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It's not so much that the Founders didn't grasp partisanship as it was that they thought it incompatible with republican government. Their conception of "good g

It's not so much that the Founders didn't grasp partisanship as it was that they thought it incompatible with republican government. Their conception of "good government" was a society governed by an aristocratic class of landed gentry, whose wealth would (in theory) make them immune to temptations like bribery and self-dealing. Ordinary people couldn't be trusted with their own government, because they would too easily succumb to those same temptations. In practice, of course, that theory broke down almost immediately. Political parties started coalescing around Hamilton and Jefferson practically before the ink on the Constitution had dried, and the gentry whose disinterestedness the Founders had placed so much trust in turned out to be just as flawed and venal as everybody else. If you're interested in why the Founders thought the way they did and the process of how reality broke their worldview in half, I can't recommend Gordon Wood's book The Radicalism of the American Revolution (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6956.The_Radicalism_of_the_American_Revolution https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6956.The_Radicalism_of_t...) highly enough. It's a great read that will change the way you look at the Revolution and the early republic.

robbrown451 7y ago
I think what they didn't fully grasp was how partisanship directly arrives from the voting method. Sure, there was factionalism, but the forcing into two opposing (and almost always equally balanced) parties as a mathematical equilibrium sort of thing probably wasn't in their lexicon. For instance Duverger's Law, which didn't even get a name until the 1950s or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law I will check out that book, thanks.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > and almost always equally balanced Doesn't that also follow from the voting method? A faction will make the political compromises it needs to reliably get past 50% in order to active power, but won't go much past that because it would be an unnecessary political sacrifice.
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    Yes exactly. That's the equilibrium under plurality.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Originally there weren't all that many places in the Constitutional system where a popular vote actually mattered, though. Senators were elected by state legislatures until 1913, for instance, not by popular vote. And the President was elected by the Electoral College, which in its original conception was supposed to have been a kind of grand assembly of the landed aristocracy, much in the same way the Constitutional Convention had been. In line with this conception, Electors were originally (and technically, still are) completely free to vote for whichever candidate they liked, without reference to who won their state's popular vote. And the Electoral College votes by state rather than by a raw count of the votes of the electors, adding a further layer of indirection.

robbrown451 7y ago

I think what they didn't fully grasp was how partisanship directly arrives from the voting method. Sure, there was factionalism, but the forcing into two opposing (and almost always equally balanced) parties as a mathematical equilibrium sort of thing probably wasn't in their lexicon. For instance Duverger's Law, which didn't even get a name until the 1950s or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law I will check out that book, thanks.

CharlesColeman 7y ago
> and almost always equally balanced Doesn't that also follow from the voting method? A faction will make the political compromises it needs to reliably get past 50% in order to active power, but won't go much past that because it would be an unnecessary political sacrifice.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  Yes exactly. That's the equilibrium under plurality.
smacktoward 7y ago
Originally there weren't all that many places in the Constitutional system where a popular vote actually mattered, though. Senators were elected by state legislatures until 1913, for instance, not by popular vote. And the President was elected by the Electoral College, which in its original conception was supposed to have been a kind of grand assembly of the landed aristocracy, much in the same way the Constitutional Convention had been. In line with this conception, Electors were originally (and technically, still are) completely free to vote for whichever candidate they liked, without reference to who won their state's popular vote. And the Electoral College votes by state rather than by a raw count of the votes of the electors, adding a further layer of indirection.