If your group chat has ever turned into a civil war over taxes, take heart. A Carolina Journal piece, published this week under the headline "Founders were far from unanimous," argues that political factions are not a recent malfunction of democracy. They are, per the piece, as old as settled communities governed by political rather than familial authority.
That is a handy reframe at a moment when Americans keep debating polarization, civic trust, and whether political opponents can still govern together. The article's pitch: disagreement is a standing feature of democratic life, not proof the building is on fire.
Factions Are a Feature, Not a Bug
The piece leans on James Madison's warnings in Federalist 10, the famous essay about the dangers of faction. It then connects Madison's worry to modern personality research, suggesting that the differences that divide people politically are rooted in something more natural than a bad news cycle.
Here is my read, and it is mine, not the article's: this is a more comforting idea than it first sounds. If factions are baked into human nature, then nobody has to be a villain for the room to split. People simply arrive with different wiring, and the political question becomes how to live with that, not how to cure it.
The article's framing, as summarized, is that factions are inevitable while dysfunction is optional. That is a good line, and the history it cites backs it up.
Even the Revolution Wasn't a Unanimous Vote
The myth-busting part is the fun part. We tend to picture the Founding era as a unified chorus in powdered wigs. Carolina Journal says otherwise: even the Founders and the Patriots were split into competing camps.
The piece brings the point home with Revolutionary-era divisions in North Carolina, a corner of the story that rarely makes it into the pageant version of 1776. Patriots there were not a single bloc marching in step. They were factions, with competing views, who still managed to build workable coalitions.
It is hard not to appreciate the irony. The people we now hold up as the gold standard of national unity spent their time arguing among themselves, and the arguing apparently did not stop them from getting anything done.
Why the Coalition Part Matters
The quiet hero of the article is the coalition. The Founders and Patriots did not erase their differences. They built alliances that functioned in spite of them.
That is the lesson I would take from it, framed as opinion: the healthy-democracy question is less "why can't everyone agree?" and more "can people who don't agree still work together?" Those are very different standards. The first is impossible. The second is merely hard, and history, per the article, says it has been done before, in North Carolina, under much higher stakes than a school board meeting.
A Fresh Way to Read the Moment
None of this makes modern tribalism charming, and the article does not claim it does. But it does offer a useful corrective for anyone who assumes there was once a golden age of consensus. By Carolina Journal's account, there wasn't. There was a messy, factional, argumentative founding that produced something durable anyway.
So the next time a relative declares that politics has never been this divided, you can gently suggest a trip to the history shelf. The Founders were not unanimous. They were just stubborn enough to build something together regardless, which may be the most relatable thing about them.
