James Madison was concerned with what he called “the violence of faction” in which factions advance their own agenda by claiming their Factional Will is the General Will or undermining the government's responsibility to identify and implement the General Will. His solution to this problem was pluralism. A large republic with many competing interests would make it difficult for any single faction to gain enough power to act unilaterally. With more parties, causes, and priorities, majorities would fracture before they became dangerous:
Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.
The sphere has extended beyond what Madison could envision, yet instead of many factions cancelling one another out, all our discourse happens around a durable two-party duopoly. Elections are all about red vs blue divides with each side claiming to represent the will of the people. When parties achieve power, all their work goes into advancing their platform, aka their factional will, or undoing gains of the other party..
Few choices maps badly to Individual Will
The question is: What don’t our main factions fracture as Madison predicted?
Individual Will is rarely simple. People usually want several things at once, many of which pull in different directions. Preferences are made up of tradeoffs, conditions, and exceptions. Because of this complexity, it is surprisingly easy to guide someone toward a choice by narrowing the question in just the right way. Parents learn this quickly. When little Timmy does not want to go to school, a parent might ask whether school would be better with the green shirt or the yellow shirt. Before long, Timmy is on his way to school in his favorite green shirt, even though going to school was the point of contention.
The same dynamic appears in elections. Voters are asked if they prefer option A or option B. They likely have a preference, but that does not mean they like either option. Regardless, the choice is then treated as the expression of their true preference.
US politics is dysfunctional because when faction members recognize the solution they would prefer to implement is not the General Will, they are better off working to get it implemented. For example, assume a party is in control and they can pass whatever laws they wish. Enacting their Factional Will archives their goals. On the other hand, working with the other party to identify and pass the General Will, which will accomplish less, anger their base, but might inspire the other side to return the favor down the road. The math is straightforward. The best move is to implement their Factional Will in its entirety.
The opposition accepts this, because it expects to impose its own agenda when the pendulum swings. It is better for both to advance their Factional Will half the time rather than being forced to negotiate towards the General Will all the time. The result is predictable: the factions become sovereign, not the people and we ping-pong back-and-forth between dueling Factional Wills.
The only thing that might give a faction pause is setting a precedent that threatens the existing duopoly or offers minor gains but opens the door for the other party to do significant damage. In some ways, the existing duopoly is a worst-case scenario. One large faction would at least have Factional Will closer to the General Will, while many smaller factions could advance their own agendas. As it is, the name of the game is not compromise, but demand and obstruct.
Elections must offer voters a set of candidates. But selecting among options does not necessarily reveal anything meaningful about Individual Will.
First, the choice set may be too small. Binary or near-binary elections are especially poor at capturing nuance or unconventional preferences.
Second, platforms are monolithic. A voter may prefer one candidate’s foreign policy and another’s economic stance, but must select a single bundle. The ballot records endorsement of the whole, regardless of which components the voter actually supports.
Third, all options may be bad. Selecting the least offensive choice can be mistaken for consent, creating the illusion of control. William “Boss” Tweed, later convicted of corruption, summarized the danger succinctly: “I don’t care who does the electing, as long as I get to do the nominating.”
To realistically map Individual Will, it must be trivial for voters to create their own options. Allowing the slate of candidates to grow organically resolves all these failures. A new candidate can assemble a platform that crosses existing monoliths, offering representation desired by at least one voter—the one who created it.
Whenever you are forced to pick from a set of options of which you have little power to change, choices have been made for you behind the scenes.
U.S. voters almost always face two viable options: Republican or Democrat. The notion that the diversity of human will can be modeled by two categories is implausible on its face.
While many candidates are technically permitted, the system ensures that most are nonviable. Ballot access is difficult, debates are inaccessible, and media exposure is asymmetric. Strategic voting further compounds the problem: a candidate must already appear capable of winning in order to win. Even in the rare case an outsider succeeds, they often enter a legislature where power is organized around parties they do not belong to, leaving them effectively powerless.
Thus, it is not enough to allow new options in principle. It must be easy to create them, and they must carry equal paths to influence.
People will quickly set aside their Individual Will in exchange for their own perceived opportunity or gain. Thus, for voters to accurately map their Individual Will to a Factional Will, they must know that there is nothing to gain by misrepresentation. There can be no strategic angle to elections, leaving voters with no incentive to do anything but express themselves earnestly.
An election that seeks to map Individual Wills to Factional Wills must therefore do nothing else. Otherwise, it produces not a map of desire, but a map of what voters believe to be strategically optimal.
Importantly, systemic pressure need not arise from the election mechanism itself. It can come from downstream effects. A candidate may be strategically inferior because victory would grant them less political power than their competitors. Voters will rationally avoid supporting such candidates even if they prefer them. Thus, an election that accurately models Individual Will also requires fair distribution of power within the legislature. How this bias can be eliminated is explored in the chapter “Compromise”.
The U.S. places exceptional pressure on voters by holding an election for a single seat, asking citizens to vote for a candidate, and awarding that seat to the candidate with the most votes. It is difficult to imagine a more dysfunctional approach to representation. The idea that one’s representation can “lose” is undemocratic on its face. A contest for representation is akin to suggesting a loving family should select which child’s movie to watch by staging a fistfight.
Some argue that representation balances out nationally: your party may lose here but win elsewhere. This logic treats public opinion as interchangeable and assumes only two factions exist, because silencing one group can be offset by silencing an “opposing” one. This framing is fundamentally undemocratic. It replaces genuine representation with the common motive Madison warned against and locks the public into two permanent Factional Wills.
Worse still, duopolistic platforms are designed to contrast, not reflect. Representatives are incentivized to implement their platform and cater exclusively to their base. As a result, if your preferred candidate loses, you not only lack representation until the next election—you experience negative representation as opposing policies are imposed. This intensifies strategic voting and makes elections more bitter.
Most voters understand this intuitively and vote accordingly. Voters select the adequate, viable candidate, not the preferred one who cannot win so at least some of their interests can be served. Again, the advice to “hold your nose and vote” is the system confessing its own failure.
If the goal of elections is to capture Individual Will, then there must be no additional pressures on voters—and certainly no mechanism by which representation can be lost. Attempting to build consensus during the election itself is inherently unjust. It asks an Individual Will to make concessions before the object of compromise even exists.
The answer is simple: our elections are designed to identify the dominant factional will, so any faction save the top two are not viable.
When the people have a desire to fracture and push new issues into the political spotlight – and this is happening all the time – they are effectively blocked by the system from winning elections in the short-term. In the longer term, the two dominant parties either ignore the issue if it is insufficient to swing elections or incorporate it into their own platform. The tactics the dominant factions use to adjust to these pressures is given more detail in the not-yet-written section on Party Systems.
Minor factions can not gain political traction in our system because voters are looking to advance their Individual Will. At the ballot box, the better of the two dominant, flawed factions who might win is the strategically superior selection to an excellent minor faction who can't win. This is for two reasons.
Just as a candidate needs support of the largest faction to be elected, a representative needs to be a member of the largest legislative coalition.
The control of political power requires a coalition. For example, a candidate will only gain political power if he attracts a big enough coalition of people to vote for him so he wins the election. However, this is not a candidate’s only coalition, or even the most important one. Once in office this person requires a coalition of like minded executives and legislatures to get things done. For example, your bill will only come up for a vote in the House or Senate if your coalition (your party) is the dominant one and thereby set the agenda. Likewise, your bill will never receive a vote in the other legislative body without your coalition’s control, or signed by the president. A representative without those things is stymied.
Thus, a candidate with no ability to build a coalition in government can win the election and have no political power. Thus, the coalition a candidate will have behind him becomes a critical issue for voters. So critical in fact, that Americans seldom vote for a candidate. They instead vote for the coalition they hope the candidate will be able to put together.
This is why every candidate who won an election on the federal level was aligned with one of the two dominant parties. A vote for a true independent might get the candidate elected, but that person will still be unable to advance any of the platform he promises. It is not surprising then that voters choose to support the lackluster faction with a good shot at political power over the better faction candidate with none.
Thus, if we need to accept factions and want a government that works to identify the General Will, then being a part of a faction or not can have no consequence on a representative’s political power.
US elections are simultaneously asking voters two conflicting expressions of their Individual will in a single question. The two questions are:
These are very different questions. The first is a genuine interrogation of Individual Will. The second is a strategic calculation attempting to weigh internal and external factors. I may like candidate X, but when (1) means candidate X will have no political power, his good intentions will do nothing to advance my concerns. Thus I am offered to choose between like-minded and effective representation.
This forced choice happens because US elections are not about aggregating individual will, it’s about selecting the factional will in power. Thus, the winner of a US election did not win because their platform was liked. They won because the people believed he and his platform would do the most good, or at least less harm than the likely second place finisher.
While the overarching problems created by strategic decisionmaking by voters are described here, the system dynamics that creates the motivation for making those strategic decisions is elsewhere. As for how the electoral system makes a candidate a superior strategic choice is described in Direct Representation. Meanwhile, some candidates are the better strategic choice because the post-election system makes them more effective representatives, and this is explained in the chapter on Compromise.
This is a significant barrier for third parties because the systemic bias built into the system always favors the duopoly. To break through, they must possess a great deal of momentum early in the campaign and then maintain at least near-parity polling despite the attacks from the establishment. This usually requires some sort of synchronized shift in public expectations that the newcomer can leverage before the major parties adapt to it. This is why few candidates outside the two major parties win anything beyond small local races.
Thus, if we want a government system that works to identify the General Will, elections need to only be concerned with mapping voter’s Individual Will to candidates or factions.
The duopoly persists because conditions are engineered to ensure that only two broad factions remain viable. Voters comply because defecting risks an outcome they consider catastrophic. Thus the factions endure, not because competing interests do not exist, but because the system prevents them from entering meaningful competition.
Both parties have cemented themselves into this position, because they are much better off with the ability to implement their tainted Factional Will 50% of the time than work towards a system that would require they compromise towards the General Will 100% of the time.