A faction is stated to be a majority or minority of a whole group. A group that deviates either in belief or some other distinction such as political view from the whole population of people. The people of a faction are unified together, bound either by common ground of belief, interest or through their desire for the well being of their community.
2.) Are factions good or bad?
Factions are both. This being stated, factions are bad to a greater extent ad factions are good to a lesser extent. The reason for this comparison is because factions, while expanding the diversity of belief and viewpoint, do much more to divide people and create conflict and struggle rather than to allow for the expansion of ideas. Factions are very much like communism, good on paper, but in reality they only emulate discontinuity. With communism and factions, boiled down the fault is placed of the nature of man. The resilience in which one protects his opinion only adds to the problem of conflicting ground and results in getting nothing accomplished. The paper states that Man is biased against his judgement because of his interest, which in turn corrupts his integrity and thus clashes time and time again without giving an inch of ground. Such can be drawn to the gun debate in America. Pro and anti gun activists are so sunk into their own bias that very little legislation has been passed on this matter despite the numerous shootings in America that seems to rise every year. To this point, factions are good because of this much needed diversity in opinion. The very core of America was founded on the basis of freedom of speech and the inalienable right to voice your opinion. Not everyone thinks the same, and it is from this diversity that the government is able to get perspectives from areas that they themselves would never think of. All in all, factions are both good and bad however the federalist paper targets them to be bad to a greater extent,
3.) Why are factions so difficult to eliminate?
This is due to the fact that, as Madison states in the paper, you would have to destroy liberty and this is "worse than the disease". Liberty was one of the core values that kindled the revolution and taking this vital ingredient of America away is nigh impossible. To strip an American of their freedom would be to take the very heart of the country with it. Furthermore, the other option would be to give every citizen the same opinions, values and passions. This would completely destroy all diversity of thought in the country and lead the country away from what a democracy is based off of. This difficulty of elimination is very similar to the hate speech problem in the US today. Hate speech is legally protected by the supreme court ruling because freedom to express one's opinion is in the country's constitution but that still doesn't mean hate speech is productive much like factions.
4.) If factions cannot be removed then how can they be controlled?
If one cannot target the faction itself then the solution sought out in the federalist papers was to control the effect of the faction. The paper theorized that the effects of a faction would be better suited to be controlled in a large society with a representative government instead of a smaller society with a popular form of government. Madison examined a republic to solve the faction problem rather than a pure democracy. One of the main differences between these two forms of government is that a republic can pass ideas through the "medium of a chosen body of citizens". This allows for a refinery of public views and the medium chosen body of citizens will be least likely to sacrifice the interests of their country. Essentially, through controlling widespread ideas through the country it allows for people to not become so narrow minded and for the intermingling of ideas that take on mutations so there is diversity but also this preserves cooperation.
5.) Centuries after the federalist papers, the two dominate political factions of 21st century America are the Republicans and the Democrats.
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