The issue of factions is discussed by James Madison in Federalist Papers 10. It will take you ten minutes to read. Worth every minute. Madison covers this critical issue completely and brilliantly. He presented the issue early in the Constitutional Convention and it shaped the form of our government.
There is no way to summarize what Madison says; he is as concise as I could be. Factions are groups of people whose interest is homogeneous but contrary to the interests of the nation’s survival if they become the majority. Madison considers a religious faction as a great potential danger but sees how commonly religious factions splinter.
Today we have three religions agglomerated and very stable. (1) The human-caused global warming apocalypse is religious and forty years old. I was among the founders who recognized it as becoming a religion. (2) The Marxist class warfare turned into racial and sexual oppression is neo-religious; (One hundred seventy years old.) (3) The union value of anti-merit is not religious but deeply held, nearly religious, (Over four hundred years old.) All together, these three form modern wokism, a gigantic faction in control of hundreds of American institutions, and important agencies. Not the majority of Americans but nearly.
So how has Madison’s designed Constitution fared in this giant faction era? I think very poorly. This gigantic faction of hostility to commerce to individual liberty to the First Amendment and to merit has survived in America. It has grown rapidly over the last twenty years.
The first Constitutional failure was in having Congressional elections every two years. This was intended to keep factions from growing rapidly by refreshing the legislature. The woke faction has grown from the election of 2006 to today; nine elections. In the election of 2016 several government agencies spied on a Presidential candidate during the campaign period, led by the woke faction.
The two legislatures have not had either the ability to recognize the faction’s control of a vast number of government agencies and no ability to control the gigantic government if they recognized the faction control. A total failure of the Constitution.
By the 2020 general election one of the two political parties, the one representing the hostile faction, fraudulently intervened in the voting process in several states to elect the faction’s candidate for president. No Constitutional recourse existed. During the previous two centuries since the Constitution was installed, there were many states controlled by corrupt local bosses and the only Constitutional protection of elections was the large number of states and the post-Constitution Electoral College.
The only Constitutional protection that has existed to protect the majority from a malicious and aggressive faction has been the Supreme Court, which has slowly intervened in several hostile faction actions. It has not been able to stop the corrupt legal warfare waged in courts below the Federal level.
Just as the Constitution failed to avoid a civil war in 1860, where a faction favoring human slavery grew to massive size in a geographic area, captured one political party and seceded. Today the Constitution seems less able to cope. The Constitution did not anticipate a political party aligned with one faction, a national government with millions of employees aligned with the faction and the public conversation (media) controlled by the faction.
The only structural suggestion I have ever made is for a lottery legislature. This would weaken the political parties but would not stop the take over of the government agencies, academia or the mass media.