I remember reading about "factions" in the Federalist papers and I have a feeling that the Founding Fathers knew such partisanship was bound to arise. And indeed, it arose very early during George Washington's presidency. I don't think the development of political parties would have caught them by surprise, especially because many of them wound up joining them as time went on.
Federalist 10 describes factions as the nature of man, explains why they don't belong in government, and describes how the Constitution limits the sway of factions. But, the Founding Fathers never envisioned it would be possible to coordinated across a continent in real time. Rapid communication allows factions/parties to have continental spread.
> Federalist 10 describes factions as the nature of man, explains why they don't belong in government, and describes how the Constitution limits the sway of factions.
Unfortunately, its claims in this regard were proven false not much more than a decade after it was published.
*> the Founding Fathers never envisioned it would be possible to coordinated across a continent in real time.
This would be a valid argument if factions did not become central to US politics until rapid communication became available. But that's not the case. Factions were already central to US politics by 1800, when the fastest mode of communication was horseback.
The Founding Fathers wrote a republican constitution and knew for a fact that as a direct consequence of the republican structure that there would be factions. That was the point of Ben Franklin's quote:
Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
> Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
Arguably, the main problem with the original rules was bullet voting in the electoral college; if they voted with preference ballots with winner elimination, instead of bullet ballots, having the second place be the VP would work well, and produce less incumbent protection even with an equally strong party system than the actual replacement system of separate election, which produced President-VP tickets.
