like speed of the communication of political opinions and demands today, whether it be in the form of constituents contacting their congresspersons, the 24-hour news cycles of CNN, CNBC, and FOX News, or websites and blogs, including the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, National Review Online, Daily Kos, and others. In effect, the days of Huntley and Brinkley are long gone. In their place are Maddow and Hannity. I. JAMES MADISON AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC OPINION How did James Madison envision deliberative republicanism working in the United States, and in what way have the advances in communications technology impacted Madison’s vision of the politics of public opinion? Let me begin by briefly summarizing Madison’s well know theory of the problem of majority faction and his proposed “cure” for this disease, but add to this the less-familiar theory about how Madison intended political communication to operate in the extended republic. According to Madison, factions are opposed to the rights of some citizens or to the public interest. When a majority composes a faction, power rather than right is the basis for rule. Since the causes of faction cannot be removed without destroying liberty or changing human nature, Madison advocated a political system that could control the effects of faction, including deterring the formation of majority faction. This would require constructing a socio- political environment in which the communication of factious views can effectually be thwarted. In a small republic, Madison argued, it is easy for a majority to communicate and unite on the basis of selfish interests or prejudices, and thereby oppress the minority. By contrast, in an extensive republic there will be a larger population, greater diversity of interests and religious views, a greater distance over which opinions must be communicated, and a greater distrust of unjust or dishonorable purposes. This will make it more difficult for a majority to form on the basis of a narrow interest or harmful passion. In a large society, a coalition of the society will be necessary to achieve a majority; thus its demands will have to pass muster with a great variety of economic, geographical, religious, and other groups in society.