>> That he allow factions.
>> Lot's of factions right.
And this is what modern democratic theorists call cross-cutting cleavages.
And so the intuition here is, that you actually, instead of trying
to work around the divisions, the factional divisions in a society.
Or instead of trying to stomp on them and obliterate them, which is unrealistic, and
would any, in any case require very tyrannical government, use them, right?
Use the factions to make the society stable.
And so the, the notion there is that if you have a lot of, if you have lots of
cleavages in the society, you won't have any permanent majorities.
So on one issue even if you lose this time you might you know like the Boston Red Sox
they can always say there's always next year, we can come back another time.
Maybe I was in a losing coalition today but
next time I might be in a winning coalition.
Or even at a single time you might have a situation where, okay,
I lost on this issue as part of a minority.
But on the,
the following three other issues I might be part of a majority right.
So there's enough uncertainty about the future that you have a reason to keep
playing by the rules rather than accept the risks
of trying to overthrow the system, which are, are huge.
We learned when we started John Locke, you don't, you don't try and
overthrow the system until there's a long train of abuses all turning in the same
direction, because the risks are so high, right.
So part of the idea of cross-cutting cleavage is to keep the risks,
the costs low so that you won't take that risk, right?
And that, and the way you keep the cost low is to say well,
okay, I didn't prevail on this question this time, but I might prevail
on other questions, and I might prevail on this question at a future time.
And so you don't reach that situation that Sunnis in Iraq have reached
where they feel, they might as well reach for their guns.
Right?
So, that's just the notion of cross-cutting cleavages.
It starts with Madison.
And it is,
it is probably the single most important piece of 20th century democratic theory.
The most famous democratic theorists of the, of the 20th century, Robert Dahl,
built a theory of pluralist democracy that is a direct descendent
of Madison's idea of cross-cutting cleavages.
And the second thing that was very innovative here was that he said the way
to do this is counterintuitive, at least it was counterintuitive in his day.
Because in his day,
people generally thought democracy only worked in small communities.
Democracy Athens had been small, and
they talked about the city states in, in Florentine,
Europe as some of them as republics they weren't really very democratic.
We'll get into what republic means in a minute.