Rove's intellectual hero is James Madison; his only child is named Andrew Madison Rove. The first time we spoke, I asked him about Madison's Federalist No. 10, which is about "curing the mischiefs of faction' ... The next time I saw Rove, he had a copy of the Federalist Papers on the table in his office, with scraps of paper marking No. 10 and No. 51, which is also by Madison, and lays out the principle of separation of powers. (It contains the line "If men were angels, no government would be necessary.") In both essays, Madison is concerned with devising structural means to prevent any one force in American society from becoming too powerful. I asked Rove to talk more about the Federalist Papers.
~snip~
... The issue is, is it adverse to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community? So what he's looking at is how do you, in a society, keep the majority from dominating?" ... Rove flipped forward in the book." And in No. 51 he says there are two ways to go about doing this. One is by creating 'a will in the community independent of the majority -that is, of society itself. Heredity or self-appointed authority. The other is 'by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.' Again, it's not that he's against majorities-he says 'an unjust combination of a majority of the whole. 'Well, that means there could be a just combination of a majority of the whole. But how do you guard against permanent, oppressive domination by a group, a majority, over all others? And he says you can try it two ways. One is by heredity or self-appointed authority, and that's precarious. The second way is the federal republic." Here he picked up the book and read aloud again. "'The society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals or of the minority will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.'"
So, I said, Rove was saying that if we had to choose, for our protection against the perils of democracy, between a benign elite, of the sort that the Progressives imagined themselves to be, and an intricate Madisonian balancing of groups ...
~snip~
Karl Rove presents what would be an interesting theoretical problem, only it isn't theoretical. What happens when someone who believes that the best society is one, in which many groups compete and counterbalance each other, to the point of perfect political equipoise, is also in a position to work with tremendous aggressiveness and skill to stitch these groups together in such a way as to create the very thing that Madison most feared: a single, permanent, crushingly powerful majority group, in the form of the Republican Party, which, after all, is where most people who have power already, economically, make their political home? Rove genially dismissed the idea. As important as building a long-lasting, dominant Republican majority is to him in practice, in the abstract he sees one party domination as a problem that would automatically correct itself. He communicates the feeling that he's having a great time trying to make the Republican Party dominant, and appears to believe that, if he succeeds, some Democratic Karl Rove will probably come along in a few decades and figure out how to undo his handiwork--so, no worries. His project, for now, involves the practical task that he has set for himself, not the abstract concerns that a good Madisonian ought to have about his succeeding at it.
In our last interview, I tried out on Rove a scenario I called "the death of the Democratic Party." The Party has three key funding sources: trial lawyers, Jews, and labor unions. One could systematically disable all three, by passing tort-reform legislation that would cut off the trial lawyers' incomes, by tilting pro-Israel in Middle East policy and thus changing the loyalties of big Jewish contributors, and by trying to shrink the part of the labor force which belongs to the newer, and more Democratic, public-employee unions. And then there are three fundamental services that the Democratic Party is offering to voters: Social Security, Medicare, and public education. Each of these could be peeled away, too: Social Security and Medicare by giving people benefits in the form of individual accounts that they invested in the stock market, and public education by trumping the Democrats on the issue of standards. The Bush Administration has pursued every item on that list. Rove didn't offer any specific objection but, rather, a general caveat that the project might be too ambitious. "Well, I think it's a plausible explanation," he said. "I don't think you ever kill any political party. Political parties kill themselves, or are killed, not by the other political party but by their failure to adapt to new circumstances. But do you weaken a political party, either by turning what they see as assets into liabilities, and/or by taking issues they consider to be theirs, and raiding them?" The thought brought to his round, unlined, guileless face a boyish look of pure delight. "Absolutely!"
http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:Xdz2UZnXAd8J:bnfp.org/neighborhood/Lemann_Rove_NYM.htm+Rove+James+Madison&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=2I think it is interesting, from this interview, that Rove seems to be exploring the use of Madison and the Federalist Papers in such a twisted way. This, in addition to how the neocons have used Machiavellian, Straussian, et al philosphy to shape their plans (let's not forget Michael Ledeen's fascination with fascism/obsession, particularly Italian fascism as a
motivational force that he deems
not necessarily a negative force) is very telling of their ultimate goals, IMHO.
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