Calhoun's Ghost, Pt. II

In a post a little over a month ago, I focused on Sam Tanenhaus's long essay in The New Republic entitled "Original Sin:  Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people," that ties the modern Republican Party back to the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun.  In that essay Tanenhaus said

This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun's ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

But in the course of his argument, Tanenhaus leaves one wondering about that claim with lines like this:

It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.

In any case, Ken Masugi recorded his own thoughts a few days ago on Tanenhaus's claims and the responses from the Right thus far in a post cleverly entitled "Crisis of the Calhoun United."  Here is Tanenhaus's real project, according to Masugi:

Tanenhaus implies that the Republicans have seceded from America itself. For him the Tea Party, among other conservatives, is not about the Declaration of Independence and its constitutionalism but rather about what he derides as the “politics of frustration and rage”—as if the disputed election of 2000 did not elicit such passions on both sides.[i] The right’s problem cannot be resolved by policy debates but rather by psychological analysis. Tanenhaus is as ruthless (and clever) as FDR was in attempting to isolate and demonize Republicans as Tories and fascists.

And on the response to Tanenhaus's essay by Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in a recent issue of National Review:

They convincingly show that Tanenhaus has “wildly exaggerated” Calhoun’s influence on the early (and certainly the present) National Review, the journal they write for....

But Masugi says that Jonah and Ramesh miss something with their take on from where they think Tanenhaus took his bearings on Calhoun.  I will first quote the pertinent section from their essay:

We suspect that an intramural disagreement among conservatives has confused Tanenhaus about Calhoun’s influence. For many years a group of conservative scholars led by the brilliant Harry Jaffa have contended that the Constitution must be read in light of the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is a powerful argument even if not all of the implications Jaffa and his students draw from it are convincing. In his more recent and polemical works, unfortunately, Jaffa has often claimed that anyone who disagrees with any aspect of his theory is thereby taking Calhoun’s premises on board. If you didn’t believe in natural law, you were a Calhounist. If you placed more weight on the sovereignty of the states than on the powers of the federal government? Calhounist. Kendall, who perfunctorily dismissed Calhoun as a “man I cannot do business with”? Obviously a Calhounist, doubtless operating under deep cover. 

Reviewing Jaffa’s Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution, Robert Bork tried to count up all of Jaffa’s enemies: “Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, Edwin Meese, Russell Kirk, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William Rehnquist, and, I rejoice to say, given the company to which I am assigned, me.” Bork added, “It turns out, for reasons that are not entirely clear, that most of us are disciples of the late, unlamented John C. Calhoun.” Bork ran afoul of Jaffa by arguing that it was not necessary to advert to the principles of the Declaration to see that Dred Scott was wrongly decided; the text of the Constitution was enough. 

While Tanenhaus does not mention Jaffa, he seems to have exaggerated Jaffa’s insults. If that is what happened, one irony is that Jaffa’s views have largely prevailed among mainstream conservative intellectuals, who are far more Lincolnian in their thinking about the Declaration than they were before he began writing. (Jaffa may not be willing to accept the credit: Buckley once quipped that if you thought disagreeing with Jaffa was hard, try agreeing with him.) In short, Jaffa issued an incidental and gratuitous smear against rival conservatives, and Tanenhaus has made the incidental central and the gratuitous fundamental in constructing a political smear against all conservatives.

But I concur with Masugi's main point here on what Jaffa was (and still is God bless him) trying to do with his attacks on his fellow conservatives throughout the past decades:

But Jaffa is no amoral arms dealer, merely out to make a buck in his own cause. His assaults on leading conservatives (e.g., Justice Scalia) are intended to show how they share the fundamental premises of their liberal opponents. The reductio ad Calhounum applies to left and right alike. For Jaffa, Calhounism is the “original sin” of both contemporary conservatism and liberalism, just as Rousseau informs both. 

Jaffa’s Calhoun is the evil genius who sought to undermine the central teaching of the American founding, the human equality that leads to the social compact. And the social contract leads to limited government. Unlike Jefferson, who thought that states might better protect natural rights than the national government, Calhoun banished natural rights from politics. He did this under the guise of his “concurrent majority,” which he promoted as a means of guaranteeing consensus in politics and moderating extremes. And with the end of natural rights, there is no right to revolution and therewith no limited government. It is fitting that a political philosophy which tolerates slavery would point to unlimited government. Both Tanenhaus and his thoughtful NR critics were too hasty to jump to race as the most egregious symptom of contemporary Calhounism, when in fact it is unlimited government. [iv] This follows from Calhoun’s notion of unlimited sovereignty, which in turn followed from his assumption of historical development, culminating in a superior race. “In Calhoun’s worldview,” Jaffa succinctly states, “right is founded on might….”

Very interesting stuff to think about--not only as a philosophical exercise but as a practical matter as well.