Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: the later heritage of John Calhoun

In his biography John C. Calhoun (1966), Richard Current talked about the later 20th century manifestation of "the genuine ghost of the Great Nullifier." He talks about attempts to rehabilitate Calhoun's theory of government as some kind of deep insight into the American political system. But Calhoun's theory of government was basically an elaborate justification for preserving slavery, framed as a way to protect minority interests within the American system. But the only minority interest he really cared about was that of slaveowners.

Some conservatives tried to spin Calhoun's theory as being relevant to various other minority interests in the compromises that various factions and interests group make in American politics. But, Current explains, "the new interpreters of Calhoun have been careless in their reading of his philosophy and superficial in their description of current politics."

On the whole, he seems to have taken a dualist, not a pluralist, view of politics. Though he mentioned the existence of various interests in society, he made no attempt to list and describe them, and certainly he never specified racial or religious minorities, or the working class, as deserving of the veto power. Generally he ignored the variety of possible groupings. When he got down to theorizing, he really thought about only two groups at a time, not several. On occasion he dealt with the duality of capital and labor. Most often he had in mind the twofold grouping of North against South, free states against slave states. These were, to him, the majority and the minority, and this was the minority he sought to protect-the minority of slaveholders. [my emphasis]

The real successors of Calhoun were the segregationist groups involved in their "massive resistance" campaigns against legal and political pressure for racial integration:

Wherever a White Citizens' Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party convention, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

These white Southerners now face a problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problem remains that of defending, against external attack, institutions based upon a belief in human inequality. [my emphasis]

In 2020, Calhoun's heritage can be seen especially in the voter-suppression campaign against blacks, Latinos, and poor whites that have been a key part of the national Republican Party's electoral strategy for the last two decades. The Democratic Party hasn't given up all its own Calhounian legacy, as illustrated by the Yellow Peril campaign ads the Joe Biden campaign released over the last week.

But the party of Lincoln the Great Emancipator has become the devoted party of Calhoun the Great Nullifier.