Joe Biden, Thomas Jefferson, and Vladimir Putin

President Joe Biden is setting a public tone for US relations with Russia under his Administration. Here is the key passage from his recent ABC News interview: TRANSCRIPT: ABC News' George Stephanopoulos interviews President Joe Biden 03/17/2021:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under -- denigrate you, support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we -- I know him relatively well. And I-- the conversation started off, I said, "I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared."

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn't have a soul.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And -- and his response was, "We understand one another." It was-- I wasn't being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that -- that's how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, "I looked in his eyes and saw his soul."

I said, "Looked in your eyes and I don't think you have a soul." And looked back and he said, "We understand each other." Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my experience, and I've dealt with an awful lot of 'em over my career, is just know the other guy. Don't expect somethin' that you're-- that -- don't expect him to-- or her to-- voluntarily appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he's a killer?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he's gonna pay we'll-- you'll see shortly. I'm not gonna-- there's-- by the way, we oughta be able that ol' -- that trite expression "walk and chew gum at the same time," there're places where it's in our mutual interest to work together.

That's why I renewed the [START nuclear arms control] agreement with him. That occurred while he's doin' this. But that's overwhelmingly in the interest of humanity, that we diminish the prospect of a nuclear exchange. But that and SolarWinds as well. He's been -- they've done some mischievous things, to say the least. And so we're gonna have -- I'm not gonna announce what I'm doing, but he's gonna understand that -- [my emphasis]

"Walking and chewing gum" over Russia in the 19th century

Russia has been around for a while. In the early decades of the United States' existence, the country's foreign policy was less worried about Russia than about Barbary Pirates, Britain, France, Spain and the challenge of dispossessing the native population in North America.

During the first part of the 19th century, republicans and democrats in Europe and the "New World" generally took a dim view of Russia because it was seen as the ultimate guarantor of the royalist regimes of the so-called Holy Alliance in Europe after the defeat of Napoleon and the 1815 Peace of Paris.

But even then, things weren't that simple. Thomas Jefferson in his mansion in Monticello kept prominently displayed busts of Napoleon and of Alexander I of Russia, the emperor who had defeated Napoleon and was the protector of the Holy Alliance. In 1813, Jefferson was a post-Presidential "elder statesman," as we used to say. But he was still an influential voice on political matters. And he understood very well that even in 1813, foreign policy was complicated. His biographer Dumas Malone wrote about Jefferson in this period in Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello (1981):

Toward the end of 1813 a Federalist paper in Philadelphia printed an extract from a private letter of his, written a couple of months earlier. In this he voiced his detestation of Napoleon, describing him as "the unprincipled tyrant who is deluging the Continent of Europe with blood." At the same time the ex-President expressed his gratification at the recent disasters of the unprincipled French Emperor in Russia and the successes of "the virtuous Alexander [I of Russia]."  From this extract alone it would seem that, at a time when his own country was at war with the British, he was siding with them against their inveterate foe [France], and his strong language was particularly disturbing to members of his own party who retained pro-French sentiments. [my emphasis]

Jefferson later explained the context of that letter, which had been published by a Federalist Party partisan. The War of 1812 was still going on in 1813, and the Federalists were in the process of fatally discrediting themselves by their pro-British partisanship. Jefferson was the founder of the Democratic-Republican Party, which evolved into today's Democratic Party but in those days was known as the Republican Party. Then-President James Madison was a Republican.

The quotation was from a letter of [Jefferson's] replying to one from Dr. George Logan, a Quaker. This former supporter of his had once gained favor in Republican circles, and reprobation in Federalist, for his efforts to prevent war with France. A doctrinaire pacifist now seeking to end the war with Great Britain, he besought Jefferson to ask Madison to "come forward with just and honorable proposals for peace." He was entirely confident that these would be accepted. Instead of brushing him off as a visionary, Jefferson wrote him a long account of Anglo-American relations, leaving no doubt of his own conviction that the object of procuring a just peace would be "best promoted by a vigorous and unanimous prosecution of the war [i.e., of the US war against Britain]"  As he explained to Leiper, the references to Napoleon, while indisputable, were incidental. They were being quoted wholly out of context by a former friend who had become a "bigoted partisan of England, and malcontent of his own government." [my emphasis]

Foreign policy with Russia was complicated even in 1813.

Since Jefferson's reputation has fallen considerably in recent decades, especially among the party he originally founded, I assume I'm not doing any favors by comparing him to Jefferson. But the party founder and third US President did know something about walking and talking at the same time in foreign policy matters. And the example above shows how Jefferson was balancing a variety of partisan and ideological considerations and his understanding of the general US interest in how he was evaluating foreign policy.

His busts of Napoleon and Alexander I could be taken as a symbol of that complexity. Napoleon was a military aggressor. But his conquests also advanced the progress of political and economic reforms of a liberal nature across Europe. Alexander became the backstop of reactionary regimes in Europe. But he was also an internal reformer in various ways, most notably in establishing a system of public education in Russia. Alexander came to the throne after cooperating with a successful plot to assassinate his father Tsar Paul I (Pavel Petrovich). Alexander was also sort of a "killer" type, it seems.

"Walking and chewing gum" today

Returning to the present, here's a English-language Deutsche Welle report on Biden's recent comments, Russia recalls US ambassador after Biden's 'killer' comment 03/18/2021:

Here's an additional Deutsche Welle report on the immediate response to Biden's comments, Russia recalls US ambassador after Biden's 'killer' comment 03/18/2021:

Patrick Revell reports on another early response from Putin, Putin challenges Biden to debate after president calls him a 'killer' ABC News 03/18/2021.

My general attitude toward Biden' foreign policy is pretty much "trust but verify," which was Reagan's famous phrase for nuclear arms control. Or maybe "be skeptical and verify" would be closer. Because I think the US spends way too much on the military and that our foreign policy is far too militarized and should be focused much more on pressing dangers to humanity like nuclear proliferation and climate change.

But I'm not alarmed by this particular turn of events. Does Putin really mind that much if Biden calls him a killer without a soul? He may take it as a compliment, although in diplomatic terms he obviously knows it's an insult. And of course Russia expects other countries to respond to attempts to interfere in their internal politics.

A lot of foreign policy is posturing, sending signals, saving face, and satisfying various internal constituencies and external actors. And when countries are negotiating with each other, just like in business or labor negotiations or a lawsuit, both sides are going to assume that the other side will try to maximize its advantages and get as much as they can. And that their opposite numbers will be hardnosed and practical in their approach to negotiations.

In the real world of US foreign policy, the military-industrial complex and its allies in think-tanks and politics are and will continue to be hardnosed in pursuing policies that lead to bigger and bigger military budgets. People who actually favor a peaceful, practical, and democratic foreign policy need to build a lot more clout than they currently have.

Part of that is paying attention to serious analysis from those who aren't exclusively devoted to the profits of armaments companies. Like this piece from Anatol Lieven (Calling Putin a ‘killer’ with ‘no soul’ is not exactly the best way to reset diplomacy Responsible Statecraft 03/18/2021), who warns:

The Biden administration has created an completely unnecessary confrontation with Russia at a time when reasonable working relations with Moscow are extremely important for achieving two immediate and key administration goals: rejoining the nuclear agreement with Iran, and a peace settlement in Afghanistan facilitating U.S. military withdrawal from that country and an end to America’s longest war.

The administration approach combines many of the errors committed by Washington officials, politicians, and the media in recent years. First, you have an intelligence report based on evidence that the public cannot see stating that it is “likely” that the Russian government ordered attempts to influence the elections. This report is then turned by the administration and much of the media into an absolute certainty. In a recent ABC News interview, Biden says Putin will “pay a price” for what the report says his government has done. As usual, the issue is personalized by attributing the decision to Putin himself, and the U.S. statement is accompanied by gratuitously insulting language which is likely to offend even many Russian opponents of Putin. Does nobody remember the advice of Teddy Roosevelt — hardly a weakling on U.S. security — to speak softly and carry a big stick? [my emphasis]

Lieven also reminds us that we can be try to be realistic about Putin's government, which is admired by rightwingers and even the most radical rightists, and still be critical-minded about simplistic "Russiagate" claims, "In essence (assuming that the allegations [about Russian election interference in 2020] are true), Russia did what thousands of Washington lobbyists are paid to spend their lives doing (perfectly legally): influence U.S. politicians, media and policies in favor of particular foreign governments." I don't take Lieven to mean that the US shouldn't distinguish between legal and illegal influence operations.

It's also worth noting that current celebration in the West of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny does not mean that if he were the leader of Russia he would pursue a fundamentally different foreign policy, since he rose to his present level of influence in Russian politics with a distinctly Russian national-chauvinist tone, although in the last decade he has put more emphasis on the fight against corruption.

Putin had obvious pragmatic power reasons to prefer Trump as President over Clinton or Biden. Trump may have been inclined to actively help him in some areas, and may have been subject to blackmail in some way. Certainly Trump weakened the credibility of the US as player in world politics and particularly within the NATO alliance, both goals of Putin's government. But Trump also continued to increase the military budget, and didn't obviously cater to Putin's foreign policy preferences in places like Syria. Russia's power-balancing interests would also be aided by increase US tension with China, a country with which Russia currently has good relations.

Whatever benefits Trump may have provided in term of basic espionage gains, Trump's main policy benefit from the standpoint of Putin's government was in being a chaos agent. Trump was spectacularly incompetent in actually running the government, including the military, intelligence, and diplomatic parts. And he was terrible at negotiating with other countries, shown particularly by his dealings with North Korea. And as we see with the bizarre clown coup attempt in Venezuela, Trump was no good at regime-change operations either, and Putin seems to be genuinely worried about the US targeting such operations at Russia and its immediate neighbors, especially nations once part of the Soviet Union.

I assume that Putin's government regards the Biden Administration as a mix of blessing and curse. He isn't going to provide Putin a lot of opportunities to look like he's slapping the US around, and Biden obviously isn't going to kowtow to Putin personally in the way Trump did. But for substantive agreements affected things like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal or the Iran nuclear deal, the Russians will probably be relieved to have an adversary in the White House who actually knows something about foreign affairs and who doesn't see the Presidency as a professional-wrestling promotion act. Related: Biden's February 4 foreign policy speech Contradicciones 02/06/2021

Trump and the s-word (sedition)

Trump's clown coup has reached the stage of huddling with his most loony associates to desperately plot a military coup. While it's highly improbable that he can pull off such a thing at this point, what he's attempting is serious and is likely to have not only very politically disruptive effects but also increases the likelihood of far-right violence in the coming months and years. And it sets some terrible legal precedents if he gets aware with it without legal accountability.

Mehdi Hasan recently address the far-right terrorist problem in How Will the Biden Admin. Tackle the Growing Threat of Domestic Terror? The Choice 12/22/2020:

Historian Sean Wilentz made the case that Donald has been committing literal sedition in The Sedition of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 10/11/2020:

Trump’s racist rhetoric and shout-outs to white nationalists have cleaved the nation in two, driving political polarization with an intensity not seen since the Civil War. His explicit encouragement of violence and armed demonstrations has menaced the rule of law. His brazen attempt to shake down the president of Ukraine (“Do us a favor, though”), in order to manufacture dirt against his chief political opponent — the event that triggered Trump’s impeachment — almost surely would have led to his removal from office but for the cynicism, cowardice, and partisanship of the Senate Republican majority. His amply documented obstruction of justice in connection with the Russia investigation — 10 offenses, according to the Mueller report; the corruption of his office to enrich himself and his family in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause; his purposeful sabotage of the First Amendment by demonizing the free press as enemies of the people — all this and more add up to not just the worst performance of any American president, but the most subversive conduct since Jefferson Davis, who was not a president of the United States.

Trump’s subversion is an immediate existential crisis for American democracy, the worst since the Civil War. He has deliberately tried to discredit and delegitimize democracy itself. By repeatedly trashing the upcoming election as rigged and corrupt, raising baseless wild charges about voting by mail, Trump has poisoned the political wells. By instructing the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic Proud Boys to “stand back” and “stand by,” and instructing his goon squads to descend on the polls to intimidate voters, he has openly called for disrupting the election. By refusing to pledge to a peaceful transition of power should he lose the election, Trump has revealed his plan for a coup d’etat, with the connivance and unswerving support of the Republican Party. [my emphasis]

Wilentz' article was three weeks before the election on November 3, so some of the things he talks about we know what happened with them. But he correctly describes what was almost certainly Trump's main coup strategy:

Should Trump fall short, as current polls show him doing, then his campaign, against the backdrop of civil chaos, would try and throw the election into either the House of Representatives, where the GOP controls the majority of states and thus the outcome, or the courts, where they can expect that, eventually, the Supreme Court, packed with his appointees and other right-wingers, will simply declare Trump the winner. Complicit GOP leaders and officeholders would absolve themselves of responsibility by throwing up their hands and saying the law, then, must be followed, knowing full well the final decision had been politically preordained. The Republican theft of the presidency in 2000 would look like a dry run for the overthrow of American democracy in 2020. [my emphasis]

In describing Attorney General Bill Barr, Wilentz also reminds us of another important precedent for official impunity for serious crimes by the Executive Branch, the Iran-Contra affair:

Barr seemed to be what is approvingly called in Washington an institutionalist, meaning in this case the type of conventional GOP operator who privately loathed Trump. What most observers had forgotten is that back in 1992, Barr had helped successfully shut down once and for all the investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal that for a time had threatened to topple Ronald Reagan and to upset George H.W. Bush. Now Barr was about to go to full-scale war in the service of Donald Trump — and his own ideas about America as a degenerate liberal culture in need of a right-wing judiciary and an autocratic president. [my emphasis]

Wilentz calls attention to this particular action of Trump's that he sees as sedition:

Trump’s summons to militias began long before his callout to the Proud Boys. “Liberate Michigan,” the president tweeted in all caps in April, when rifle-toting MAGA troops shut down the state’s Legislature over Michigan’s Covid restrictions.

These two words were seditious in the most exact sense, a president instructing armed American citizens to attack their own government. His acts amounted to an assault by the president himself on the Constitution’s clause that guarantees states “a Republican Form of Government,” including against “domestic violence.” And chillingly, they may well have encouraged, if not incited, the right-wing militia plot, now revealed by the FBI, to kidnap Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer, storm the state capitol, and overthrow the state government. (In character, Trump the inflamer reacted to news of the plot by attacking Whitmer as an ingrate who has done “a terrible job” on Covid.) Yet Trump’s April tweet — perhaps the most literally subversive utterance by any president in our history — has proven to be but a forecast of the grander subversion taking place right now. [my emphasis]

He also uses this characterization of the variants of authoritarianism on the Republican menu during Trump's Presidency: "Trump, for his part, would prefer a kind of Putin-like kleptocracy. Barr’s vision, if you can call it that, is an Americanized version of something more akin to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain."

I should state here what I take to be obvious, which is that since the Civil War, sedition laws have been used far more often against dissident groups on the left than on the right. The earliest major effort to suppress freedom of speech and the press after the Constitution took effect were the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. "The Sedition Act (July 14 [1797]) banned the publishing of false or malicious writings against the government and the inciting of opposition to any act of Congress or the president." (Britannica Online 01/17/2020)

But even though they were used against the left, including against Thomas Jefferson's new Democratic-Republican Party, Alexander Hamilton's party (though not Hamilton himself) later at least heavily flirted with (pro-British) sedition around the War of 1812.

But even after the election of 1800 which Jefferson won, some influential High Federalists did conspiracy to keep John Adams in the White House despite losing. So rightwing sedition around a Presidential election is not a Trump innovation. Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone describes a key face-to-face negotiation with Adams during the crisis. Showing how different things were in those days, Malone writes that Jefferson "afterwards said that he conversed with John Adams about the state of affairs when he chanced to meet the President walking on Pennsylvnia Avenue." (my emphasis)

But one could plausibly speculate that the conversation was a bit more formal than, "Hey, John, fancy bumping into you here! If you've got a moment, let's chat a bit about the coup your party is planning to block me from taking office." Since the substance of the conversation as Malone relates it basically came down to: Look, John. Our side has more state militia forces on our side than yours do. And we will use them to restore the results of the election if push comes to shove with what you guys are doing.

Sasha Abramsky offers a more current take on the Trump sedition issue in Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and Must Be Brought to Justice The Nation 12/22/2020. "In increasingly specific language, Trump and his band of traitors are advocating some combination of martial law, national emergency, and paramilitarism as a way to cling to power."

Biden at Gettysburg, Biden and Trump on bipartisanship

Joe Biden gave a justifiably well-regarded speech at the Gettysburg Battleground this week (Biden delivers campaign speech in Gettysburg PBS Newshour 10/06/2020):

It's within the context of his main campaign framing of I'm Not Donald Trump rather than on building a mandate for Democratic positions. Thanks largely to the coronavirus and the economic depression it kicked off, that strategy is working well so far. Also, because of Trump's continuing personal disintegration.

Scott Destrow reports for NPR (In Election's Final Weeks, Biden Makes A Case For Unity Amid A Tumultuous Time 10/06/2020):

Speaking Tuesday afternoon overlooking the battlefield where Union soldiers tilted the tide of the Civil War in Gettysburg, Pa., the Democratic nominee tried to frame his call for unity within the arc of American history.

"Today, once again, we are a house divided," Biden said, echoing the words of President Abraham Lincoln. "But that, my friends, can no longer be."

The Gettsburg Address is not the House Divided speech. But let's not quibble. You know, Lincoln the Greatest President, honoring fallen soldiers, bringing the country together. For an establishment Democratic politician, it's a good use of historical symbolism. Of course, he was relying on the historical symbolism of a Republican politician, so I guess we can't have everything ...

I would love to see Status Quo Joe roll out this Lincoln quote from 1861:

It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. ...

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. ... A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them.

He won't do it, of course. But it would be cool if he did.

Lincoln himself declared that his two main Presidential models were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the two major founders of the Democratic Party, both of whom today's Democratic politicians were prefer not to invoke theses days. Times change. Historical narratives evolve.

(I'll use this opportunity to make another plug for Heather Cox Richardson's lecture series on The American Paradox, which takes a sophisticated and sensibly nuanced to the development of democracy in the US. I don't know if she thinks of herself as a Hegelian in some way, but she does take the unfolding of contradictions in history seriously.)

I instantly broke out in hives when he said "bipartisan". But he did make a point of unequivocally condemning Trump's "very fine people" at the murderous neonazi marches in Charlottesville in 2017 and going after the Republican Party's current overt support for violent white supremacist goon squads. Even Joe can be "antifa" when he puts his mind to it.

Bipartisanship is only a good thing if it involves getting something constructive accomplished. If it means another Democratic Administration giving a free pass to people in government who broke the law in serious ways in the previous Republican administration, it's destructive. Trump is out there listing political opponents he wants arrested and prosecuted. We just can't afford to have a situation where Republicans are willing to pursue blatantly partisan prosecutions and the Democrats refuse to allow the Justice Department to impartially and independently enforce the law against crimes committed by Republicans. The Republicans will give their "bipartisan" endorsement to that arrangement. But it's not the rule of law.

Lindsey "we-got-thuh-votes-tuh-do-at-so-we-gone-do-at" Graham's position on the Barrett nomination is the Republicans' current position on bipartisanship. If the Democrats keep the House majority and win 50 Senate seats with VP Kamala Harris as the deciding vote - and given the current poll numbers that's a modest expectation - that means the Democrats have the votes to enact everything in their party program. Period. Joe Biden was in the Senate longer than Lyndon Johnson was before he became President. He knows how to twist arms to get key votes in line. If he wants to get a couple of Republican Senators to vote his way so a conservative clown like Joe Manchin can vote with the Republicans, well, in that case, hooray for bipartisanship!

I take it for granted that the Democrats will end the anti-democratic Senate filibuster rule. *Not* ending it would basically be a bipartisan surrender to the Republicans on issues across the board right out of the gate. I don't even want to think about what a disaster that would be.

Starting the night of Biden's Gettysburg speech, the Grand Wizard of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, had some partisan ideas (Kyle Cheney, ‘Where are all of the arrests?’: Trump demands Barr lock up his foes Politico 10/07/2020):

Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.

Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

By early afternoon, Trump was letting loose his frustrations in an all-caps missive that seemed aimed at nobody in particular.

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!” Trump tweeted.

Now, the FBI arrested several members of a far-right terrorist group for "a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer." And maybe murder her. The President responded by ... attacking Gov. Whitmer. Bunker Boy may be garbled in a lot of his statements. But his position on this is very clear. Here's a report from a Michigan FOX News station, President Trump tweets about Gov. Whitmer, Joe Biden responds with tweet Mid-Michigan NOW Newsroom 10/09/2020.

See also, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer slams Trump in response to kidnapping plot Guardian News 10/08/2020:

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 23: Calhoun and Jefferson on slavery (2)

In the previous post in this series, I discussed part of John Calhoun's "Speech on the Oregon Bill" of June 27, 1848 and how he used the words and reputation of Thomas Jefferson to bolster his own pro-slavery position. And I talked about how Jefferson's famous dismay over th Missouri Compromise of 1820 confronted Jefferson with the dilemma that his own gradual-emancipation strategy for freeing the slaves had become unrealistic in the face of increased aggressiveness on the part of slaveowners and their representatives.

But Calhoun then found himself condemning the most famous piece of Jefferson's literary production, the Declaration of Independence. While commentators today are more apt to take Jefferson's antislavery positions and even his more general positions on democracy and individual liberty as cynical covers for support of slavery, The Dark Prince of American Reaction John Calhoun, thought Jefferson was altogether serious about the sentiments in the Declaration, and Calhoun condemned one of them in harsh terms.

That sentiment was the Declaration's position that "all men are created equal". People today are more conscious of the extent to which Jefferson and the leaders of the Revolution really meant men only. But that consideration wasn't what was on Calhoun's mind. He told the Senate:

Now, let me say, Senators, if our Union and system of government are doomed to perish, and we to share the fate of so many great people who have gone before us, the historian, who, in some future day, may record the events ending in so calamitous a result, will devote his first chapter to the ordinance of 1787, lauded as it and its authors have been, as the first of that series which led to it.

If he should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors. The proposition to which I allude, has become an axiom in the minds of a vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic, and is repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth; it is, that “all men are born free and equal.”

This is one way in which Calhoun was a straightforward reactionary. That phrase in the Declaration expressed a fundamental principle of democracy and liberal freedoms, that each individual has a basic level of rights as a human being (or at least as a man!) that must be recognized and respected. It was also an expression of a basic principle of the liberal concept of the rule of law, that the law applies equally to all.

As democrats recognized even in the late 18th century, the actual application of equal rights and the rule of law was heavily influenced by class and status considerations. But Calhoun was not at all advocating overcoming such barriers. He rejected the entire principle. He begins with an refutation of the kind we hear these days from aspiring rightwing podcasters:
Taking the proposition literally, (it is in that sense it is understood,)

Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with “all men are born,” which is utterly untrue. [!!] Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born “free and equal,” which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom. Besides, they are necessarily born subject to their parents, and remain so among all people, savage and civilized, until the development of their intellect and physical capacity enables them to take care of themselves. They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits, by growing to be men. Nor is it less false that they are born “equal.” They are not so in any sense in which it can be regarded; and thus, as I have asserted, there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood. [my emphasis]

Ben Shapiro would be proud. Incidentally, the rapid-fire speech of some rightwing pundits was also something that Calhoun was known to practice in his speeches. It's an old rightwing habit, I guess.

As Calhoun insists there, the American public did take that basic principle of democracy and the rule of law very seriously, i.e., "literally ... is in that sense it is understood"; "the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood." And Calhoun wanted to change that common opinion!

He continues with some weak theoretical nitpicking against John Locke and Algernon Sidney. But his real point is not about differences between individuals but alleged difference between races. Because the dominant slaveowners' justification for slavery had become the notion that black people were inherently inferior to whites and incapable of creating or practicing civilization on the supposedly elevated level of the slavedrivers. The slaveowners who held human beings as property and bought and sold them as such.

The Honorable Senator from South Carolina:

It follows from all this that the quantum of power on the part of the government, and of liberty on that of individuals, instead of being equal in all cases, must necessarily be very unequal among different people, according to their different conditions. For just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger from without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of the government, and individual liberty extinct. So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered, and how it ought to be administered, and the less the tendency to violence and disorder within, and danger from abroad, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. Instead, then, of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are all born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are high prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won — and when won, the most difficult to be preserved. [my emphasis]

The slaveowners' narrative, of course, held black people to be an "ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt" people who could only be ruled by tyranny. While representation in a republic should be a matter for whites, who are "a people" who have managed to "rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism." But he wasn't advocating Jeffersonian equality even among white men. Liberty in his view "is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances." And he explicitly states that "liberty and equality" are definitively not for "all men and all classes and descriptions." (my emphasis) Calhoun is making a racial argument here. But he's making a class argument as well, both on the behalf of the slaveowning planters, aka, the Slave Power.

And he saw the sinister Jeffersonian influence at work in Europe, then experiencing what we now remembers as the revolutions of 1848:

[Maintaining the power and liberties of the white race has] been made vastly more so by the dangerous error I have attempted to expose, that all men are born free and equal, as if those high qualities belonged to man without effort to acquire them, and to all equally alike, regardless of their intellectual and moral condition. The attempt to carry into practice this, the most dangerous of all political error, and to bestow on all, without regard to their fitness either to acquire or maintain liberty, that unbounded and individual liberty supposed to belong to man in the hypothetical and misnamed state of nature, has done more to retard the cause of liberty and civilization, and is doing more at present, than all other causes combined. While it is powerful to pull down governments, it is still more powerful to prevent their construction on proper principles. It is the leading cause among those which have placed Europe in its present anarchical condition, and which mainly stands in the way of reconstructing good governments in the place of those which have been overthrown, threatening thereby the quarter of the globe most advanced in progress and civilization with hopeless anarchy, to be followed by military despotism. Nor are we exempt from its disorganizing effects. We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of our independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits. It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document, which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral. To this error, his proposition to exclude slavery from the territory northwest of the Ohio may be traced, and to that the ordinance of ’87 [that excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory], and through it the deep and dangerous agitation which now threatens to ingulf, and will certainly ingulf, if not speedily settled, our political institutions, and involve the country in countless woes. [my emphasis]

Because for Calhoun, democratic republics and the equal rule of law could only produce "hopeless anarchy". But let's give the old reactionary credit. He was right to see the democratic revolutionary elements of the American Revolution in the European revolutions of 1848.

Calhoun here was frankly stating that the basic concepts of the American democracy were incompatible with the slave system and the racist ideology by which the planters justified it ideologically. Abraham Lincoln agreed with him about that incompatibility. But he took a different side. In his Letter to Joshua Speed of August 24, 1855, Lincoln wrote, with particular reference to the xenophobic Know-Nothing party (formally the American Party:

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

As it turned out, in 1856 Czar Alexander II liberated the Russian serbs from their feudal status, declaring, "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below." Because of that, historians sometimes draw parallels between Lincoln and Alexander II as similar "liberators". Alexander's government maintained good relations with Lincoln's Union government during the Civil War.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 22: Calhoun and Jefferson on slavery (1)

The Great Nullifier and arch-reactionary John Calhoun gave a speech in the Senate on June 27, 1848, weighing in on the controversy over slavery in territories that might be captured during the Mexican War then underway that had been concluded in February of that year. The immediate topic which he was addressing was actually on the question of slavery in Oregon, which became a US Territory and was not part of Mexico. But the territories that might be captured in the war were very much on Calhoun's mind. The Mexican War was generally enthusiastically supported by the slave states, but Calhoun had reservations about the war, because he thought that significant parts of Mexico were not suitable for slavery.

The speech is known as his "Speech on the Oregon Bill," and he elaborated some important parts of his worldview in it. The text was published in an Appendix for that date to the Congressional Globe: an abridged version is available from the Teaching American History website.

Calhoun's worldview was primarily centered around the view that chattel slavery in the American South was a great institution which much be preserved even at the cost of the destruction of the United States in the Constitutional form in which it then existed. While he makes some grand theoretical and Constitutional arguments in the speech, they are all transparently centered on his fight to preserve and extend slavery.

The secessionist threat is there in this speech:

I have believed, from the beginning, that this [slavery] was the only question sufficiently potent to dissolve the Union, and subvert our system of government; and that the sooner it was met and settled, the safer and better for all. I have never doubted but that, if permitted to progress beyond a certain point, its settlement would become impossible, and am under deep conviction that it is now rapidly approaching it — and that if it is ever to be averted, it must be done speedily. In uttering these opinions I look to the whole. If I speak earnestly, it is to save and protect all. [my emphasis]

In other words: Nice Union you've got there, Yankees. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Twenty-first century neo-Confederates can relate to that Calhounian attitude. It's another way his dark soul goes marching on.

This speech is also an interesting example of contention over historical symbols in the politics of a particular day. In this speech, he centers the figure of Thomas Jefferson in a way that emphasizes Jefferson's ambiguous legacy on slavery.

Calhoun introduces Jefferson as the main sponsor of the idea of excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory, which eventually became part of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This set the stage for a north-south political split over slavery. And that is probably the most significant contribution of Jefferson to the antislavery cause. It's common these days for American progressives to dismiss Jefferson's antislavery position as complete cynicism on his part. He was, of course, a slaveowner himself.

But his position was much more complicated than that. And Calhoun's speech reflected that. Jefferson was astute enough as a politician and student of history and philosophy to know that slavery was incompatible with liberal democracy and the rule of law, as the classical liberal theory of politics and governance understood them.

Calhoun next brings Jefferson forward as a witness against restriction of slavery, based on Jefferson's dismay over the Missouri Compromise, which established a new territorial limit on slavery. In a famous letter that Calhoun quotes, Jefferson says of the Missouri Compromise:

I had for a long time ceased to read the newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. [my emphasis]

Jefferson sounds a bit "burned out" in that passage. But it shows how events were presenting him in dramatic fashion with the limitations of his own position. Jefferson was never a Calhounist nullifier. But he was inclined to see states as a defender of basic liberal principles. But he also did have some personal and political commitment to the institution of slavery.

Jefferson, like virtually all white antislavery Americans back then, viewed the abolition of slavery as something that would be done by states and it would accompany a decrease in the number of black people as a proportion of the population. Because that's how emancipation happened in the Northern states like New York. Jefferson letter on the Missouri Compromise reflected this outlook:

I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.

This was an unrealistic expectation at that time. In fact, the proposal by New York Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. for excluding slavery from Missouri that set off the immediate controversy was based on the gradual-emancipation model other states had used. The representatives of the Slave Power in Congress weren't willing to tolerate it. But Jefferson was clear-headed enough to realize that he had no practical idea of that such a result could be achieved without a serious national convulsion, which Jefferson also hoped to avoid. He continues directly, "I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." (my emphasis)

But for John Calhoun in 1848 threatening the Yankees with secession and civil war, Jefferson position that "justice is in one scale," i.e., the abolitionist side and "self-preservation (of the planter class as it then existed] in the other", was pretty weak tea. That was the best he could do to try to position the image and historical aura of Thomas Jefferson on the side of treason and secession. But Calhoun didn't care about justice.

Or, more generously, for John Calhoun, "justice" was indistinguishable from the interest of slaveowning planters as they themselves conceived it in 1848.

In tomorrow's post, we'll look at Calhoun's further thoughts on Jefferson and liberal republican government.

Eurobonds, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson

One of the long-standing tropes in American history is that in the early years of the Republic, Alexander Hamilton represented a sophisticated, forward-looking, pro-manufacturing, enlightened nationalist outlook that contrasted with the states-rights, agrarian-romantic, ruralist vision for the nation's future supposedly held by Thomas Jefferson.

This view also sees federal regulations on business and the growth of the federal government's role as embodied in the New Deal as the victory of the "Hamiltonian" vision.

My understanding is that Progressive historians around 1900 and the following decades had a big influence on this interpretation. And, of course, historical understanding is continually evolving with new perspectives and new emphasis on individuals and groups that had previously been marginalized or ignored.

But the old Hamilton-Jefferson clichees still keep popping up. For instance, Andreas Kluth in Coronabonds Could Save Europe, or Sink It Bloomberg Opinion 04/02/2020 argues that eurobonds, public debt backed by the EU as a whole, are an enlightened "Hamiltonian" idea:

So tempers are boiling once again. As indeed they were in 1790, when intellectual titans including Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson had a similar debate, the one Volcker had in mind. Hamilton, America’s first treasury secretary, wanted to assume the debts of the 13 states that had recently joined together to fight off the Brits. Jefferson and his followers were against the idea, fearing that the federal government would become a behemoth threatening the liberties of the states.

Both were right. The U.S. did assume the states’ debts, thus seeding today’s huge Treasury-bond market. And the federal government did balloon, as it took on ever more functions over time, especially after the New Deal of the 1930s. But the result was the United States of America as we know it. [my emphasis]

I'm on Kluth's side in supporting eurobonds. It's one of the critical failures of the eurozone construction that there are no eurobonds as part of the system. A currency zone needs common debt instruments. Currently, individual EU countries have to borrow on their own faith and credit, not that of the eurozone as a whole. That not only means higher interest rates for less wealthy countries who have higher needs for infrastructure investments.

It also means that individual countries are not borrowing in their own country's currencies, but their debts are euro-demoninated. So when one countries productivity rates are growing more slowly than others, or when they are faced with massive speculative capital movements across national borders in the eurozone, it can provide debt crises like those earlier in this decade. (2020 is the last year of the 2011-2020 decade, BTW.)

But that two-paragraph accounts of Hamilton, Jefferson, and the revolutionary war debts omits important context. In his Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951), the third volume of Dumas Malone's classic biography of Jefferson, Malone describes the dispute this way:

Hamilton's proposal that the federal government assume the debts of the states was based on the arguments that these had been contracted in a common cause, the war for independence; that a more orderly and efficient provision for them could be made on the basis of a single plan, rather than many plans; and that this action would serve to increase national unity. The federal government was under no contractual obligation to provide for these debts, however, as it was in the case of its ·own obligations, and did not need to do so in order to establish its own credit; hence the discussion centered to a greater degree on questions of expediency and local interest than it had in the case of the national debt.

The alignment considerably depended on the financial situation of the various states. Massachusetts and South Carolina in particular stood to gain by the measure, because a relatively large part of their Revolutionary debt was still unpaid, while Virginia, which had paid a larger proportion of hers, saw actual disadvantage in it. Except for South Carolina, the Southern states were generally opposed to the measure - a further practical consideration being that much of the paper had fallen into eager Northern hands. [my emphasis]

We can safely assume that those "Northern hands" were not primarily poor farmers or small shopkeepers, but rather the late-18th-centruy- version of vulture investors. Congressman James Madison led the Congressional fight against Hamilton's proposal.

At the same time, there was a controversy over whether it was right or legal for wealthy speculators to buy up were buying up the rights of former Virginia and North Carolina soldiers in the Revolutionary War to the back pay they were owed for their military service, accustomed by the usual deceitful practices associated with such schemes. Jefferson opposed recognizing the rights of the speculators to the back pay, Hamilton supported it.

Hamilton, favoring a more oligarchic and quasi-monarchist model for Amrican society and government, thought supporting the speculators in both cases was a grand idea. Jefferson opposed them as crassly unjust. Jefferson and Madison did come to a compromise on the assumption issue, which involved some political deal-making over the permanent location of the national capital.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 7: Anti-democracy reaction around the Nullification Crisis and the democratic tradition opposing it

Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle's "The Backwoods Progression," his history of the development of rural life in American history, appeared in the 1:4 (1933) number of The American Review. It sheds some light on the historical role an images of the two leading founders of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Yes, both of them were slaveowners and American reactionaries have long found good reason to hate them.

(This is a partially revised version of a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month's posts.

Robert Barnwell Rhett

As history, Lytle's piece is not very impressive. But it does illustrate something about Lytle's version of the Southern Agrarian ideology. His criticism of Thomas Jefferson illustrates how much Lytle's thinking falls within the tradition of late 18th century, anti-democracy thought:

The weak point in Jefferson's defense [of property rights] was his own belief in a distorted conception of property, albeit a specific kind, landed property and the kind of life it supported. This meant that his political activity concerned itself fundamentally with the same thing the Federalists espoused: the principle that the chief duty of the State is the protection of the property of individuals and aggregates of individuals. This is certainly one duty of government, but only as a means of guaranteeing the security and self-perpetuation of the family. Prohibiting kings, then allowing private citizens to own the State is certainly hopping from a very slow pan to a very hot fire. Instead of laying the broad foundations a State needs to rest upon - and these foundations are best laid upon the dogma of one religion - he raised the question as to which will, the middle-class or the agrarian, would own the continent.

The aesthetic joys of the rural life clearly weren't the only concerns of the Southern Agrarians.

I am impressed with Lytle's comments on the historical significance of Andrew Jackson. Although I approve what he finds reprehesible. Speaking of the Nullification Crisis with South Carolina, Lytle writes:

South Carolina, under the prompting of such men as [Robert Barnwell] Rhett and [James Henry] Hammond, made such active opposition that the great leader of the state, Calhoun, abandoned his nationalistic stand and proposed his Nullification theory of redress. Andrew Jackson's romantic idea of the Union and his dislike of Calhoun joined together in his stubborn mind to play him into the hands of the enemy. Although he had destroyed the National Bank, he threated to send troops into Carolina to make tariff collections. For a moment war seemed inevitable; but Henry Clay came forward with a compromise, Calhoun accepted it. The Congress voted favourably on Jackson's force bill, and voted to reduce the tariff. Two great blows to State rights were struck at once. The South got temporary relief, and for this relief agreed to a sacrifice of principle. There can be no compromise between two antithetical ways of life. What appears a compromise is a postponement of the issue. The South, by accepting this postponement, doomed itself to ruin. The high prejudices of his heart and a limited political vision led Jacxkson to squander the great strategic moment by which his backwoods could have established its rule. Life a good backwoodsman, he took "the responsibility" and Calhoun refused it; but the South, not Calhoun or Jackson, suffered the consequences.

Jackson's "romantic idea of the Union" was his notion of the United States as a united country based on democracy. (More specifically at the time, democracy for an expanding number of white men.) He articulated the idea of democratic national patriotism to which the North held in the Civil War and which still defines the formal notion of American patriotism today.

As Lytle says, Jackson backed "the enemy". Or rather what was considered "the enemy" in the eyes of the enemies of democracy, the enemies of America, the enemies of the Constitution. This is what makes the image of Andrew Jackson, despite his very real faults, especially on slavery and Indian relocation, such an important symbol of American democracy. A wealthy man, he sided with the small farmers and the urban workers against the concentrated economic power facilitated by the Bank of the United States. A slaveowner and a supporter of slavery, when forced to choose between Calhoun's anti-patriotic defense of slavery in the Nullification Crisis, on the one hand, and democracy and American patriotism on the other, Jackson made the right choice. In an important sense, Lytle is right in saying that the slave South "doomed itself to ruin" in the Nullification Crisis. And to the extent that is true, to that same extent Andrew Jackson was the executioner.

Lytle, of course, sides with Calhoun. His shares the anti-democratic tradition of Calhounian thought his fellow Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley expressed in the previous issue of The Southern Review.

Lytle explains who the Confederates were supposedly forced into their treason and their war to destroy the American government by those evil Yankees and especially by that Southerner Old Hickory:

There was after this [Jackson's defeat of the secessionists in the Nullification Crisis] only one avenue left open to the South - secession. Calhoun still hoped to concetrate Southern leadership and make the fight within the Union. But his plans of effecting his ends by controlling the Democratic Party failed. With desperation he took up a last position, secession through the common action of all the Southern States. But Clay's American plan - an extension of capitalism - and his compromises, the god of all opportunists, had done their work. In this crisis Calhoun's chief lieutenant, Robert Barnwell Rhett, proposed a policy of coercion. He contended that if one State acted separately, the other State, all believing in their own sovereignty, would follow the lead. He supported his contention by reminding his political peers that the revolt against England did not take place until the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour.

At least one Southern Agrarian in 1933 was looking at the Tea Party as a useful symbol to defend the white South!

When common action did take place, it came about by South Carolina's single-handed withdrawal; but it came ten years too late and brought Appomattox, not independence.

And he notes in the Calhounian demogogic mode, "The fall of the Confederacy removed the last great check to the imperialism of Big Business."

John Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett, fighters for the workers' revolution! This is the kind of idiocy to which the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause line of thinking inevitably leads.