Political polarization alarms nearly everyone who thinks about it, and it should. But the alarm itself is often misdirected. People speak as though the existence of fierce, opposing factions is a sign that something has gone wrong with the American character. I would ask them to reconsider. Faction is not a malfunction. It is the natural symptom of liberty. Wherever people are free to think, acquire, and organize, they will disagree — sharply, persistently, sometimes bitterly. The danger is not that factions exist but that the constitutional structure fails to prevent any single faction from seizing permanent, unchecked control.

This is precisely the problem I tried to address in Federalist No. 10. The cure for faction is not suppression — that cure is worse than the disease, because suppression requires the very tyranny you are trying to prevent. The cure is extension: spread the republic large enough, and diversify the representation enough, that no single interest group can coordinate a durable majority across every branch at once. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition, as I wrote in Federalist No. 51. The mechanism does the work that virtue alone cannot be trusted to do.

What troubles me about the polarization of the present era is not the intensity of disagreement — I saw plenty of that — but rather two structural developments that my design did not fully anticipate. First, modern communication platforms appear to operate as faction-amplifiers rather than faction-diluters, concentrating outrage and rewarding the most extreme voices with the widest reach. This shrinks the extended republic in practice even as it remains vast in geography. Second, and more gravely, when both major factions begin treating normal constitutional mechanisms — elections, courts, legislative procedure — as legitimate only when those mechanisms produce the faction's preferred outcome, the compact itself is under attack. That is not polarization; that is dissolution.

The written Constitution provides the remedy, but only if those who hold office treat it as binding rather than as a rhetorical resource to be cited when convenient and ignored when inconvenient. Article I vests legislative power in Congress; Article II vests executive power in the President; Article III creates an independent bench. Each branch must possess both the constitutional means and the institutional will to resist encroachments by the others. When factions capture two branches simultaneously and use that leverage to neutralize the third, the balance collapses — regardless of which faction does it.

So my answer to those who ask whether I would despair at today's polarization is: not at the disagreement itself, but at the weakening of the structural referees. Faction will always press against the walls. The question is whether the walls still hold.