The Federalists Reloaded | No. 10
Not Like Us: The Weapon of Them
The Beat Behind the Battle Lines
Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us doesn’t just call someone out. It draws a battle line. It turns that line in the sand into a stage. You’re either in the circle or you’re not. It’s rhythm and war paint. And for all the spectacle, the song captures something primal. We rally around who we are by deciding who we are not. In the modern age, our enemies are everywhere.
Madison would’ve nodded along. In Federalist No. 10, he gives one of the most honest descriptions of political conflict ever written. He doesn’t pretend people are all aiming for the common good. He doesn’t expect rational debate to win the day. He tells the truth. People group up based on passion and interest. And those groups, what he calls factions, are inevitable.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.
What worried him wasn’t that factions exist. It was what powerful people might do once those factions were in place.
Factions Are Human Nature. Weapons Are Policy.
Madison accepted disagreement as part of the human condition. People would have unequal property, different values, and opposing goals. He believed those differences were not just expected, but natural. When people organize around those differences, they create factions. To Madison, that wasn’t a crisis. It was a condition of freedom.
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires.
The real danger begins when a faction isn’t just a group of people with shared interests. It becomes a tool of domination. When someone takes a faction and uses it to consolidate power, liberty no longer functions as a safeguard. It becomes the fuel for exploitation.
Every time you hear a politician, influencer, or institution tell you who to blame, who is the threat, or who can’t be trusted, chances are they’re not trying to persuade you. They’re trying to control you. That’s the shift from healthy pluralism to political warfare.
Not Just a Group. A Strategy.
In today’s political economy, conflict isn’t just an outcome. It’s a commodity. Outrage drives attention. Attention drives dollars. Dollars drive influence. Whole industries now exist to keep factions fired up and pointed at one another like rival sports teams. Madison didn’t live to see cable news or social media, but he understood this pattern. Passion can fuel liberty, and it can also burn it to the ground.
His answer was scale. Make the republic larger. Broader. More complex. The more voices, the harder it would be for any one faction to take control. That was the core of extending the sphere. Spread representation across a wide variety of people and places so that dominance would always require negotiation.
The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
But that model assumed factions had to fight to win. Today, they can just buy the victory. They can manipulate platforms, hijack algorithms, and nationalize messages at the speed of a click. Someone else is writing the rules. Most of us don’t even realize we’re playing the game. Madison counted on geography and diversity to slow things down. In a digital world, factions spread faster than fire in dry brush.
When the State Becomes a Faction
Here’s what Madison didn’t fully anticipate. Government is no longer just the referee. It’s become one of the teams. Public institutions no longer sit on the sidelines, ensuring fair play. They take sides. Bureaucracies push narratives. Agencies back one side or another. Taxpayer dollars are funneled into organizations that are built to serve partisan goals rather than protect public balance.
There’s a difference between factions arguing in public and the state stepping in to help one side win. That’s when liberty begins to rot from within.
[T]he public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.
Even efforts to regulate this dynamic, such as campaign finance rules, lobbying disclosures, and transparency laws, have failed to keep pace. The players just changed their uniforms. Now it’s dark money, nonprofit shell games, influencer campaigns, and super PACs. The business of power has gone professional, and the referees are wearing team jerseys.
The Anti-Federalist Warning
Not everyone bought what Madison was selling. The Anti-Federalists warned that the new Constitution would centralize power and mask it with a thin veneer of republicanism. Madison saw complexity as protection. They saw it as camouflage.
Brutus believed a large republic would become elitist and unresponsive. National elections would favor the wealthy and well-connected, while ordinary citizens would be left out.
In a republic, the manners, sentiments, and interests of the people should be similar. — Brutus
He argued that when representation stretches too far, it stops being real. Patrick Henry didn’t waste time with nuance.
Your President may easily become King. — Patrick Henry
He saw consolidation as a direct threat to liberty. The farther power moved from local communities, the less it could be restrained.
Henry and Madison went at it like Kendrick and Drake. And then came the Federal Farmer, who argued that the proposed system would blur responsibility and weaken accountability. People wouldn’t know who to blame. And those in power would take advantage of that confusion.
These weren’t abstract concerns. These men had lived through arbitrary rule. They knew that once power is centralized, it rarely returns to the people. Their opposition helped shape the Bill of Rights, but their greater concern remains. Can a national government remain connected to the people it governs?
Today, that concern feels less like a warning and more like a description. The federal government is expansive and insulated. It is deeply intertwined with organized political factions. The Anti-Federalists feared a government that was too large to represent its people effectively. We now live under one that talks over them while claiming to speak on their behalf.
Madison believed structure could contain conflict. The Anti-Federalists believed scale would eventually crush it. Both had a point. The question now is which one was closer to the truth.
The Business Model of Division
Disagreement in America isn’t just common. It’s a show. It’s monetized and weaponized. The bigger the enemy, the better the ratings. You don’t need policy. Just a scapegoat. Name the villain. Accuse them of not being like us. Keep it going until fear becomes identity and outrage becomes currency.
This is how politics raises money, builds audiences, and wins elections. It’s also how free societies rot from the inside.
While we argue on social media, the government keeps growing. More rules, more debt, and fewer rights. Few people notice because we’re glued to the screen, reacting to whatever factional outrage trends next. You are living through the modern-day breads and circuses.
Madison warned us about majority factions using the tools of government to crush the rest. But today’s parties don’t want to dismantle that power. They just want their turn behind the wheel. Remember when you cheer it on, you will one day regret it.
Choose Your Own Outrage
In today’s political ecosystem, you don’t find outrage. It finds you. Your feed serves it up on demand. If you’re on the left, it’s creeping fascism and climate collapse. On the right, it’s moral decay and open borders. The algorithm doesn’t care what makes you mad. It only cares that you stay mad.
It’s tribal branding with a beat. Just like Kendrick’s Not Like Us, the message is clear: you’re either with us or you’re not. That works because it offers belonging through exclusion. It gives people a cause by handing them an enemy.
But that kind of clarity is easy to fake. The more we define ourselves by who we oppose, the easier we are to manipulate. Outrage feels like conviction, but most of the time, it’s just repetition with better lighting.
You can choose your cause. You can choose your side. But if you stop choosing your thoughts, you’re not fighting for anything. You’re just echoing the chorus.
This Isn’t What Madison Signed Up For
Madison wasn’t just crafting a government. He was solving a problem no one else had cracked—how to preserve liberty in a world of conflict. He read Locke, absorbed Montesquieu, and understood Hume’s insight that factionalism is a feature of human nature, not a bug.
He didn’t believe people would always act wisely. He believed they’d act in their own interest. That meant the system had to manage that instinct, not wish it away.
He was deeply skeptical of pure democracy. Majority rule wasn’t a safeguard. It was a risk. Just because something has the support of 51 percent doesn’t mean it’s right. Majorities can be just as tyrannical as kings.
To Madison, the republic was not democracy refined. It was democracy restrained. It was built to slow things down, filter public opinion, and prevent permanent damage from short-term passions. The republic was supposed to protect everyone, especially those not in the majority.
That’s why the Constitution is filled with friction. Federalism divides power across levels of government. Separation of powers forces institutions to compete. Checks and balances prevent consolidation. It wasn’t elegant. It was supposed to be frustrating. That frustration was the cost of liberty.
Today, we treat that system like an obstacle. Politicians try to bend institutions to their coalitions. Voters get impatient when their side can’t win outright. But Madison’s idea was that no side should ever win outright. The system was built to create balance, not consensus. And once we stop respecting those constraints, we invite the very kind of tyranny he was trying to avoid. Not from a monarch, but from a majority convinced it has a blank check.
Madison didn’t think liberty could survive on good intentions. It needed structure. Not to limit the people, but to protect them from each other.
You Are the Product. And the Weapon.
This isn’t just about elites, billionaires, or algorithms. It’s about us. How quickly we take the bait. How easily we trade thinking for identity. The media doesn’t have to lie. It just needs to keep us engaged. And nothing does that better than anger. Social media doesn’t have to persuade us. It simply reflects what we already want to hear and amplifies it.
We’re not just consuming the message. We’re carrying it. Broadcasting it. Weaponizing it against people we’ve never met, for the benefit of people we’ll never know. And it feels like clarity. Like purpose. However, it’s often just manipulation disguised as certainty.
Factions today aren’t organic. They’re engineered. Narratives are tested, packaged, and launched. Outrage is timed and targeted. And the messengers? Most of us are volunteers who don’t realize we’ve been enlisted.
Every time we repost without thinking, defend without questioning, or attack without asking why, we’re doing someone else’s work. Not because we lack power, but because we stopped being curious.
Madison warned about factions because they make it easier for us to be controlled. His answer wasn’t censorship. It was structure. His hope wasn’t in unity. It was in independent minds.
He believed that liberty required citizens who questioned power, rejected groupthink, and held themselves and everyone else accountable.
That responsibility doesn’t belong to platforms or politicians. It belongs to us. To the people who click, post, vote, and share. We don’t just feed the machine. We drive it. We’re not just the product. We’re the weapon. The only way to disarm it is to stop letting someone else aim it for us.
If you’re reading this right now and thinking about other people, but not yourself, you’re already lost. Liberty doesn’t need more noise. It needs better questions. Ask them. Demand them.
Final Thought
Madison didn’t design a government for perfect people. He built it for flawed ones. People who argue, organize, and chase their own interests. He expected conflict. But he believed a strong republic could survive it if its citizens stayed alert, questioned power, and valued liberty more than loyalty.
That’s the real test. Not whether we form factions, but how we use them. Are we thinking for ourselves? Or just repeating the script? Are we demanding better from our own side? Or just trying to win?
A republic can survive disagreement. It cannot survive thoughtless obedience.
This system runs on friction. It needs people willing to think harder and shout less. People who are more interested in preserving freedom than scoring points. It assumes citizens who don’t just follow orders.
That kind of thinking is rare. But we need it now more than ever.
This isn’t about being polite. It’s about refusing to be used. Liberty can’t survive performance. It needs discipline. It needs citizens who refuse to become pawns in someone else’s game.
Madison left us a system strong enough to handle division. But only if we use it with care.
The lines are drawn. The factions are moving. The only question left is whether we will be free thinkers or just better programmed.
John Wooden, the ESPN Coach of the 20th Century, viewed competition as a form of collaboration. The game was an opportunity to gather information on how to improve. This is a simple but deep concept and hard to master in today’s environment.