Calhoun's Ghost

Somewhat related to my earlier post about Lincoln, Steve Hayward had some thoughts on a long essay written by Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic on that man who Tanenhaus thinks is behind modern conservatism:  John C. Calhoun.  Here is Hayward first on what Tanenhaus sort of gets right:

There has been quite a lot of loose and untethered talk about “secession” from some conservatives, including the otherwise good governor of Texas, whose present efforts to get some businesses to secede from California for Texas I applaud. And there are many misguided conservatives who do admire Calhoun and think his constitutional theory is worth reviving. In this they bid to commit the same error as the Left. Understanding the proper nature of majority rule—and its limits—in our democratic republic is indeed hard work, but conservatives shouldn’t imitate Tanenhaus’s slovenly habits of mind.

Surely though well-intententioned, there has been a growing chorus of Tea Partiers and the like who are preaching nullification as the answer to combat the growing powers of the federal government, e.g., Obamacare and Medicaid expansion.  But nullification and secession at bottom are grounded on the same principle:  anarchy.

Next is Hayward on the irony on Calhoun presents for liberals:

In recent decades it has been liberalism that has embraced Calhoun’s doctrine of the “concurrent majority” most robustly, in such things as the specially-carved majority-minority districts to elect minorities to Congress (mostly black) who, by the very nature of these districts, marginalize themselves. And the spirit of Calhoun was most evident in the explicit doctrines of the now largely forgotten Lani Guiner, Bill Clinton’s aborted nominee for the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department 20 years ago. Go back and read her writings—the ones that allegedly “shocked” Bill Clinton when he read them (as though he had no idea what he was getting)—and the parallels to Calhoun are precise.

And ultimately, how Calhoun's political philosophy affects even the best of conservatives (quoted from Harry Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom):

In 1981 President Ronald Reagan, in his inaugural address, declared that the states had made the Union, showing that Calhounism, even at the highest levels, was still alive and well. I am confident that Reagan, a native of Illinois, had no idea that he was contradicting Lincoln. His entourage, from which the speech emerged, like the conservative movement generally, was, however, filled with disciples of Calhoun.