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This should be noted: In this 2012 conversation between Dougherty and Corey Robin, Dougherty specifically cites Burnham as a key conservative intellectual for him. It should be around the 13:20 mark.

https://youtu.be/_mOh0HP8GSg

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And Sam Francis right after.

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Ridiculous that even gussied up, at the end we still have some version of 'duh it's a republic not a democracy, neener neener'

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Dougherty’s description of the UK parliament episode is so misleading that it is clearly a lie.

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It's not critical, but I think you're misreading a line in Madison.

"When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens."

There's a syntactic inversion, but I believe it's clear Madison is saying "when a faction has the majority, it can override the public good" -- and the problem is how to prevent this. You read it as though the second "to" were displaced --

"enables [the majority] to sacrifice its ruling passion or interest *to* both the public good and the rights of other citizens."

It would be nice to think this followed, but I think Madison is right to worry about the majority as a faction.

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Coming up with a majority coalition made up of various factions requires compromise and moderation, that is Madison's point

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Madison, as I read him, goes on to suggest that a large representative democracy can cure the ills associated with a majority faction, by virtue of the tempering induced by representatives and by compromise, as you write, decrease the likelihood that any such majority could form.

He admits that representatives may themselves be the problem, but (to my mind) hand-waves that away with the notion that men (in his mind) elected by a larger polity would be less able to be elected on the basis of deception and bad argument. As I've indicated, I disagree, as I believe modern communications enables (and I'll further claim) encourages bad argument and deception regardless of the size of the polity, and (to the second point) increases the chance that a majority could form around what I'll call (in my own, entirely novel turn-of-phrase) an whole basket of deplorable ideas.

(My hobby-horse: I believe that by the mass dissemination of real-seeming images the rational faculties can be very easily bypassed, and that personalisation makes words even more tailorable into rote incantations designed solely to ignite the passions.)

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It's a good point, but I don't think it's the precise subpoint made by that sentence.

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No, but he says it elsewhere where I cite

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The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, *the greater number of citizens*, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

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