Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro are two world leaders who have linked their own rule to revisionist histories of their nations’ past dictatorships.

 

On 17 August 2022, the Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) published its twenty-eighth annual report. Set up in 1995, NCH documents news on the intersection of history and human rights, in particular the censorship of history and the persecution of its producers. Its focus ranges from issues related to the freedom of historical research and teaching to the right to remember. This year’s report covered 100 countries and documented, among others, the political murder of five history producers.

 

Of these history producers who were killed for political reasons, three were murdered during the unfolding of a military coup. In Myanmar, after the military deposed democratically elected State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, large-scale protests erupted across the country. In one of such protests, in February 2021, high school history and math teacher Tin Nwe Yee was hit by a tear gas cannister fired by security officials; she suffocated and died of a heart attack. Two months later, amidst violent resistance against the junta in Chin State, first-year history student Felix Than Muan Lian was shot dead by soldiers of the Tatmadaw (armed forces) on his way to work.

 

In Afghanistan, in August 2021, eleven days before the Taliban took control of Kabul, historian and poet Abdullah Atefi was taken out of his house in the Chora district, Uruzgan, allegedly by Taliban forces, tortured and shot on the street. Atefi was known for his writings on the history of Pashto literature and culture, and was a member of the Afghan branch of PEN International.

 

The other history producers’ deaths were caused by negligence of the regime. In Iran, in January 2022, film director and member of the Iranian Writer’s Association (IWA) Baktash Abtin died from complications relating to COVID-19, which could have been avoided had he received medical care earlier. He had contracted the disease in Evin Prison in Tehran, where he had been sent in 2019 on a five year prison sentence in relation to a book he had co-authored on the history of the IWA.

 

In China, also in January, the Uyghur writer and former editor at Kashgar Uyghur Press, Haji Mirzahid Kerim reportedly died in the hospital after he had “jumped and fell.” Despite a serious health condition, he had been sentenced to eleven years in prison for writing about Uyghur history and historians.

 

The political murder of history producers is only one, albeit the worst, type of history-related censorship. Throughout 2021 and 2022, examples of censorship and persecution ranged from political or politically-supported interference in the production of history textbooks and curricula—notably in India, Hungary, Hong Kong and currently unfolding in the Philippines—to restrictions on archival access, for example in France and Romania. The multi-headed monster that is history-related censorship reared its head in debates about racial justice initiatives in the United States; in politically motivated appointments in Brazil; in the liquidation of a historical organization in Russia; and in the persecution of individual history producers in India. Let us look a little closer at these four cases.

 

The number of so-called anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) laws restricting the teaching of race and racism in United States history increased exponentially throughout 2021 and 2022. Research by PEN America found that 183 educational gag orders had been introduced between January 2021 and April 2022, with nineteen of them having become law in fifteen states. It further observed that the state level bills–almost exclusively brought forward by Republican party politicians–were vaguely drafted, leaving room for arbitrary interpretation, while often enabling direct punishment of teachers’ speech, including through a “private right of action” allowing parents and citizens to levy their own punishment. All this together made the laws likely to also cause self-censorship and thus lead to the effective banning of a wide swath of historical materials.

 

While in the US politicians attempted to censor historical teaching, and by extension future historical research, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro intervened personally. Known for his admiration of the military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985, he reportedly asked his Minister of Education Milton Ribeiro to interfere with the November 2021 Exame Nacional de Ensino Médio (a standardized examination given to more than 8 million secondary students), requesting the term “1964 military coup” to be changed into “Revolution.” On November 15, six days before the exam would take place, he announced that the exam would now start “looking more like the government” so that nobody would have to worry about “those absurd issues from the past.” Four days later, he nominated Ricardo Braga, the owner of a private security company, as the Director of the National Archive, despite him lacking expertise. The nomination provoked fears among many, including the National Forum of Associations of Archivists of Brazil, of a rewriting of the history of the dictatorship, and possibly a destruction of archival documents.

 

In Russia, matters were even worse. In November 2021, the Prosecutor General’s Office filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Court seeking to liquidate Memorial and all of its regional and structural units. Memorial worked as an international human rights organization in Russia since its founding in 1988, uncovering crimes against humanity, especially those committed during Stalin’s reign (1928–1953). A thorn in the eye of President Vladimir Putin’s history policy of valorizing the Soviet Union and Stalin’s rule, Memorial had been forced to register as “foreign agent” in 2014 for receiving foreign funding, and had since been fined at least 21 times for a sum of more than 4.2 million rubles. On December 28, Memorial was liquidated by the Supreme Court. Its archives, including a database of three million victims and 42,000 collaborators of the Soviet secret police between 1935 and 1939, a library and a museum, were all under threat after the ruling.

 

In India, political persecution was mostly aimed at individual history producers. In May 2021, Gilbert Sebastian, an assistant professor in international relations at the Central University of Kerala, was suspended for describing the militant political organization Rashtriya Sqayamsevak Sangh (RSS), connected to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, as a “proto-Fascist organization” during a course on “Fascism and Nazism.” One year later, in May 2022, Waqas Farooq Kuttay, an assistant professor at Sharda University, was similarly suspended after students had complained about an “objectionable” question for a mid-term undergraduate paper, which asked students to discuss whether there were “any similarities between Fascism/Nazism and… Hindutva.” Following the suspension, the university said the question had “distorted the great national identity.” The links between the BJP, the RSS and an aggressive policy of Hinduization are clear, and so is the link with the 2002 mob violence targeting Muslims in Gujarat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, was deemed responsible for the violence by human rights activist Teesta Setalvad. Whereas the National Human Rights Commission and the Supreme Court had strongly condemned the Gujarat government for its failure to deliver justice in the 2002 mob violence case, the Gujarat authorities repeatedly prosecuted Setalvad on false charges. In June 2022, for example, she was arrested in Mumbai on charges of criminal conspiracy and forgery. She was released on interim bail this September.

 

What these four cases, in their great diversity, show, is an attempt by those in power to limit historical research and teaching to those subjects and perspectives that in some capacity function as a foundational element of their legitimacy: be it Putin presenting himself as the harbinger of stability after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while promising Russia’s return to power in a new world order, or the attempts of the Bharatiya Janata Party to push a view of India inspired on an aggressively excluding Hindutva ideology.

 

Similar processes were found at work in how the past was allowed to be remembered. Elsewhere, I argued that the governments of Rwanda, Russia, China and Sri Lanka channeled their legitimizing interpretations of the past into national commemorative practices. Similar examples took place in Vietnam, where human rights activists were put under house arrest on important commemoration days, such as April 30 (the end of the Vietnam War); in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Bosnian Serb authorities of Prijedor banned the annual White Armband Day commemoration (for the victims of ethnic cleansing during the 1992–1995 war) on the grounds of a “serious danger of violence” by two far-right Bosnian Serb nationalist groups, thereby strangely reversing its responsibilities; and in Israel, where in June 2022 the Knesset approved a provisional bill banning the display of “enemy flags,” including the Palestinian one, at state-funded institutions, after Palestinian flags had been waved on May 15 (known by Palestinians as Nakba Day to commemorate the 1948 Declaration of Independence of Israel and the accompanying displacement of Palestinians), in direct opposition to a September 2021 ruling by the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court.

 

When analyzing the censorship of history, one is drawn to look at the backsliding of democracy in the world, as shown time and time again by democracy watchers such as Freedom House and the Economist Intelligence Unit, since 2005 as well. The pursuit of historical truth and the falsification of historical revisionism, depend on such freedoms that are foundational for democracy: freedom of expression, freedom of information and the right to truth. When democracy is under threat, historical research is among the first casualties. Both need our fullest support.

 

BERKELEY ­– This year marks the 60th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which highlighted the negative effects of DDT and other pesticides on wildlife and helped spur the rise of the environmental movement. Unfortunately, the commemoration comes at a time when Americans are becoming more skeptical of scientific institutions. Looking at DDT’s story, it is clear that some of this doubt was sowed by corporate actors such as Phillip Morris in the 1990s. Still, our public health institutions must also repair the damage they have done to their reputations and rebuild trust with the American public. It is their responsibility to free themselves from the “economic poisons” that threaten to discredit their work.

 

In my book, How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall and Toxic Return of DDT, I delve into the story of the toxic chemical. Back in the 1940s, when DDT was first developed, “economic poisons” were chemicals designed to kill pests that otherwise caused high-cost damage. In the broader sense, however, the term “economic poisons” can describe how the Invisible Hand often steers scientists, medical professionals and governments away from reasoning and toward profit. In America, this phenomenon intensified as a rising world superpower clamored for post-war profit at any cost. Today, our government institutions, and especially our scientific ones, have a duty to rebuild the public trust that this process eroded over the last half century.

 

In the late 1940s, Lester Petrie came face-to-face with these economic poisons. Petrie was head of the Georgia Division of Industrial Hygiene, responsible for investigating the problems posed by chemical encounters in workplaces. Yet ever since the war, his division’s work had become more complicated. Before, the job largely involved making sure that people working in factories didn’t come in contact with chemicals or equipment in ways that harmed them. Now he was hearing more and more about chemical poisonings in people’s homes and farms. Most of them were caused by what those in his line of work called “economic poisons,” newly developed synthetic chemicals that killed insects ranging from the annoying to the deadly. DDT was one of them.

 

Before long, Petrie had compiled a harrowing collection of poisoning cases. Most were crop-dusting pilots choked to death by their own cargo. One was a woman who died after eating blackberries grown nearby a sprayed cotton field. A group of small farmers wrote him to say DDT sprayed on neighboring farms was killing their bees and chicks and making them sick. People used to kill insects on crops, when necessary, using compounds that contained the well-known poisons arsenic and lead. It troubled Petrie that the economic poisons seemed as deadly as the older poisons, and that people clearly didn’t know.

 

Petrie himself, after all, had been sure DDT in particular was safe, because of reports and assurances from the U.S. government during the Second World War. Now he wondered whether he ought to create a warning for it, as he had just done for another economic poison, tetraethyl pyrophosphate or TEPP. He reached out to FDA pharmacology chief Arnold Lehman, who had so helpfully reviewed the TEPP warning he had drafted for farmers in his state. “A few days ago,” he wrote, “I noticed a news item in the paper cautioning against the spraying of barns with DDT. I would appreciate very much your sending me all of the new information you may have available concerning the toxicity of DDT.” This time, Lehman didn’t reply.

 

Instead, Petrie received a form letter from the FDA’s Division of State Cooperation. “I regret that we are unable to send you literature dealing in a detailed way with the toxicity of DDT,” it read. Enclosed was a list of articles on DDT poisoning published in medical journals, and an official statement issued by the FDA, PHS, USDA, Army, Navy, and Pan American Sanitary Bureau. Recent news had “misled and alarmed the public concerning the hazards of DDT,” the statement read. “DDT is a very valuable insecticide which has contributed materially to the general welfare of the world.” It was a “poison” like any other insecticide, but any harm it seemed to cause was a result of “errors” in its use.

 

Then Petrie got word of a young boy who died minutes after taking a swig from a bottle he found resting in the crotch of a tree. Petrie felt certain the bottle must have contained TEPP. He also knew that no one, not even the most advanced forensics lab in the state, had the means to identify it. He forwarded details of the case to the Toxicology Branch at the CDC. Then he wrote to the list of manufacturers his staff had compiled, asking them to add tracers to their products so state health officers like him could figure out which products were causing illnesses and deaths. He received one polite reply, from the medical director at Monsanto, which made parathion and DDT. The company would not be able to do this, he said, because it would cost too much.

 

Petrie had tried to raise the alarm on the new chemicals that were being produced at an unprecedented scale after the war—and that were now seeping inside every American household. Instead, he was met with skepticism from government officials and indifference from corporations, who knew it was dangerous but that warning the public would hurt their bottom line. His job, it became clear, was to protect production over public health.

 

The responsibility to disclose such dangers doesn’t just fall on scientists and government officials. Journalists who have knowledge that could save the public from deadly viruses or dangerous chemicals have a duty to shine light on those issues, too. The Los Angeles Times accomplished this with their groundbreaking story on dozens of barrels of DDT waste dumped into the Southern California Bight.

 

The response to that reporting was swift. California Senator Dianne Feinstein demanded that the EPA take action. Other lawmakers called hearings in the House of Representatives in Washington and the State Assembly in Sacramento. Foundations reached out with grant funds. Scientists convened meetings and conference panels. A team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NOAA pulled together an expedition in record time to go down to the seafloor and map the dump site in the spring of 2021. They didn’t see dozens of barrels; they saw more than 27,000. Recently released memos from the EPA’s investigation indicate that the actual amount of ocean-dumped DDT may be far, far higher.

 

It’s not too late for these institutions to repair the damage they have done. But it will take years of effort beginning at the grassroots level. It will mean scientists who consistently push back on industry, even when it is the unpopular, or in the short term, more costly decision. It will take brave policymakers and politicians willing to back up scientists, even when it is not politically convenient. It will mean journalists taking the time to build trust in Black and Hispanic communities, places where they have ignored their stories and their calls for environmental justice. These previous pollutants and pandemics are but a dress rehearsal for the growing climate crisis, a global emergency that will once again pit big business against sound science.

 

Scientific proof of environmental harm has only ever shifted policy when government and business interests have aligned. We must remember that there’s no greater shared interest than our very survival.

Women survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, April 17-18, 1945

 

When I was a teenager, I imagined that Anne Frank was at my mother’s 15th birthday party. After all, they were the same age and they were both in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

 

How did I arrive at such a phantastic conflation?

 

For one, who hadn’t heard about the gifted diarist? Expressing normal adolescent interests and concerns, Anne’s letters to imaginary friends helped her cope with the oppressive situation in “the Secret Annex.” I could picture the hiding place she described. I could appreciate her humor, wisdom, and powers of observation. Though Anne knew that terrible things were happening, “The Diary of a Young Girl” does not touch the horrors of the Holocaust. Her book is relatable. Hopeful. 

 

When I was a young teenager (about 13, the age my mother was during the war), my mother was restrained in what she shared with me. She worried that her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen would give me nightmares. She recalled and elaborated on her birthday party in a labor camp. The episode was relatable. Hopeful.

 

Eventually, after multiple conversations and into my college years, I learned the truth. Here is why Anne and my mother were never at the same place at the same time:

 

On August 4, 1944, SS-Oberscharfuehrer (Nazi squad leader) Karl Josef Silberbauer and Dutch police officers raided Prinsengracht 263, where Otto Frank ran his business. Searching behind the office’s bookcase, they found Anne and the seven others (Otto, Edith and Margot Frank; Herman, Augusta and Peter Van Pels; and Fritz Pfeffer) who had been hiding there for more than two years. They hauled the group to a detention center, a stop before Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp.

 

By this time, my mother had endured the harrowing journey from Sighet to Auschwitz. And the trauma of being separated from her parents and siblings on the ramp at Birkenau. For more than two months, she had struggled to survive in the shadows of the gas chambers and crematoria. Finally, providentially, she and her sister Elisabeth were sent to Christianstadt, a labor camp in Lower Silesia. In its neighboring munitions factory, she gouged holes in grenades, preparing them for pins. (She deliberately made the holes shallow, rendering the weapons useless.)

 

By October 8, the date of my mother’s birthday, Anne — having been deported with her family on the last train to leave Westerbork — had known the terror and depredations of Auschwitz-Birkenau for more than a month. A celebration of any sort would have been unthinkable. Meanwhile, in Christianstadt, my mother received gifts: slippers and a hat made of straw pulled from mattresses; flowers made of somehow-procured crepe paper. Had Anne been at my mother’s party, she would have had a slice of the cake decorated with a scene from Hansel and Gretel, made by women who worked in the SS officers’ kitchen, created at the risk of punishment for stealing scarce ingredients.

 

On November 1, 1944, Anne, her sister, Margot, and Augusta Van Pels were transferred from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen. It would be another four-and-a-half months before my mother encountered that hell.

 

With the advance of the Red Army in the winter of 1945, the Nazis hurried to evacuate concentration camps in the east. Bergen-Belsen, deep in northwest Germany, received the largest number of war-ravaged survivors. Without adequate shoes and clothing, with hardly anything to eat, they had suffered terribly on death marches and in overcrowded rail cars. Now they landed in a place without sanitation, clean water or habitable housing. A February transport brought typhus to the camp. Epidemics raged. Death was practically inescapable.

 

After witnessing the demise of Margot, Anne, emaciated and ill, also succumbed. No one knows the exact date, but it was likely within one or two weeks of my mother’s arrival in mid-March. More than 17,000 prisoners died that month. The dead lay in huge piles, or among the living in the huts.

 

By the time units of the British Second Army liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, half of the camp’s 60,000 inmates were recent arrivals. If not too far gone, they were able to withstand the final five days under Nazi rule, when no food or water was distributed. Those who were there longer had less of a chance. More than 13,000 died after the liberation. It took four weeks for the liberators to stem the tide of death.

 

My mother barely survived. On April 23 or 24 she was washed, disinfected, and placed in a makeshift hospital room with 12 beds. Every day for three weeks, 11 dead were removed and 11 nearly dead filled the empty beds.

 

Even when I had the crazy idea that my mother and Anne Frank knew each other, I was aware that they were very different girls from very different backgrounds. Despite her family’s move from Germany to the Netherlands in the wake of the Nazis’ rise to power, Anne enjoyed the trappings of a privileged childhood: family trips, expensive activities, material comforts. My mother came from a poor family in an isolated Carpathian Mountain town. The second of six children, she’d had big responsibilities — taking care of her younger siblings, tending to household chores and, by age 12, delivering orders for her grandmother’s poultry business. While Anne attended a Montessori School, my mother attended a provincial Romanian school. While Anne kept a diary, my mother kept a log of what customers owed. Beyond being Jewish (Anne’s family was secular; my mother’s, religious) the only thing they had in common was the developmental stage they were at when caught in Hitler’s murderous web.

 

Had Anne survived, she and my mother may have crossed paths. This was plausible; in hospitals and TB sanatoriums and, at one point, at an International School for teenage survivors, my mother was with girls who came from various socioeconomic groups. What they had in common was more significant than what they had experienced in their diverse prewar lives. Almost all were orphaned, sick and homeless. All had endured against all odds.

 

Had Anne survived, her mighty contribution to Holocaust literature would surely have taken a different tack. Readers would have had to be ready to learn the whole truth.

 

This essay was originally published on August 4 by Kveller, and is republished by permission. It may not be reproduced without permission. To receive a free subscription to Kveller, visit https://www.kveller.com/signup/.

 

 

When I picked up my copy of Federalist #10 to begin writing this article, I was stunned by the subtitle: “The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.” Despite my 30 years of teaching this document, the emotions that welled up in me upon reading “Insurrection” were a shock. These are hard times. That the present shapes our understanding of the history we study was brought home to me with new force.

Knowing that Shays’ Rebellion was a cause of the calling of, and the high attendance at, the Constitutional Convention and the prominence of the phrase “to insure Domestic Tranquility” in the preamble helps explain what the framers thought was at stake in 1787. I always spent 10 or 15 minutes parsing the meanings of the preamble, but even though I taught the Constitution more than 150 times over the years, I never felt the depth of those words as I do at this time. The insurrection by the followers of Donald Trump puts us in a situation James Madison would recognize. Donald Trump and his minions have been frightening us every day for years now. It is time to analyze the most famous of Madison’s essays: Federalist #10. This essay is addressed to teachers.

This article is in two major parts: An analysis of Madison’s Federalist #10 on his terms in the first section, which is a pared down student-led lesson, and a second section which builds on the first to critique #10. Usually historians and political scientists refer to the electoral college as the major anti-democratic feature of the Constitution, but in Federalist #10 Madison, as you will see, had fundamentally no respect for the will of the of the people. He baked this idea into his theory of the republic.

That final section takes on the chimerical idea of the (single) public good and Madison’s outright rejection of “the people themselves” to protect the government from dangerous majorities. In 2022 the white supremacist Republican party has ditched democracy and gerrymandered Madison’s constitutional structure. We are on the brink of a fascist takeover.These contradictions could not be compromised away in 1787 and cannot be smoothed over in 2022. “The Miracle in Philadelphia” nearly failed as a system on January 6, 2021. Democracy cannot be defended by depending on a group of men of “wisdom” to lead us to control “the mischiefs of faction.” Instead we need majority rule.

When I assigned Federalist #10 I asked the students to download and read the document. (1) They were required to choose two sentences from the beginning, three from the middle and two from the end of the document. As I have explained in detail in “The Tarzan Theory of Reading,” on my Substack site, the students were to single out sentences with which they agreed or disagreed strongly or those that they thought were important and explain why. The students will lead the discussion with their questions, comments, and the sentences they choose which they will read out loud to the class. In addition I asked them to identify the sentence that was at the logical center of the argument. Federalist #10 has an elegant architecture.

When I began the class, I asked for questions or comments. Students often made comments on the definitions of faction or insurrection, which is now a term many students will encounter in the news. The definition of faction is “a majority or minority… opposed to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The students will come up with the common term “special interest,” but how can that be a majority? This is key problem with Federalist #10, since Madison’s understanding of the term faction is not intuitive. The students may object that the Constitution describes a democracy: does not the majority rule? You should put that idea in a separate list on the board and leave it until the end of the discussion (we will discuss that separate list of ideas in depth in the Part II critique). An insurrection is an attempt at the violent overthrow of a government. The students know that Shays’ Rebellion (1786 – 87) was an insurrection.

Majority faction is itself a contradiction that can be addressed by working through Madison’s series of subtopics: the climate of disorder in the country, his diagnosis of factions the proposals to eliminate them, or to control them, and a critique of his solution. Although the discussion will jump around the document, as the students volunteer their sentences those subtopics will organize the notes as we go along.

Disorder in the Country

Shays’ Rebellion was a major factor in Madison’s concerns. The students will know that indebted farmers in western Massachusetts denounced unaffordable taxes and complained that they were losing their mortgages to foreclosure. Daniel Shays was a Revolutionary War captain who led his followers to attempt to close the courts to prevent the foreclosures. In addition, they demanded representation equal to the proportional per capita representation in the east close to Boston. After the rebellion was quashed, Shaysites were elected to the Massachusetts legislature. Another problem was that the rebellion was a protest against unfair taxation reminiscent of the protests in the 1760s and 70s. It reminded many leaders in Massachusetts of the lead-up to 1776 (similarly, some of the insurrectionists in 2022 used 1776 as a threatening slogan). This armed insurrection was a major cause of the convening of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, because the Articles Congress had no power to raise an army directly: the state had to defend itself along with any allies it could muster.

Madison describes how, in his view, the public good was being ignored. “The friend of popular governments” opposes the “violence of faction” which causes “instability, injustice and confusion.” There are “overbearing” majorities that cause ” governments” to be “too unstable” because they do not respect the “rights of the minority,” and governments controlled by “specious (unsupportable) arguments” causing “mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished.” He blames the “factious spirit that has tainted our public administrations.”

Madison’s Definition of Faction 

“By faction I understand a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse or passion or of interest adversed (sic) to the rights of other citizens or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” If a student chooses this sentence, you have to be careful to explain each part of the definition. How do you explain this definition, I ask. Eventually the students come to realize that Madison expected that the people would support particular conclusions (how else could he call it a majority faction?). How could a leader find “the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,” I ask. This should also go in the Critique section for discussion. The rest of Federalist #10 discusses how to eliminate factions or how to control them.

Eliminating Factions 

This is the first of the methods to secure the government against the “mischief of faction.” There are two methods to eliminate factions: destroying liberty or giving everyone the same opinions. The students will come to the conclusion that restricting liberty is not possible in a democratic government because we depend on freedom of thought and action to maintain democracy.

The second method, giving “everyone the same opinions,” is also an impossible solution because “as long as man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” How do you understand that, I ask. Here, students might note Madison’s identification of opinions based on “self-love,” the diagnosis that “reason is connected to passion” and the observation that “Diversity in the faculties of man” were factors in the differences of political opinions.

The rights of property and the ownership of different kinds of property and the faculties to obtain those kinds of property all cause divisions. Faculty seems to be an ability, the students will conclude. So, Madison describes it thus: “(t)he latent (underlying) causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.” It soon becomes clear that Madison was not making an argument for the change in distribution or the control of production or property or goods in the US—Madison was not a Marxist! Instead, the students will conclude that Madison was attempting to find ways to manage the political effects of that inequality or those differences. But in whose interest did he want to manage those inequalities: was it  to be a country of the enslaved, the ordinary people, or did he favor his class of the southern gentry?

Controlling the Effects of Faction

“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 controlling its EFFECTS.” In the ensuing discussion students will come to the conclusion that this sentence begins the second half of the argument. It is the sentence at the logical center of the argument. Here Madison turns to the idea of controlling the effects of factions instead of eliminating them and eventually introduces the republic as a solution.

“If the faction consists of less than a majority” voting, the “republican principle” is the remedy. There might be disagreements, but majority rule does offer a solution. Therefore, what to do about a majority faction is the most intractable problem. Someone is likely to pick the sentence: “To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a (majority) faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.” The ensuing discussion can conclude that it is a thesis sentence pointing to the chief point of the whole article.

The “existence of the same passion in the factional majority” must be prevented or “the majority must be rendered unable to concert. When people “concert” they work together. Madison is actually opposing the rule of the majority here. A pure (direct) democracy in which the citizens are the legislature “can admit of no cure” for “the mischiefs of faction” because “the common passion or interest will in almost every case be felt by a majority of the whole and there is nothing to check… an obnoxious individual” or group from influencing everyone.

In a republic as envisioned by Madison, however, “the representatives refine and enlarge the public views by passing through a medium of a chosen body of citizens whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country (my italics).” He added, “the public voice pronounced by the representatives of the people might be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.” Here Madison added the idea of making the republic cover larger areas. He suggests that by ”e)xtend(ing) the sphere – you take in a greater variety of parties and interests (and) you make it less possible they will concert… “ The conclusion of this part of the argument can lead to a choice of more famous and experienced statesmen who possess the “wisdom” referred to above, because the a large number of voters would be participating in a larger district, the chances if a more famous or experienced person (i.e. of wisdom) would be greater.

Finally, “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states.” He uses religious sects, a rage for paper money, and abolition of debt as examples that are more likely to “taint a particular county or district than an entire State.” These are some of Madison’s most famous statements. The students will see that the purpose of representation and extending the area of the republic was to elect men of wisdom. The factions may cancel each other out or the men of wisdom will convince the other legislators to follow the “true ideas” of the public good because the ordinary people cannot end the controversy, Madison and his fellow leaders will decide for them.

Madison’s essay seems clear as a the ringing of two groups of bells: There are two groups of opposing solutions:

Eliminating Factions or Controlling its Effects. Each has two methods of solution: He moves through the ideas with alacrity going from one solution to another. The logic is stunning and elegant, like a mathematical proof.

 

Part II: A Critique of Madison’s Argument

Now we have to confront the sentences we have put aside or left without exploring thoroughly, in particular the idea of the majority faction:

“By faction I understand a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse or passion or of interest adversed (sic) to the rights of other citizens or the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Eventually, the students will conclude that a majority vote is not what Madison is seeking as a solution to the problem of the majority faction. Somehow the government must override the majority.

Another example of Madison’s majority problem: The “public voice pronounced by the representatives of the people” might be more consonant “to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.” The students will determine that Madison is counterposing the representatives to “the people themselves.” Representatives certainly do not have to vote by taking instructions from their constituents, but it is clear that Madison is trying to circumvent the majority. Why would a legitimate republic be so designed? When we discuss this idea the students reach the conclusion that he does not trust the people to make the right decisions. It is obvious from the sentences that are there for the choosing.

Another of Madison’s sentences expresses the same contradictory view: “To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a (majority) faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.” What, students may ask, is the “public good” other than the will of a majority? If you have not yet discussed “public good,” it is an opportunity to discuss the major contradiction. When the students analyze this the discussion is not done until the students see that even though Madison seems to be discussing the solutions as benefitting all the people, instead he is claiming the right to decide for the majority which citizens will benefit.

Eventually the students reach the conclusion that everyone does not have the same interests in society or that the public good may change. So it is not clear how to reach the public good, or that the public good can be expressed as a singular rather than a series of public goods. Madison believed, however that the public good was not only attainable, but a key factor in overcoming the mischiefs of the majority faction. Do we really think that the Constitution has been a success for all the people as Madison designed it and the conventional wisdom in the US has always assumed?

Now we have entered a realm of ambiguity and contradiction. Madison’s elegant proof, which seemed so clear, becomes murky, and most importantly, unreachable by the majority of ordinary men—or women!! How do you understand this “public good” now, I ask. The students will determine that not all people under the Constitution have the same interests as propertied white men: There are women and Black people and poor and rich. In 1787 these citizens were not formally part of the political community. The First Peoples “not taxed” were thus excluded by the clause on taxing and representation in Article I after the 3/5 clause. The Black underclass in the US has been living without the protection of the law for the vast majority of American History; much of the US seemed to only discover the true level of relentless and widespread violence against Black people on May 25, 2020—the day of George Floyd’s murder. Madison had been fine with slavery and its terrible consequences. These actions were not a new development.

The interracial uprising that resulted was unique They were the largest multiracial demonstrations ever in the US .The violence against Blacks has been a dark undercurrent in the US since the ratification of the Constitution. What is the public good? Do you think now that Madison was protecting the whole people as he implied in paragraph after paragraph by calling his goal the public good?

Now we come to the final sentence in the statements we have put aside for critique. When Madison brought up the danger of Shays’ Rebellion (see Disorder in the Country above), he blamed the eastern leaders of Massachusetts for the unequal taxation which caused the rebellion. The western farmers rebelled against the unfair taxatiion as they had in the 1760s and 70s. Madison commented: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” i.e. elected to office.

These men on whom Madison depended must convince the other representatives and the senators that they know the public good better than the people themselves. Are these people philosopher kings who see the reality in Plato’s cave? Or are they advocating legislation based on the general will in the theory of Rousseau? The general will is discerned outside of debate, and expresses the “true will” of the people. This ability is a “faculty” of enlightened statesmen. It depends not on majority vote but on “the permanent aggregate interests of the community” or the”public good,” determined by the men “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country” in Madison’s phrase.(2) These men of the “better sort” must convince other legislators to follow their lead. What in Madison’s argument places these statesmen in power, I ask. The students eventually identify the layering that takes the decisions out of the hands of the direct voters who have elected men of deeper perception or who represent more conservative interests that protect the government from the “vexed,” the poor or the enslaved, in other words, the factions born of ambition race, and class. These men can find the public good for the benefit of the permanent aggregate interests of their countrymen. But as I stated at the outset such a belief is a chimera.

How can we call the history of the US a long story of a developing public good for all the people when the 3/5 Compromise ruled the House of Representatives until 1818, when the large white population of the North overwhelmed the slaveholders’ advantages, and up until the Civil War the small population states controlled the Senate with the help of the “dough-faced” northerners who voted with the South in the Senate and the House. These all acted together to repress democratic solutions to slavery and keep women, the poor and the First Peoples in literal and virtual shackles and chains.

When the slave power was overthrown and the Reconstruction Amendments were passed after the Civil War, there was a brief period from 1866 to 1877 when a fragile interracial democracy existed in the South, which for a time kept the Republican reformers in power. But then violent mobs attacked and killed Black Republican voters, overturned that hard won peace between the races, and Blacks lost suffrage in nearly the whole South. White supremacy ruled again until the Civil Rights Revolution capped by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 produced a second period of Black and minority participation.

Now we are in a different era in which our political life has also been commandeered by white supremacy in the form of Republican re-districting in the states so, despite the large populations in the Democratic-controlled states, the Democrats have only bare majorities in the House and only the tie-breaking vote of the vice president in a 50-50 Senate. Democratic senators represent 41.5 million more Americans than the Republicans. (3) These are problems quite different from Madison’s majority factions. It is minority rule that the majority cannot use the “republican principle” to “cure.” It is a deadlock caused by the filibuster and the small population states, which have controlled the Senate since they were born in the Great Compromise. Madison’s “Machine that Would Go of Itself” has been rejiggered. (4) There is a fascist threat to democracy led by the followers of the former President. Madison’s governmental structure has been under threat by these insurrectionists and the democratic traditions have been undermined to the breaking point. It is unclear whether democracy shall survive the next election, let alone the ones after.

The call in Federalist #10 for the protection of the public good and for the permanent and aggregate interests of the community was based on the will and experience of a minority Madison called the “enlightened statesmen,” who protected slavery for the white majority. The white majority in the country is now disappearing and the movements to defend the “historical white republic” are threatening the lives of workers, women and all minorities. This is our problem now, and it is rooted in the ideal of the public good which Madison believed he and other enlightened statesmen could conjure up to protect the true interests of the “whole” community. He fought to maintain the rule of people like him. There was no working compromise between the interests of slavery vs freedom, or today between the evangelical radicals opposed to abortion and advocates of women’s rights, or between the refusal of the rights of the poor to health care and advocates of medicare for all, or finally, the interests threatening the rights to clean air, water, food and jobs and the movement for a Green New Deal. The Electoral College and the unrepresentative Senate must not control our politics. We are at a crossroads.

The myth of the “divinely inspired” Constitution has sustained Madison’s reputation of infallibility, but the flaws in his reasoning, as we have pointed out, have come to haunt us and brought us to the brink of losing our democracy. What, after all, is the public good if it does not represent a clear majority of the US population? As the students realized in their analysis there is no single or public good. We are a country of classes, races and genders. We should not be controlled by the rich white men or their MAGA insurrectionists. We are still being ruled by the magical thinking of former centuries, from ancient Greece to the early modern concepts of the virtue of the white landed aristocracy. All this is embodied the persons of senators from states with populations smaller than assembly districts in New York or the city of Washington DC. These modern day conservatives talk about the Constitution as a document describing a republic, not a democracy. They believe that the proper leaders of this republic are the whites: the real Americans. This idea brings us back to the earlier argument concerning the dangers of reaching for the single public good or the “permanent aggregate interests of the community.” The chimera of the public good turns out to be a smokescreen for white supremacy—as it always was. No amount of leisure or learning can motivate the white supremacists to discern true interests of our country. They are in it for themselves.

Notes

(1) You can find Federalist #10 at:

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

(2) For example see passim

https://www.britannica.com/topic/general-will

or

https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-sovereign-political-entity

(3) https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2021/02/u-s-senate-representation-is-deeply-undemocratic-and-cannot-be-changed/

(4) See The Machine that Would Go of Itself , a book about the Constitution by Michael Kammen published in 1986 which shows that the understanding of the Constitution is weak, but Americans believe it is inspired by God and unchangeable.

 

There is no doubt that the Russian invasion of Ukraine constitutes a criminal act of aggression.  What lay behind this, however, is a complicated set of competing geopolitical ambitions and threat perceptions, and beyond these, a fundamental weakness in the United Nations mediation and collective security systems. 

 

Russian leaders from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin have viewed NATO’s gradual expansion to the east as a grave national security threat.  In 2008, President George W. Bush opened the door to Ukraine and Georgia for future NATO membership, thus bringing this Western military alliance to the doorstep of Russia.  While there has been much debate over whether NATO expansion constitutes a broken promise to the Soviet Union (and Russia), there is no doubt that Russian leaders have regarded it as an existential threat to their nation.      

 

The Russian response has been to support separatist movements in Georgia and Ukraine, annex the Crimea Peninsula, and, most recently, invade Ukraine.  U.S. leaders have deemed these actions gross overreactions, or perhaps indications of a desire on Putin’s part to remake Russia into an empire along the lines of the old Soviet Union.  Whatever the case, the invasion of Ukraine has been counterproductive for Russia, as NATO has been strengthened and expanded further. 

 

U.S. leaders have taken the position that NATO is of no threat to any nation, and thus they have been unwilling to compromise on Ukraine’s eventual membership.  Then, too, U.S. leaders generally regard U.S. global power as protective and benevolent, notwithstanding a long record of military interventions and covert operations in other nations.  No doubt, they would respond with alarm if Russia or China invited Mexico to join in a military alliance. 

 

Might the war in Ukraine have been avoided if the U.S. had relied on the UN rather than NATO to ensure security in the region? 

 

The UN Charter requires that parties in any dispute “shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice” (Article 33).  Should the latter fail, the charter provides for collective security measures in which member nations can collectively deter or repel would-be aggressors through joint diplomatic, economic, and military actions “for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security” (Article 43).

 

The UN has often failed to live up to its mandate to “end the scourge of war,” which has led many to dismiss the institution as irrelevant.  Yet, like all great changes and paradigm shifts, progress in establishing a global security system is incremental and may be centuries in the making.  Think of the establishment of democratic governments, human rights policies, and religious tolerance. 

 

In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to revive this inclusive concept of security set forth in the UN Charter.  Speaking before the UN General Assembly on December 8, 1988, he declared, “The world community must learn to shape and direct the process in such a way as to preserve civilization, to make it safe for all and more pleasant for normal life.  It is a question of cooperation that could be more accurately called ‘co-creation’ and ‘co-development.’  The formula of development “at another’s expense” is becoming outdated.” 

 

Turning to the U.S., Gorbachev proposed that the U.S. and Soviet Union begin a “joint effort to put an end to an era of wars, confrontation and regional conflicts, to aggression against nature, to the terror of hunger and poverty as well as to political terrorism.  This is our common goal and we can only reach it together.”  Giving substance to these aspirations, he announced Soviet decisions to withdraw significant numbers of troops and tanks from Eastern European countries and to seek a UN-brokered ceasefire in Afghanistan.

 

It was a remarkable speech, especially as Americans had been conditioned to view the Soviet Union as the graveyard of idealism.  The editors of the New York Times had difficulty describing it:  “Breathtaking.  Risky.  Bold.  Naive.  Diversionary.  Heroic.  All fit.  So sweeping is his agenda that it will require weeks to sort out.  But whatever Mr. Gorbachev’s motives, his ideas merit – indeed, compel – the most serious response from President-elect Bush and other leaders.”

 

The incoming George H. W. Bush administration was hesitant to endorse Gorbachev’s idealistic reforms.  Indeed, the U.S. foreign policy establishment viewed Moscow’s retreat from great power domination as an opportunity to advance U.S. interests and establish the U.S. as the sole superpower in the world. 

 

Gorbachev remained undaunted.  Having taken up the challenge to reinvent the Soviet socialist system, he was equally determined to instigate humanistic reforms in the international arena.  To diffuse the Cold War in Europe, he proposed an end to both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  Speaking in France in July 1989, he called for a cooperative “commonwealth of sovereign democratic states with a high level of equitable interdependence and easily accessible borders open to the exchange of products, technologies and ideas, and wide-ranging contacts among people.” 

 

Eastern European nations, in other words, would join Western European nations in creating a common European identity and culture, buttressed by open trade and travel.  Western European nations had already modeled this in forming the European Economic Community (1957) followed by the European Union (1993), enabling age-old national animosities to dissolve.      

 

In essence, Gorbachev was proposing a way out of great power competition, in line with the UN Charter, presuming that a friendly international neighborhood is the best security.  This is the vision that is needed today – a reimagining of the world order.  Beyond immediate crises, we need to work toward an inclusive and sustainable global security system.     

 

Moreover, continuation of the current system of big power competition and rival blocs bodes ill for the future.  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set its “doomsday clock” at 100 seconds to midnight, closer than it has ever been, based on nuclear and global warming threats, an indication of how close humanity is to “destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making.”  Moving toward mutual security and cooperation will set the clock back and allow humanity to move forward.