Federalist No. 86

The original Federalist Papers worried about faction, demagoguery and the instability of popular judgment. They did not, through no fault of their own, anticipate a republic in which every citizen could become prosecutor, publicist, clerk and executioner before breakfast.

What follows is a small anachronism.

To the People of the Extremely Online States:

Among the many infirmities to which popular government is exposed, few have been so little examined as the corruption of judgment produced when every citizen is furnished with an instantaneous press, an inexhaustible appetite for contradiction and no corresponding improvement in wisdom.

It has long been held that a free people must possess the means of inspecting public conduct. This principle is sound. A republic cannot be preserved by concealing its governors from the governed, nor can liberty survive where power acts without witness. Yet it does not follow that every man, having acquired a lantern, must immediately appoint himself magistrate of an arson inquiry.

The modern forum presents a difficulty unknown to antiquity and only dimly apprehended by our own age: that specificity, once the servant of reason, may become the instrument of faction.

A claim stated broadly is condemned as evasive. A claim stated precisely is searched for vulnerable joints. The speaker who offers scope is accused of hedging. The speaker who offers examples is accused of cherry-picking. The speaker who admits exceptions is told that his own qualification has defeated him. Thus the citizen is invited into a dilemma worthy of some minor infernal bureaucracy: either say nothing that can be tested, or say something that will be dismembered before it can be understood.

This is not deliberation. It is litigation conducted by mobs who have mistaken screenshots for law.

The vice is not that men possess evidence. Evidence is the natural ally of liberty when governed by proportion, burden and inference. The vice is that evidence, severed from these restraints, becomes not proof but ordnance. A receipt is produced not to clarify the scale of a matter, but to secure conviction upon a fragment. The exception is raised not as an aid to judgment, but as a veto against judgment altogether.

Thus a party may fail in its representative function, and its defenders will reply that some officer, in some district, upon some Thursday, performed a useful act. The fact may be true. The inference is absurd.

A single sound plank does not acquit the ship.

Nor is this habit confined to partisans of any one faction. It belongs to the architecture of the forum itself. The machinery rewards not the citizen who weighs, compares and distinguishes, but the prosecutor who finds a seam. A sentence is not received as an argument but as a field of exploitable surfaces. Its nouns become warrants. Its caveats become admissions. Its examples become traps. Its omissions become confessions. Where earlier ages feared the demagogue who inflamed the crowd, we must also fear the crowd that has learned to become a thousand little demagogues to itself.

The consequence is a peculiar inversion. Specificity, which ought to discipline speech, is converted into attack surface. The more carefully one binds a claim, the more points of entry one supplies to those who have no interest in the claim’s central tendency. A man who says “this is generally so” is answered as though he had said “this is universally so.” A man who says “there are exceptions” is answered as though exceptions were government in miniature. The true particular is then elevated into a strategic veto over the whole.

This is how faction arms itself with evidence and escapes judgment.

For evidence without proportion is not reason. It is merely ammunition with footnotes.

The remedy cannot be the suppression of speech. That cure would be worse than the disease and, besides, would furnish the worst men with martyrdom, improved stationery and a committee. A free people must tolerate much noise if they are to preserve any liberty worth the inconvenience. But liberty does not require that every contradiction be mistaken for thought, nor that every receipt be treated as a theory.

What is required is a sterner habit of judgment:

That an exception is not a refutation.
That a receipt is not a theory.
That a true particular may still be false as a defense of the whole.
That the presence of local virtue does not acquit systemic vice.
That those who profit from interpreting failure must not be permitted to define accountability as extremism.

A republic may endure parties. It may endure newspapers. It may even, with difficulty, endure the vanity of public men. Whether it can endure every citizen becoming prosecutor, publicist, clerk and executioner before breakfast remains, regrettably, an experiment now in progress.

Publius, logging off under protest.