A new piece from Carolina Journal makes an argument that feels almost rude in the current climate: political factions are not a bug in democracy, or a modern infection. They are, per the article, as old as settled communities living under political rather than familial authority. Its subtitle, in effect, is the headline: the Founders were far from unanimous.
That is worth sitting with, because the popular picture of the Founding era is a tidy tableau of men in powdered wigs nodding at each other. The article's pitch is that the real thing was messier, and that the mess was normal.
What the piece actually argues
Carolina Journal connects three threads:
- James Madison's warnings about faction in Federalist 10
- Modern personality research on why people drift toward different political camps
- Revolutionary-era divisions in North Carolina
The through-line, according to the article, is that factions are natural rather than artificial. People sort themselves into camps, and have for as long as they have lived under shared political authority. Even the Patriots, the supposedly united side of the Revolution, were split into competing camps, yet they still managed to build workable coalitions.
Madison saw this coming
Federalist 10 is the famous text here, and the article treats Madison's worry about faction as a clear-eyed read of human nature rather than a complaint about bad manners. Madison did not, as the article frames it, expect factions to vanish. The whole design problem was how to live with them.
It's hard not to notice how that reframes the modern lament. When we say politics has never been this divided, we are implicitly assuming a golden age of agreement existed. The piece suggests it did not.
The personality angle
The article also leans on personality research to argue that people's political leanings are tied to who they are, not just what they were told. I can only report that the piece makes this connection; the details of the studies aren't something I can lay out here. But the point lands as a framing device: if temperament nudges people toward different camps, then disagreement is less a sign that one half of the country has lost its mind and more a predictable feature of a large group of humans.
North Carolina, the forgotten faction fight
The regional hook is the fun part. Carolina Journal points to Revolutionary-era North Carolina as a case study in internal division, with Patriots split into competing camps rather than marching in lockstep. For readers who learned the Revolution as a two-team sport, Patriots versus Britain, this is the footnote that rewrites the page.
The lesson the article draws is not that the divisions were harmless. It is that the coalitions held anyway.
Why this lands now
The timing is obvious. Americans keep arguing about polarization, civic trust, and whether political opponents can still govern together. Carolina Journal's answer is a historical one: disagreement is an enduring feature of democratic life, not proof of collapse.
Here is my take, and it is only that: the useful distinction in the piece is between factions existing and factions paralyzing. The first is inevitable. The second looks like a choice about how coalitions are built and maintained. Nobody gets to opt out of having rivals. You only get to decide whether rivals can still share a table.
The takeaway
If the Founders had waited for unanimity, there would have been no founding. The most reassuring detail in the whole piece is not that people agreed, but that they were so plainly not agreeing and built something anyway.
