The Constitution, Taste, and “Violence of Factions”

James Madison, who understood democracy better than most then or since, would have been perplexed by Sanford Levinson’s piece in the summer issue that treated interpretations of the Constitution as mere matters of “taste.” Madison was quite sure what he was about in proposing the Constitution as an answer to such political uncertainty. He very likely would have seen this and the many other discussions of what the Constitution is all about as evidence of a failure to comprehend what he expected it to do. The currently prevalent notion of democracy as an arena for the unconstrained combat of a plurality of factional interests was precisely what he hoped the Constitution would prevent, for the thrust of his conception of t...