America’s Crisis of Political Legitimacy
In general, the Founders feared capture of government by “faction,” including a faction composed of a majority. They feared that the consequence of capture would be “class legislation,” laws designed to further the interest of a particular group rather than that of the public as a whole. They especially feared “systemic corruption,” whereby the political system would pass class legislation and the recipients would recycle some of the booty back into support for the politicians.
As John Joseph Wallis says:
Fear of corruption, verging on paranoia, became a dominant feature of American politics in the early 19th century … The word most often brought to mind a … dreadful image of a spreading rot. A frequent metaphor compared corruption to organic cancer, eating at the vitals of the body politic.
This concern was not abstract, because in 1776 over half the members of Parliament were bought supporters of the king. The tea dumped into Boston Harbor in 1773 belonged to the East India Company, a monopoly created by Parliament whose rack rents in India had contributed to ghastly famine in Bengal in 1770. We tend to view the Boston Tea Party as a bit of a frat-boy lark, but it was deadly serious business.
Much of the Constitution is as it is to forestall capture in the first place, or, as a backup, to limit the damage that factions could do if they did succeed, by limiting the power of government. The consent that provides the bedrock legitimacy of the government was conditioned on the existence of these safety mechanisms. The Founders took for granted that a minority oppressed by a faction of the majority would withdraw its consent from the governmental structure, with unpredictable, but certainly unpleasant, consequences.
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