When we cover Federalist #10, I like to consider whether Madison's theory still holds water since he relied so much on the size of the republic to slow down the flow of information among the population. A sudden spontaneous urge to form and act act against an unpopular minority cannot occur because different people will receive a piece of information at different times.
Not everyone will be angry, upset and prone to lash out at the same time. In addition, the diverse points of view that exist in society will make it less likely that everyone will react in the same way. Times have changed however.
The spontaneous communication we are accustomed to removes this impediment, but the size of the country can still make coordinated action difficult. This is not the case with financial decisions which can be make spontaneously due to sudden impulses. David Brooks says the following about the factors leading to the current housing crisis:
To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.
What this tells me is that the speed at which we can make and implement decisions has negated one of the advantages that a diverse republic is supposed to provide for decision making in a society. What to do about it? I have no idea at the moment, but the answer probably lies in developing some institutional method that slows down the process in order for diverse points of view to impact collective decisions.
