The faction that wins must still answer to the compound republic

The New York Times reports that democratic socialists, riding victories in two House primaries and several state legislative contests in New York, are now deliberating how to press their expanding influence. That is precisely how a republic in health ought to function: citizens form associations, contest elections, and seek to translate principle into law. Nothing in what I helped draft at Philadelphia or in what I argued in the Federalist forbids any of this. On the contrary, it is the expected and even the necessary motion of free politics.

But I have spent the better part of my public life insisting on a distinction that partisans of every stripe are tempted to forget: winning a faction's internal competition is not the same as earning governing legitimacy in an extended republic. In Federalist No. 10, I argued that the great advantage of a large and diverse republic is that no single faction — however sincere, however energized — can long sustain a majority capable of overriding the rights and interests of the remainder. The extended sphere is the structural cure for factional tyranny, not any particular faction's virtue.

The DSA's concentration, as described by the Times, appears to be geographic — centered heavily in New York City and a handful of urban districts. That is important structural information. A faction that wins intensely in a narrow geography and then attempts to legislate nationally is precisely the configuration the Constitution's apportionment of power was designed to check. Two House members and a cluster of state legislators are, in the compound republic, a voice — a legitimate and audible one — but not yet a governing majority. The Senate, the executive veto, the diffusion of representation across fifty states: all of these are not obstacles to democracy but are democracy's internal architecture.

I note, as inference beyond the lead, that the Politico story on this same movement suggests the DSA is now weighing presidential politics for 2028. Here the constitutional stakes rise. The presidency is a singular office, possessed of the executive power under Article II. It is not a committee of faction; it is the one branch designed to be held by a single person answerable to a national — not a local — majority. A movement that has proven its ability to organize a borough should not mistake that proof for proof of national mandate. The extended republic will render its own verdict on that question.

What I find genuinely useful in this development is the competitive pressure it places on the two established parties. Faction multiplied is faction checked. If the emergence of a disciplined democratic-socialist bloc forces both major parties to sharpen their arguments and attend more carefully to the interests of working people in cities, the extended republic is doing exactly what it was designed to do — absorbing energy, converting it into deliberation, and producing law through negotiation rather than through the unchecked will of any single interest.

The question I would put to the DSA's leaders — and to any faction celebrating primary victories — is this: by what institutional mechanism will you be held answerable when your program fails or overreaches? Accountability is not the enemy of ambition; it is the condition under which ambition can be trusted. The Constitution's genius is that it does not ask leaders to be virtuous. It asks the structure itself to correct them when they are not. A faction that understands and accepts that discipline has earned its seat at the table. One that does not is a danger regardless of how appealing its platform may be.