Barry Clark's Blog

Pedro L. Gonzalez suggests that an “alliance between paleos and populist-aligned Straussians is possible.” We would agree that is it theoretically possible, and that it is absolutely required considering the magnitude of the threats to Permanent Things. We cannot help but wonder two things. Would the Straussians even consider such, we paleoconservatives being so few and so many of them inaccurately conflating us with Jacobins? And, just as importantly, if such an alliance was formed, and we were able to thwart the current threat, what would the world look like after?

Paul Gottfried published a piece yesterday in Chronicles called Clearing Up the Confusion on Leo Strauss. It was a fair and necessary piece. Strauss is complex, he was brilliant, he is often misunderstood and he was certainly wrong about some significant things. But Strauss himself is not the problem. It is the interpretation of Strauss and the building upon those interpretations that most paleoconservatives perhaps take the greatest exception with. It has always been unfortunate that two groups came to be called “Straussians” in the first place. “Jaffites” is a much more accurate term for West Coast Straussians, but what is in a name matters much less than understanding the nuances and permutations of ideas under that name.

In the past months, West Coast Straussians have begun to make calls, louder and louder, for a return to the sort of Federalism that the conservatives in the Antifederalist camp called for (ironic). Their warnings of the dangers of centralization and of a tyrannical majority sound very much like Calhoun (beyond ironic). We would welcome this, if only they could find it in their soul to also admit they were wrong about the Antifederalists (the conservative sort) and Calhoun. The desire to see that sort of intellectual honesty is not a desire for a win or vindication – it seems necessary if we are to treat them as allies. They cannot vilify those that worked and spoke to prevent all the major troubles America has seen and at the same time, channel the words and warnings of those men to face the current crisis.  As Gottfried wrote, “[s]outhern conservatives and Straussians have long been at loggerheads on historical and political questions.” And there are profound reasons for this.

We do not want to be vindicated for past stances. We merely fear a group that dismisses valid opposition, and warnings that proved true historically, in preference for men that acted rashly and often tyrannically. We fear allying ourselves now in common cause to fight a beast at the door only to end up with a new version of Lincoln or Franco in the near future. It is a Sophie’s Choice.

Ultimately, the current trendline is perhaps just so dangerous that we few, hearty paleoconservatives will join them, whether they are intellectually honest about the points they were wrong about or not. They hold the soapboxes in the public square, the populists know of them and need voices to guide them. And, profoundly, the elites and rhetoricians that lead the leftist populists are more dangerous, provably so historically, than anything the Straussians can conceive of. Yes, we will join them, whether they acknowledge us or not.

We humbly and sincerely ask for one thing from the West Coast Straussians – take a pause and reflect on all of U.S. history and who warned of what and when. Incorporate some of those we hold dear into your thoughts concerning a way forward. History is not binary, and few men ever had all the answers. We suggest you are missing a few powerful thinkers that you ought to add to your reading list.

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We are pleased by the resolution of the S.C. House of Representatives to honor Dr. Clyde Wilson for his tireless and peerless work over the course of a lifetime defending what is good and pure of the Southern tradition and of Calhoun’s work.

A HOUSE RESOLUTION TO CONGRATULATE DR. CLYDE WILSON, PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA, FOR A LIFETIME OF PRESERVING AND DEFENDING SOUTHERN HISTORY AND TRADITION AND FOR HIS SEMINAL WORK ON JOHN C. CALHOUN. – June 8th, 2021

Dr. Wilson is not only the preeminent Calhoun scholar alive, and perhaps ever to live, his writing and speeches related to the permanent things provided a necessary linkage to the great minds of a past generation but also inspired innumerable new thinkers that have carried on the tradition. And despite those he has inspired, ‘they simply do not make more of his ilk’.

Well deserved Sir, we wish you health and happiness, and joy in this recognition. We can never thank you enough for your inspiration and assistance with our project here and the other efforts you have been such a key figure in.

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We observe many confounding and often confusing reactions and attitudes in America in 2020. Perhaps the most alarming is an abandonment of what our Union and form of government were originally conceived to be, at least the view held some of those that took part in the debate and framing between the mid-1700s and 1800. We assume, with reasonable confidence, that the attitudes and desires of the anti-federalists were the predominant views of the ordinary man. These may have been influenced by The Federalist and other writings and speeches to dissuade fears of an overarching and all-powerful central state, those letters were a fabulous piece of propaganda. The mere fact that the Federalists themselves had to go to such lengths, to explain away fears that soon materialized as fact, soon after ratification, is sufficient proof that most people in most of the states wanted nothing to do with anything central, powerful, pervasive, or invasive.

The argument ensued until the mid-19th century, it ceased being a rational or reasonable debate after 1850 and progressed to war in 1861. By 1867, the entire nature of the Federal government was changed. As George Fletcher argued, to a form of “organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy” concepts different and opposed to those of our first constitution which promulgated “peoplehood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republicanism”.

Over the years we have highlighted Calhoun’s various words that warned of the dangers and ramifications of ‘popular democracy’ and the tyranny of the majority. He warned, before popular fiction writers a few decades after him, that tyranny and dystopia must surely result from unbridled centralized power. We have reached back to the foundational ideas that many of the ‘founders’ shared, specifically Blackstone. Our position, which is essentially a distilled elder Calhoun position, is that we inherited traditions and institutions, these were influenced by ideas from the enlightenment, but not driven by them. Our original conception of rights, freedoms, and duties was that of an Englishman’s rights and freedom, our law developed over centuries of accidents, trials a tribulation. To most Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries we were not a product of an ideological experiment, but rather the continuation of improvements in ancient ways; carried out in a new and exciting way on this continent.

We lost that somewhere along the way. Place and tradition were replaced with passions and ideas, community with society, ancient rights with codified, and modifiable, civil law. The responsibility and duty of the individual to his community was replaced, over time, with a nebulous notion of ‘equality’, and ubiquitous belonging to a central state. From this all manner of -isms have taken hold, nationalism, progressivism and now, a sort of nihilism that differs only from the textbook definition in that individuals and groups have come to see that life and rights only matter insofar as they and their preferred group matter.

In 2020, Calhoun has been stripped from the public square and the academy. If he is mentioned at all it is to take a few words of his out of context, dispensing with the body of his work that gives those words meaning and clarity. He is not alone; we have systematically purged ourselves of all manner of ‘dead guys’ this year. At what cost, we cannot yet reckon. We suspect the cleansing of ideas, of history, of facts, and of truth itself has just gotten underway; it will get worse.

We see now that the inheritors of the tradition of the Federalists, of Webster and ultimately of Lincoln now openly boast that ‘conservatism’ will realign after this much as the Whig party did in 1837. The West Coast Straussians would be pleased to see the dominant ‘conservative’ party cleansed of what they collectively call ‘small government libertarians’. It seems they have so thoroughly routed paleoconservatives they no longer even acknowledged this diminished group exists.  “Out with the small-government, originalists” is their battle cry, all of this progressivism is our fault it seems. Just ask them they are happy to repeat this tale. One hundred and seventy years after Calhoun’s passing his ghost still haunts them it seems, it is evident by their current journal submissions. We and all that hold to a notion that bigger is not better, and is perhaps just as repugnant as the solution offered by the Marxist in our midst are persona non grata.

We warned in 2018 that America was more divided than at any point since 1850, and two sides were vying to ‘solve’ all of our problems with their vision of more government. In the middle is a populist administration, opposed by the marxist and often influenced by the Federalists. We have been proven correct in 2020. The worrisome fact is one side appears to have a military wing and they are not constrained by any moral scruples in letting that element burn and loot.

What should a person that holds to a traditional view of what America is and was supposed to be to do? The intelligentsia of the Straussians wants nothing to do with us.  The most radical of the Marxists, somewhere deep in their minds, would not be upset if we were lined up against a wall and shot – some have openly said as much. Men of principles and ideas that we have come to revere have been banished. The populists do not understand us and we have few outlets to communicate with them. All of the subsidiary institutions that are supposed to play a role in defending permanent things (academia, the media, organized Christianity) have utterly failed this year or worse, gone over to openly support radical change.

There are no easy answers. Debates, arguments, academic papers, op-eds, books, none of those fine efforts, over the course of the last several decades have had a large effect. In times like these, men of principles, conscience, and fall back to the defense of the most basic permanent things, home, hearth, clan and family, our communities, and the future – our children.

The following is merely my opinion, not necessarily the view of the Calhoun Institute. The ideologies of the world, the great divide of worldview and unbridled passions, detached from right reason, are very dangerous. We have entered perhaps the most dangerous time in U.S. history since the Cuban Missile crisis. Many of the institutions we previously trusted have utterly failed this year. Reasonable men, looking at the danger, the divisiveness, and the divide should take practical steps to protect their families and small communities (I have written elsewhere on this topic). Vote, for the party that is not Marxist, and hope we can deal with the Statist-Centralists later, pray and prepare.

@onlyBarryLClark

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We are saddened by the sudden and often lawless assaults on monuments, and museums. These relics of history pale in comparison to the loss of life, health, property, and prosperity many have suffered in these troubles. However, culture consists of the sum and total of its experiences and its history. At The Calhoun Institute, we have never asserted that John C. Calhoun was a perfect man, there have been no perfect men to walk the Earth beyond Christ. Our efforts at highlighting his words derived from the fact that he thought like a statesman in a time of great struggle and strife. He was a man of his time, he held opinions that nearly nobody today holds related to race. He was complex in the dichotomy between a young Calhoun and an elder man in terms of his conception of Constitutional issues and solutions. He predicted much of what would become of America – he worked tirelessly to avoid bloodshed, debating in his last days from his deathbed.

We have always felt it important to discuss his work relative to contemporary problems, not to apply his solutions directly, but rather to apply the example of a statesman that was sometimes right and sometimes wrong but a man that for the bulk of his career acted upon principles rather than politics. If the trumpet has sounded and the will of the vocal few has enticed cities, colleges, and universities to submit to erasing Calhoun and others from the pages of history and our collective memory, we concede. Words, logic, reason, rational arguments, scathing and honest dissections of his words even by us, have, it seems, failed to serve their purpose.  We shall say no more.

We leave you with but one warning. A people without a full and truthful understanding of their past, the good bad and ugly, cannot long remain a people that are free and prosperous. Historians in a long distant future will look back upon America in this time and age, so filled with rage and indignation, and express wonderment and sadness. Wipe all history that is repugnant by contemporary standards, remove all plaques, statues, buildings, and names from public and private institutions. We will become nothing more than a people with the latest version of an iPhone to connect us and histories that will now be rewritten every few years to appease new and unforeseen sensibilities.

Erase Calhoun if you wish, but his warnings of what is to come will remain, even if they are now unheard.

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The Great Unraveling began in the 1990s, perhaps with the changing world order that resulted from the fall of communism. It is often the case that people living in a time of crisis do not fully recognize the transformative nature of the events surrounding them, and this is true today and has been true of most Americans over the last server decades. But it is not true that nobody ever recognizes the meaning; such has not been true historically and it is not true now.

What is true is that the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has highlighted, exacerbated and accelerated the unraveling; it has made it apparent for any that wish to recognize it for what it is. What has happened, government reaction, overreaction, and underreaction, public panic, selfishness, and selflessness are all merely part of a death dance of a way of life and form of government and perhaps the culture itself.

Philosophy is impotent, the prevailing worldview makes discussion of truth impossible – philosophy has failed us. Theology and religion are likewise incapable of helping, without a common language, historically provided by philosophy, the religious viewpoint is alien and unintelligible in the public square – only the Christian can understand Christianity and many of that number get it wrong it seems. Sophists rule us – influencers, ‘journalist’, and pseudo-intellectuals all hold undue sway on the public mind. Technology, social media outlets have only exacerbated this phenomenon, controlling who is validated, who has influence and who is heard. Cicero warned of the dangers of sophists , our culture is subjected to them twenty-four hours a day.

One might perhaps dispute the date set above. Surely, the emergence of postmodern ideology in the 1950s could be the mark, or perhaps the New Deal, or any number of other transformative and significant events. All of these played a role, each transformed the Republic in some way, moved it toward something more centralized and more powerful or weakened the Permanent Things of the culture, faith, family, reason, and resilience.  The unraveling is, therefore, not the beginning or cause of the crisis and the transformation that follows, the causality occurred over the last several centuries and was ‘baked’ in from the beginning. This is just the inevitable conclusion, the effect of those causes. The unraveling, is as Calhoun predicted, the natural result of implementing flawed ideas.

The very foundation of our ideas, the dominant political philosophy in America undergirding our system is flawed. “Classical liberalism failed when philosophical thought turned away from the Scottish School toward the German school. This combined with “the acceptance of Neoplatonic ideas of Thomas Hobbes by the Federalist, and their eventual total victory in United States domestic politics and interpretation of the law, combined with other factors such as passions of the Transcendental generation and a progressive increase in bad philosophical ideas in the form of ideologies, completed the destruction of Classical Liberalism/Republicanism and lead to absurdity in economic thought and policy, as well as political theory and politics. These factors affect not only policy and history in the United States but have come to shape geopolitics and history.”

John C. Calhoun was prophetic in his assessment of the ramifications of Federalists’/centralists’ ideas. As Lee Cheek observes, “[John] Randolph affirmed, as would Calhoun more elaborately two decades later, the vision of a moral regime focused upon the idea of subsidiarity (or localism) in political and religious concerns.” Calhoun realized the importance of voting, and majority rule, but also the inherent flaws and deficiencies of such, particularly unanchored by the foundation of community and virtue rooted not in libertine notions of individual freedom (license) but instead upon the traditions borne of ancient liberties and traditions. To Calhoun, the Jacksonian democratic dream had become the American nightmare. Untethered from the tempering virtue that community and tradition might instill upon a people, tyranny, incivility, authoritarianism, waste, and decay must follow.

In his Disquisition and Discourse Calhoun accurately depicted the path the Federalist/Jacksonian and eventually Lincolnian ideologies would lead.

As the Government approaches nearer and nearer to the one absolute and single power, the will of the greater number, its actions will become more and more disturbed and irregular, faction, corruption, and anarchy, will more and more abound; patriotism will daily decay, and affection and reverence for the Government grow weaker and weaker until the final shock occurs when the system will rush to ruin, and the sword will take the place of the law and Constitution.

Calhoun was, it must be admitted, America’s greatest political philosopher. Following closely the tradition of Edmund Burke and influenced by the Scottish School of philosophy and Calvinism, Calhoun stood in defiance to the flaws of Lockeanism, Kantism, Federalism and ultimately authoritarianism. There are certain schools of ideological thought that oppose this view, Jaffites, and Straussians first among those, these groups still attempt to vilify and misrepresent Calhoun, attempting to somehow paint him as a progressive. Liberals and progressives disparage and ignore the man, equating him as a manifestation of evil, ignoring what he did and did not actually say. Historians attempt to merely place him as a statesman of a particular time and place, ignoring the centuries of tradition and convention that his political philosophy represented. Modern philosophers, insofar as they seek to understand the ideas of Calhoun at all, almost universally ignore what he had to say. The same is true for academia in general, those so enamored with a narrative of America that celebrates a story of the Enlightenment, Lincoln, and platitudes of equity that ignore justice, the common good, individual responsibility, culture, and community.

Despite his detractors and those that have sought to either vilify him or ignore him, Calhoun singularly and above all others in American history framed the proper questions, based upon first principles and right-reason. He not only saw the near-term consequences of the Federalist/Jacksonian approach, but he also foresaw the implications of those weaknesses carried through to their inevitable and natural conclusions. Beyond framing questions and theorizing solutions, as philosophers are apt to do will little practical effect, Calhoun offered tangible and achievable solutions – solutions based upon the convention and history of the American people, not untested, untried and unproven theories of enlightenment and philosophy. Rather tradition-based, practical and workable solutions in the Burkean tradition.

Before the current crisis, America was more divided than at any point since 1850, dangerously divided. The Culture War was lost to traditional-minded Americans many years ago, this became plainly obvious in 2015. The U.S. is too large, too populous and geographically dispersed and diverse, to allow for a minority view. Untethered from the foundation of reason, convention, virtue, and morality and failed by a philosophy that should help disempower sophists and ideologues, the unwashed, ill-educated, un-churched, baseless masses are ill-prepared to weather and event like Coronavirus. Desperation and tyranny must naturally follow.

In the few short weeks since Coronavirus entered the American news cycle, we have observed “conservatives’ calling for government lockdowns of private businesses, the Federal government taking control of the production of industries and debt packages of a scale unimaginable passed without debate. All of this, without objection from the masses, and in most cases to applause and calls for more draconian actions. America, the land of the free and home of the brave, is now, it would appear, the land of the ill-informed and afraid – a people that cry out for authoritarianism.  These cries for government action would not be disturbing if they were based on a moral and philosophical position of justice for the common good. But as Cicero believed, “the stark and undiluted truth, the philosophic truth, may shake the very foundations of a given political order.” This may indeed be true as we may soon see.

Coronavirus did not begin the unraveling, it is not the cause, it is just the conclusion. Everything has changed, the center cannot hold and nothing will ever be the same again. The progressive path we have traveled, now accelerated by Coronavirus but enabled by two centuries of bad ideology will lead to authoritarianism.

If we accept that Calhoun was right in the 1840s and that Lincoln changed the very nature of the Constitution through war and unconstitutional acts in the 1860s, progressivism altered the national trajectory in the late 19th century and early 20th century, Roosevelt enshrined socialism into the system in the 1930s and the postmoderns killed the last vestiges of philosophy and right-reason in academia in the 1950s – how then can one claim the unraveling began in the early 1990s? Again, the unraveling is the natural conclusion to all of the events that lead to this point.

There was perhaps a moment, a brief moment in the 1990s when enough men of conscience and reason looked around and realized what was occurring – these men, these few men tried and failed to be heard and make a difference. There was a moment of hope, but the stitches were already beginning to fray.

The 1980s

Alasdair MacIntyre described the state of moral philosophy in his 1981 book After Virtue thusly;

“What we possess…are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both of theoretical and practical.”

If we accept MacIntyre’s thesis, which the subsequent 40 years have proven correct, our view of the 1980s, the hope, the revival, the economic ‘boom’ – all must be reconsidered. None of it was sustainable, not of it turned the tide, it was temporary and ineffective. For many Americans, those in small towns, the reality that MacIntyre observed was less obvious. Ordinary men, “beneficiaries of a culture and community that embrace common-sense as a virtue, know truths that philosophers for centuries have tried in various ways to express. Common-sense is something all men should know; common- sense informs us of certain natural laws, common-sense is God’s gift of understanding.” To these men, that still understood not only the language of morality but its underlying presuppositions, the 1980s were a time of hope, they failed to understand a vast swath of the land could no longer even understand the words they used.

We might then consider the 1980s as something of a false recovery. The United States seemed to have recovered from the doldrums of the 1970s. Boomers had come of age and many came to embrace the premises of capitalism and the American dream. Denominations like the Southern Baptist completed their conservative revivals, allegedly purging themselves liberal theology and apostasy.  But it was an illusion.

In 1980 the U.S. debt began a steep increase, an increase only experienced previously in the Depression, World Wars One and Two, the Civil War and the War of 1812.Government spending increased to a percentage of GDP only surpassed during the Great Depression. Thus 1980 began the debt bubble that continued unabated until the current crisis of 2020. The 1980s appeared prosperous, but they were also destructive. Cutting income while increasing expenditures is a bad economic policy for the individual and governments.

The soul of the culture was in no better shape. Jerry Farwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition took the Christian worldview to the public square and political arena, but to what end? Neither group could cooperate, often working at cross purposes such as the 1988 South Carolina primary. Christians dutifully aligned with one camp or the other to vote for Republican candidates that promised to fight the cultural war, but nothing changed for the better. By the end of the 1980s, the coalitions were falling apart, one after another televangelist was falling into scandal and the church looked as feckless and weak as ever.

The 1990s

Patrick J Buchanan stood before the Republican convention in 1992 and offered prophetic words, “there is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war, is for the soul of America.” Neither Farwell and his group nor Robertson and his cohort supported Buchanan, a Christian that happens to also be Catholic, choosing instead to support the establishment man, the decidedly not Christin nor conservative H.W. Bush. Many traditional-minded Americans heard Buchanan’s words, but not enough. The Great Unraveling had begun.

We saw tanks used on religious dissenters that were just too different, unarmed mothers and their children shot on their front porch at Ruby Ridge by federal agents, the notion of marriage and the family assaulted through don’t ask, don’t tell and America’s burgeoning involvement in global policing – Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo. It also ushered in the age of absurdity and incivility in government with stained dresses, discussions of pubic hair and coke cans in the Senate and impeachment proceedings. These were just small glimpses of the things to come.

Some Americans recognized the danger. Many young Generation Xers left traditional churches to be seduced by the snake oil Peter Drucker, Rick Warren and the Leadership were selling, forming the beginning of the megachurch movement. Southerners rallied to the colors and a revitalized fight to restore the telling of history that had prevailed before the coming of age of postmodern revisionist in the 1960s. A small paleoconservative movement persisted outside of the GOP establishment. Finally, some Americans, reading fully what the changes in the air truly meant formed and joined the growing militia and patriot movement. All attempts to confront the problems with the system that some observed while many ignored.

Global War, Recession and the Cultural War

September 2001 changed all of that. Patriotism ran high, many abandoned their militia and patriot movement efforts to support the cause. Neoconservatism fully ascended, pulling many previously traditional conservatives into its camp – because of war. The U.S. passed the most draconian and invasive domestic spying legislation in history, without debate. We sanctioned torture, assassination and prosecuted war on a nation based upon false intelligence and lies. Christian churches never questioned the actions of the Republican party nor the nation. Of the traditional and paleoconservatives from the 1990s, few remained, the Cindy Sheehan’s of the left precluded many right-minded conservatives of principle from considering questioning the continued prosecution and expansion of the wars in the middle east – it seemed unbecoming in a time of war to many.

By 2008 many Americans had grown tired of the War and those that supported it. Christianity in America has tainted itself with the stench of War, corrupt men like Dick Cheney, blind support for big business, and had gotten into bed with the Republican party with no questions asks with the tacit promise of ‘supporting Israel’ and defending the culture. The financial crisis of 2008 was the first evident shockwave of the crisis.  The election of Barrack Obama and the complete loss of the cultural war in 2015 was predictable.

Christianity supported big business, only to be shunned as hateful and bigoted by even Chick-fil-A, blindly supported GOP politicians skilled at doublespeak and lost everything while being associated with the guilt of war greed and corruption. We gained nothing, lost everything and in the end, have been abandoned. For our efforts, nothing was won and everything lost. The system, without moral people, was destined to fail.

The End of the Culture War and the Beginning of Transformation

William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted in The Fourth Turning that in our era we would face a great crisis after the culture war ended, sometime around 2005 give or take a couple of years America would enter the Fourth Turning, initiated by a crisis. It is obvious, in retrospect, that the Culture War was lost by 2005, monuments came down without objection, our speech was restricted – some still stood in opposition but it was the effort of a desperate few, never a fight that could have been won. The application of their theory to previous eras of U.S. and British history makes sense, it works and explains much that history, sociology or economics alone struggle to understand. The financial crisis of 2008 was certainly transformative and informative. It demonstrated the inherent weakness of monetary and fiscal policy, as well as individual ignorance and collective greed. It changed lives and industries and the solutions implemented deepened the weakness of the system.

If Strauss and Howe were correct, 2008 was simply the beginning, 2020 is the culminating event of the turning, the event that will fundamentally transform everything, in the same way, previous crises did. Speaking of what comes after the crisis they predicted to begin around 2020, they predicted that if “America plunges into an era of depression or violence which by then (2030) has not lifted, we will likely look back on the 1990s as the decade when we valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices.”  Thus, the early 1990s was identified early in this discussion here as the beginning of the unraveling – we had every chance to see things as they were and make different chances, but failed.

The Zeitgeist of our Era

One need not look far on Twitter and other social media outlets to see the true nature of our fellows. Individuals that once professed conservatism actively call for ‘more government action’, for businesses to be closed by government decree, for the Federal government to do something about production and to speed through unprecedented legislation to manage the economy and send money to Americans. Christians have applauded the arrest of a pastor in Florida for conducting church services. Conservatives are doing this without understanding the philosophical presuppositions toward justice and the common good. Many of these are not calling for a better, more just system, but more of the progressive ideological solution.

We see calls to conduct rent strikes and governments across the land denying individuals the use of their property by forbidding evictions for those that do not pay rent. These same people demanding free housing from others today are the same sorts that will demand food from their neighbors if times were just a bit tougher.

A Republican president and senate lead the way to pass some of the most extreme legislation in the nation’s history. Conservatives support these folks, sustained by hope and guidance from the strangest and most inexplicable public information campaign in American history -Qannon.

These are extraordinary times, and we find, we are surrounded by folks that speak and think not from principles but emotions. Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation of the language of moral philosophy applies across the entire spectrum to ideas and thoughts. It is no longer just the ‘radical’ progressives that clamor for authoritarianism, it is most Americans.

The die is cast, Calhoun was right – we are too big to maintain virtue and tyranny has been our destiny since his fight was lost and his words ignored.

Everything will change, things will get more difficult and some things will fall apart – but this system cannot hold. The center has fallen, our foundation forgotten, the language misunderstood and presuppositions that sustained us to this point are no longer understood.

As we endure the hardships and turmoil to come, perhaps some will look back to Calhoun, perhaps when we finally rebuild and reshape ourselves in the aftermath of all of this – we will learn that locality, community, virtue, and morality are important and they must be sustained by something more than emotion and ideology.

Conclusion

It matters little if the theories of Strauss and Howe are valid in whole or part, or conversely if they are complete bunk. We know some things as fact. We know that modern monetary theory (MMT) has never been tried. However, we do know that in each case when governments have massively expanded fiat currency it had devastating effects. The Qualitative Easing (QE) infinity put in place the week of 23 March 2020 is little different than the monetary policies of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. We know that never in history has the entire world shut down its production and economy. We cannot be certain that the wheels of commerce and production start again without difficulties and consequences. However, we do know that the current shutdowns are unsustainable. We know something more of our fellow citizens, not nearly as many of them as we hoped hold conservative principled positions. Many are willing to sacrifice liberty for the idea of security at the first scare. We know that many are not the resilient sorts that weathered the Great Depression – people are more selfish, self-centered, less grounded, less moral and weaker. We know that when people of that sort are afraid, they can be dangerous.

No matter if Strauss and Howe were correct, it is almost inarguable that this is transformative. It is the logical conclusion to a flawed system that Calhoun predicted in 1842. Conservatives have for too long toiled on the plantation of liberalism. We must come to the realization the strict allegiance to notions or originalism vis-à-vis the Constitution are merely pleas to a document borne of flawed ideology, a revolution, and revolt against tradition and conservatism. Calhoun’s attempts to offer remedies were patchwork offerings that may have succeeded if accepted in the early 19th century, but not now. The crisis we currently face will offer trials, suffering, and challenges, but in the end an opportunity to remake our system according to the real traditions of the founding of America.  We can no longer trust our fellows, those radical liberal divested of any connection to the Divine and unaware of Permanent Things to peddle their flawed ideas of license as freedom and self-interest and identity politics at the expense of the common good. The experiment of the evil twin sisters of Classical liberalism, progressivism, and communism is over.

The best sort of government a fallen and flawed man might craft respects Natural Law recognizes Revealed Law, ensures justice (as opposed to equality) and supports the common-good as a virtue. What we have now does none of that, this crisis and the unraveling demonstrates that indisputably. We should look to Calhoun for commentary and to Burke for inspiration in the coming months and years to craft a new way forward.

Adrian Vermeule writing recently in The Atlantic, facing much debate and reproach, suggests a very Burkean and Calhoun-like solution.

“This approach should take as its starting point substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution. These principles include respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality”—indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.”

Calhoun’s contribution to our political philosophy is not finished it seems. If we must have more government, because our fellow man is incapable of being good citizens, as so many now call for. Then let us craft a new system based upon subsidiarity, morality, justice and the common-good; formed from the vestiges of what is good of our traditions and conventions.

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Barry Clark

31 March 2020

@onlyBarryLClark

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Cropsey, Joseph. History of Political Philosophy. United States: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

See, “Liturgy of Liberalism”, Adrian Vermeule, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/01/liturgy-of-liberalism

Clark, Barry, The Rise of Absurdity in Western Philosophical and Political Views (January 22, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3523995 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3523995

Cheek, H. Lee. Calhoun and Popular Rule: The Political Theory of the Disquisition and Discourse. United States: University of Missouri Press, 2004. p. 8. https://amzn.to/2w3agBE

Ibid. p. 18.

Ibid. p. 156.

Calhoun, John Caldwell, and Hemphill, William Edwin. [The papers ] ; The papers of John C. Calhoun. 16. 1846. United States, University of South Carolina Press, 1996. p. 149. “Speech in support of the Veto Power” 28 February, 1842.

See, “Providence and the Straussian Narrative”, https://calhouninstitute.com/providence-and-the-straussian-narrative/

See, Clyde N. Wilson, “Federalists Still Attack Calhoun”,  https://calhouninstitute.com/federalist-still-attack-calhoun/

See, “John C. Calhoun and Slavery as a ‘Positive Good’: What Calhoun Did Not Say”, https://calhouninstitute.com/john-c-calhoun-and-slavery-as-a-positive-good-what-calhoun-did-not-say/

Fletcher, George P.. Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2001. https://amzn.to/39xSTGT

See, “America’s Great Cultural and Political Divide”, https://calhouninstitute.com/americas-great-cultural-political-divide/

See, “The Implications of the “Cowtow” – 1984”, http://barryclark.info/the-implications-of-the-cowtow/

Cropsey, p. 157.

Clark, Barry, From Radical Progressivism to Authoritarianism (December 19, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3506918 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3506918

Fletcher

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. p. 2. https://amzn.to/33YQW5f

The Philosophy of Commonsense: A Cultural War Primer. The Calhoun Institute., Barry L. Clark, 2019. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Philosophy_of_Commonsense/CK6-DwAAQBAJ

Figure 1 and 2, via http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/

PATRICK JOSEPH BUCHANAN, “CULTURE WAR SPEECH: ADDRESS TO THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION” (17 AUGUST 1992), https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-culture-war-speech-speech-text/

Strauss, William., Howe, Neil. The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny. United States: Crown, 2009.p. 272. https://amzn.to/2UyIzu8

Ibid. p. 298.

See, “Beyond Originalism”, Adrian Vermeule, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/

Ibid.

The post Government for the Common Good appeared first on The Calhoun Institute.

I considered beginning this article with some variation of “there is a war going on within conservatism”. I wrote about the issue just the other day. However, that is not quite accurate. The war is long over, the occupation is well underway and reeducation is progressing quite nicely, thank you. Those of us with counterviews were defeated long ago. I can recall when such a war raged. Famously, Jaffa vs. DiLorenzo and most recently, to some degree, French vs. Ahmari.

One might place this war as reigniting in the 1960s. Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss had an amicable relationship, Kirk wrote favorably of Strauss at times at least as late as 1963. However, by the 1980s his views of Straussianism, not of Strauss himself had tainted. By the 1990s, His views of Straussians was much more damning.

More recently—that is, chiefly since the 1950s—Locke has been apotheosized by disciples of Leo Strauss, an amiable and learned professor of politics, strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. Less learned and less amiable than their master, many of the latter-day Straussites demand ideological conformity to a “Lockian interpretation” of the Constitution and of American history and politics generally. That interpretation, though sometimes called “conservative” (as indeed Professor Strauss was personally), is bound up with secularistic and egalitarian assumptions. This adulation of Locke (or rather of a fancied Locke who did not exist), erected into a dogma, is the more curious in view of Strauss’s chapter “Modern Natural Right” in his book Natural Right and History, in which Strauss argues that Locke was powerfully influenced by the thought of Thomas Hobbes—that ‘presumptuous little upstart” (T.S. Eliot’s phrase) whom Strauss did not love. But consistency is a jewel. In the 1950s and 1960s, though, Kirk had nothing but praise for Leo Strauss as a person and as a scholar, in both his published works and in his private letters. Kirk also seems to have been taken with Strauss’s students. –The Conservative Constitution

In the realm of ideas, the broad divide between these views that Kirk came to realize, were pronounced and tangible.  This began in the 1980s but took flight in the next decade. A rising paleoconservative minority, encouraged by Patrick J. Buchannan’s 1992 Cultural War speech, began to write speak and coalesce around the principles of the Old Right. Ideas carried forward in the person of Kirk, ideas that diverged in the students of Strauss.

This debate ended, for a bit, in the 2002 DiLorenzo vs. Jaffa debate. No matter your opinion of who won that debate, the reality of geopolitics, rising nationalism and dominance by neoconservatives essentially stymied further conflict. The paleoconservative movement took a principled stand against endless and expanding war. Straussians and their cousin neoconservatives were ascendant.

One must then wonder, why then, do the Straussians continue to publish pieces such as one that just appeared in Providence? Alexandra Nieuwsma published a piece entitled, The Other Side of the Penny: Considering Abraham Lincoln’s Legacy. There is nothing original in this article, it a story often told. To paraphrase, there is an obligatory recognition he freed the slaves; one of the points that DiLorenzo argued was never his intention, concern nor even something he practically did. His Emancipation Proclamation was as much of a diplomatic document as anything else; intended to dissuade Britain from considering aiding the Confederacy. These sorts of articles simply must begin with this overstated claim.

Another standard aspect of pieces like this is a great number of words devoted mid-article to explaining away acts such as imprisoning dissenting newspaper editors and the suspension of habeas corpus.  Nieuwsma argues that “an honest assessment must admit Lincoln is superficially inconsistent, this does not mean he is substantially incoherent.” She goes on to provide four points that she believes prove that Lincoln was not incoherent. Points that themselves do not cohere with the stated views of many of the Framers.

This always builds to a predictable crescendo; Lincoln was enacting the intent of the Framers, giving legal status to the Declaration and all the Lockean concepts contained therein. In summary, Lincoln did bad things, broke the law, exceeded executive power, denied Americans liberty, confiscated property without compensation and essentially ignored the Constitution – all because he was good and for liberty and the Constitution. It is a preposterous argument. It does not cohere.

To be fair to Nieuwsma, she does not end her article with the typical narrative. She does not make the next reach, typical of these pieces, that generally proclaims something to the effect that we need to expand the principles of equality and liberty that Lincoln made war to advocate to the rest of the world. She ends with an argument that we might never again be able to trust another president with the power Lincoln wielded. The most tragic flaw of her piece, not unique to her, is her failure to see the incoherence of justifying what can rightly be termed as tyranny in the defense of liberty.

Just because she did not make the reach does not mean it is not there. Two days before her article, Providence published a video from their Christianity and National Security Conference. The video is of a speech by Nicole Bibbins Sedaca entitled, How Christians Should Respond to the Global Decline in Democracy. It should be obvious, should be, to any Christian that concern for with global democracy has nothing to do with Christianity, it is foolish to even discuss exporting democracy as part of the National Security Policy – and that should be obvious no matter if one claims a religion or not. US policies all over the world, and in the Middle East particularly, have proven that foisting democracy on a nation that has no cultural or historical basis for democracy is foolish; it ends poorly.

Before the great democratic experiment in the Middle East, ancient communities of Christians lived side by side with Muslims. Consider, “[p]ervasive persecution of Christians, sometimes amounting to genocide, is ongoing in parts of the Middle East, and has prompted an exodus in the past two decades, according to a report commissioned by the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt.”(Guardian) This is the result of exporting democracy to cultures and people that had no cultural or historical foundation to support or embrace it. Perhaps Christians should be asking what is so Christian about Democracy? If we take Nieuwsma at her word, Lincoln made war for his idea of democracy. The US spent most of the last twenty years fighting to export and make stick democracy in faraway places. That seems a bit illiberal, totalitarian and even war-like to me, not a Christian perspective.

Why is this divide of principles, that began in earnest with the students of Strauss, still a battle? One could count on their fingers and toes the number of true conservatives that write about the counterview? The revisionists have won; there is no more real debate. So, why do Straussians still expend digital paper to regurgitate the false narrative that all the framers were Lockean, spreading democracy is God’s will and our manifest destiny? Simple, their historical narrative does not cohere, many unsuspecting people repeat parts of it, but upon analysis it never holds. They must continue to repeat it if they ever hope to drive policy toward their classical liberal perspective. God help us.

Twitter at @onlyBarryLClark.

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Brion McClanahan, writing recently in Chronicles, on a topic that at first glance, seems tiresome, yet, it is relevant in ways many conservatives fail to understand. Of late there has been something of a resurgence in a narrative oft-repeated by Claremont types and other Straussian inspired, Jaffa influenced ‘conservatives’.

Strangely, inexplicitly, bizarrely, some of the most recent attacks have been directed at John C. Calhoun. One would think that Calhoun, having been interred and moved twice physically, and having been subjected to numerous years of character assassination, his enemies would console themselves that the great statesman and debater was truly dead and buried; and, almost thoroughly expunged from the public square. Why then continue to figuratively dig the man up to subject him to further inquisitions, incriminations, and accusations?

Because, Calhoun, it seems, has been written into the meta-narrative of a Straussian play that places him in a leading role as the inventor, originator and creator of the modern progressive movement. Mathew J. Peterson, Claremont V.P. of education, recently explained to me, “Claremont pioneered the research and scholarship revealing that the progressives explicitly rejected the founding and its principles and purposes.” This on the heels of an article by John Daniel Davidson entitled, ‘The Ghost of John C. Calhoun Haunts Today’s American Left’.  Davidson’s argument is that Calhoun is in fact nearer aligned with the left and that his political views disagreed with the Founders.  In a response article, I asked Davidson, which Framers he was referring to? Surely, he must have forgotten men like George Mason, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Yates, James Monroe, and many others.

But how could such an absurd notion as claiming Calhoun is singlehandedly responsible for inventing every ‘evil’ thing to ever visit itself upon America, from slavery to secession to progressivism, ever see the light of day? McClanahan provides a glimpse into how, it consists of a concerted, deliberate and sustained effort to rewrite history to portray ‘the party of Lincoln’ as the ultimate force for good in the universe. See his full article, ‘The Reinvention of Reconstruction’.

Most conservative, long ago, accepted the key tenets of this narrative. Trump in his recent State of the Union address paid the habitual homage to Lincoln.  As McClanahan states,

Many [conservatives] have also been deceived by a leftist narrative of Reconstruction as a flawed but ultimately virtuous project, and this has distorted their view of the entirety of American history.

He continues, “the Constitution ceased to be the anchor of the federal republic, and dangerous utopian ideals of ‘equality’, political centralization, and mass democracy” took hold.  George Fletcher in, Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy states we essentially had a second constitution after 1865 based upon “organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy” concepts different and opposed to those of our first constitution which promulgated “peoplehood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republicanism”. Fletcher is no enemy of Lincoln; he stated this change as a positive good. It is interesting to note, Fletcher is a lawyer, not a professional historian. His assertion that Lincoln fundamentally changed the nature and meaning of the Constitution contradicts the Straussian historical portrayal that this was always the intent. In their telling, Calhoun and others simply did not get it and those nasty anti-federalist among the Framers must have been in agreement with the grand plan. That is, If we accept the explanation of Davidson at The Federalist.

The impact of this meta-narrative, so well-woven into the minds and beliefs of ordinary Americans, has not been insignificant. As McClanahan notes,

“Conservatives would no longer be hidebound to defend traditional order or ‘well-constructed institutions,’ which were the terms Edmund Burke used to define the basis of traditional conservatism. […] and other social justice conservatives have adopted the imperial rhetoric of these foreign revolutionaries and have made their reformist agenda the so-called conservative cause of the 21st century.”

The denial of historical fact, that there were two views of the Framing, separate points of view that existed in debate and politics until 1850, is egregious enough. That this distortion has been intentional, systematic and almost total in its effect is shameful.

McClanahan concludes, “American conservatives must understand that by praising the Reconstruction Republican Party they are indirectly conceding the field. There can be no American conservative consensus while a progressive view of history that stretches back to the Civil War and Reconstruction is mislabeled and repackaged as ‘conservatism,’ and that is what these social justice conservatives have unwittingly accomplished.”

I would only add that this perversion of truth and provable facts was not as “unwitting” and Brion kindly and gently suggests. This has all been and is part of a concerted effort to press a very specific agenda going back to Leo Strauss and Henry Jaffa. The ‘conservatism’ this ideology prescribes is ultimately not conservatism at all. Tradition-minded, conservatively-inclined Americans will need to recapture authentic conservatism if we hope to maintain anything of what the Republic was intended to be.

This is no longer a ‘Southern’ issue to be denounced by a small group of dedicated ‘reactionary’ historians. The line from this Jaffite narrative to a centralized, ‘always benevolent’, unrestrained totalitarianism is as clear and present as the line from progressivism to authoritarian socialism. Neither fit within the original intent.

Connect with Barry on Twitter, @onlyBarryLClark.

The post Jaffite Historical Agenda appeared first on The Calhoun Institute.

By Russell Kirk

This essay was first printed in the Southern Partisan Magazine, Volume III, Number 1 (1983).

INTRODUCTION

One hundred and forty years ago, Senator Henry Clay proposed a constitutional amendment to limit the veto power of the president of the United States. Senator John C. Calhoun replied to Clay; and that speech in reply is the most succinct version of Calhoun’s famous doctrine of concurrent majorities. Calhoun argued, in effect, that there ought to exist several powers of veto upon the impulses of temporary numerical majorities.

“As the Government approaches nearer and nearer to the one absolute and single power, the will of the greater number, its action will become more and more disturbed and irregular; faction, corruption and anarchy, will more and more abound; patriotism will daily decay, and affection and reverence for the Government grow weaker and weaker until the final shock occurs, when the system will rush to ruin; and the sword take the place of law and Constitution.” So Calhoun said in 1842.

The will of the greater number or, at least, the will of the Washington lobbies that claim to represent the greater number—generally prevails in American politics during these closing decades of the twentieth century. In our time, Chief Justice Warren and his colleagues, in their infinite wisdom reduced all political representation to a mathematical Benthamite basis, what John Randolph called King Numbers. What Calhoun described as “the numerical, or absolute majority” has triumphed altogether over the “concurrent majority” that he advocated.

During the same period the American Republic has ceased to be a nation of states. Deliberate centralization of power has reduced the states to a condition little better than that of provinces in an empire. Even squabbles between children and schoolteachers are gravely accepted for trial in federal district courts. The rising generation in this country is unaware that most of the centralization did not occur until the administration of President Lyndon Johnson.

During the latter half of the twentieth century, increasingly the federal government has divided the American people into two fiscal classes: those who pay the taxes and those who receive personal benefits from federal expenditures. This scheme of “transfer payments” will be egalitarian tyranny, Calhoun declared. The system already is deeply rooted.

Those are only three of the more important alterations in the Constitution of the United States, which had no stronger adherent —even in 1832—than Calhoun. These changes have been effected, chiefly in the past half century, without either formal amendment of the Constitution or conscious popular assent. Calhoun foresaw their coming. The unhappy consequences of these alterations are not yet fully felt. They will be.

We still live surrounded by souvenirs of Calhoun’s era. Quite as some streets of Columbia and Charleston and surviving country houses in the neighborhood of Fort Hill are memorials of a more spirited time, so the bones of the Constitution still may be inspect-ed. That something of our past remains quick—why, that is the achievement, in considerable part, of Calhoun and his school.

The frame of the society defended by Calhoun has been shattered nevertheless. After the elapse of another fourteen decades, will anything of the old order, political or moral, endure recognizably? Will the political and social alterations have grown so monstrous that the colossus called the United States will have become incapable even of self-defense?

One is tempted to concur with Chesterton’s Eastern sages who “know all evil things” and are resigned to ruin:

“The Wise men know what wicked things

Are written on the sky,

They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings.

Hearing the heavy purple wings,

Where the forgotten seraph kings

Still plot how God shall die.“

Yet the example of Calhoun’s fortitude heartens some of us to rally round the permanent things. As Burke reminded the rising generation in his time, what had seemed like ineluctable destiny for a people might be altered abruptly by a girl at the door of an inn, or by a common soldier. It is even conceivable, such is the mystery of providence, that the politics of John Caldwell Calhoun might fructify in the twenty-first century.

I wrote my reflection on Calhoun, published as a half-chapter in The Conservative Mind, just thirty years ago. On re-reading those pages, in the sixth edition of my book, I find that Calhoun seems to me more prescient now even than he did then. The kind of society to which Calhoun gave his allegiance has lost much ground during the past three decades. That is one reason why Calhoun’s phrases tell so keenly in the ‘Eighties — and why the successive volumes of the first full edition of this writing, coming from the University of South Carolina Press, obtain some serious readers.

In his own time, Calhoun was best understood by a Yankee of Yankees, Orestes Brownson. Those two shared the conviction that though a man may sacrifice himself for the people, he must never sacrifice himself to the people. That high principle, along with much else, is our legacy from Calhoun. In one aspect Calhoun was the voice of what Henry Adams called “the sable genius of the South.” In another aspect, Calhoun was the best exponent of that idea of politi¬cal order which underlies both the written constitution and the unwritten constitution of the American Republic.

These lines are written in the teeth of a Michigan snowstorm at Piety Hill, your servant’s counterpart of Fort Hill. Fourteen volumes of Calhoun’s Papers confront me from my library shelves. They do not seem incongruous in this northern fastness. It would not be incongruous for us all to pay close attention to Calhoun during the Bicentenary of the Constitution of the United States.

JOHN C. CALHOUN—CONSERVATIVE

That zeal which flared like Greek fire in Randolph burned in Calhoun, too; but it was contained in the Cast-Iron Man as in a furnace, and Calhoun’s passion glowed out only through his eyes. No man was more stately, more reserved, more regularly governed by an inflexible will. Calvinism molded John C. Calhoun’s character as it shaped his speeches and books; for though the dogma proper was dying in him as it had decayed in the Adamses—so that Calhoun, like John Adams, squinted toward Unitarianism—still there remained that relentless acceptance of logic, that rigid morality, that servitude to duty; and these things made the man constant in purpose, prodigious in energy.

Unlike Randolph—who possessed, along with his ancient lineage, the richest library in Virginia—all his life Calhoun was a man of few books, relying upon independent meditation. Although many degrees removed from Lincoln’s “short and simple annals of the poor,” the Calhouns were tough upcountry Carolinians, tried and purged in the Indian terrors of the border, belligerent champions of frontier democracy. Where the boy Randolph read the English novelists and dramatists and Quixote and Gil Bias, the young Calhoun memorized passages from The Rights of Man. It was experience of the world, running contrary to his early discipline, that made of him a conservative. At Yale, when a student, he dared to confute the mighty Federalist professor Timothy Dwight; and he entered politics as a Jeffersonian, a nationalist and expansionist, an advocate of internal improvements, and a War Hawk. From the beginning he set his sights high; presently the presidency of the United States became his target. But one moving conviction, which in Calhoun overruled all his other ideas and even mastered his burning ambition, intervened to convert him into the most resolute enemy of national consolidation and of omnicompetent democratic majorities: his devotion to freedom. This principle ruined him as a politician. As a man of thought and force in history he was transfigured by it.

“If there be a political proposition universally true,” Calhoun said, “one which springs directly from the nature of man, and is independent of circumstances,—it is, that irresponsible power is inconsistent with liberty, and must corrupt those who exercise it. On this great principle our political system rests.” Calhoun loved the Constitution of the United States; in him was nothing of Randolph’s suspicion of the federal organization from its very inception, “the butterfly with poison under its wings.” Because he loved it, he brought it close to destruction in 1832. Because he loved it, he proposed that it be altered—or strengthened—to protect the rights of sectional minorities. Otherwise, said Calhoun, civil war would shake the nation to its foundations; and whatever the outcome of that war, the United States could never again be the same people under the same laws. He was a prophet wholly accurate.

To enter the labyrinth of dead politics and disappointed hopes within which Calhoun’s first dozen years as a national politician were encompassed is not to our present purpose. Those were the years when Calhoun listened to Randolph’s sarcastic passion, first with stiff antagonism, presently with drawing conviction; then the tariff of 1824 opened like a great crack in the earth before Calhoun, and he knew that in his early years he had sadly misunderstood the nature of politics and tendency of the nation. He had believed the Republic to be guided* by a benevolent popular reason; and now it was manifest that if reason operated in the enactment of the new tariff, it was a malignant reason, calculated to plunder the people of one section in order to benefit a class of persons in another section of the country. Calhoun was no narrow particularist; he had shared the nationalistic ambitions of 1812; but here he discovered a shameless imposition, a contempt for the right of the South so long as legislation benefited the constituents of a congressional majority. Calhoun had believed the Constitution a secure safeguard against oppression by section or class; and now it seemed that, given selfish interest sufficiently powerful, majorities would warp the Constitution to suit their ends. Calhoun had thought that an appeal to the popular sense of right could redress occasional legislative injustice; and now it could hardly be denied that Congressmen who voted for the tariff of 1824 merely were gratifying the avarice of the people they represented.

A mind like Calhoun’s works solemnly and ponderously. He did not at once go over to Randolph and defiance; but with the passage of the years, Calhoun moved unflinchingly toward a repudiation of optimism, egalitarianism, meliorism and Jeffersonian democracy. Presently he had gone beyond Randolph. Calhoun passionately desired popularity and office, but he did not value these things above his conscience; therefore he surrendered his national reputation in order to protect his state, his section, his order and the traditions of American rural society. “Democracy, as I understand and accept it, requires me to sacrifice myself for the masses, not to them. Who knows not that if you would save the people, you must often oppose them?” And Calhoun thought he might be able to save something else besides: the Union. That he failed in every one of these hopes is undeniable. But he did succeed in endowing a dumb and bewildered Southern conservatism with political philosophy; and he described unequivocally the forbidding problem of the rights of individuals and groups menaced by the will of overbearing majorities.

“Stripped of all its covering,” Calhoun declared in his terse and inexorable way, “the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or a consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting ultimately on the solid basis of sovereignty of the States or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimitedness, in which injustice, and violence, and force must finally prevail.” He was not speaking of South Carolina alone, nor even merely of the Southern states, Calhoun said: once the absolute power of majorities to do as they like with minorities is accepted, the liberties of no section or class are safe. Having reduced South Carolina to submission, the interests which passed the Tariff of Abominations and the Force Act would proceed to other conquests. He predicted a similar exploitation of industrial workers in the Northern cities: “After we are exhausted, the contest will be between the capitalists and the operatives; for into these two classes it must, ultimately, divide society. The issue of the struggle here must be the same as it has been in Europe. Under the operation of the system, wages must sink more rapidly than the prices of the necessaries of life, till the portion of the products of their labor left to them, will be barely sufficient to preserve existence. For the present, the pressure is on our section.” These words were written in 1828, two decades before the promulgation of the Communist Manifesto; and they were written by the conservative planter of Fort Hill, who warned the old agricultural interest and the new industrial interest and the yet inchoate masses of industrial labor that when law is employed to oppress any class or section, the end of constitutions and the substitution of ruthless power is at hand. In this fashion the industrial conservatism of Alexander Hamilton, the great Northern manufacturing interest, was invited by the agricultural conservatism of John C. Calhoun to peer into the future.

Groping for a practical remedy, Calhoun turned to Nullification, derived from Jefferson’s old Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions: a State might set at defiance any act of Congress clearly unconstitutional, refuse to allow that measure to operate within her boundaries, and appeal to the other states for aid and comfort, so that the unscrupulous majority which had enacted oppressive legislation might behold the power of laws and be compelled to withdraw their claims. Nullification, obviously, was a doctrine full of perils to national existence, and John Randolph told his constituents, “Nullification is nonsense” — a State could not at once be out of the Union and in the Union. President Jackson’s intrepid temper had brought matters nearly to a test of force, in which South Carolina would have been crushed, when Henry Clay’s compromise (reluctantly endorsed by Calhoun) ignored the principles at stake and for some years glossed over the tremendous problem by reducing the tariff.

Calhoun knew he had failed; and for the eighteen years of life that remained to him, he sought painfully for some means of reconciling majority claims with minority rights, under the rule of law. Nullification had succeeded just this far, that it proved power can be opposed successfully only by power. Yet the essence of civilized government is reliance not upon power, but upon consent. Can the rights of minorities be adjusted to this grand principle of consent? If not, government is ah imposition. For, said Calhoun, governments at heart are designed chiefly to protect minorities — numerical minorities, or economic or sectional or religious or political. Preponderant majorities need no protection, and in a rude way can exist without proper government: they have naked force to maintain themselves. The authors of the Constitution had recognized that government is the shelter of minorities, and had done their best to afford protection by strict limitation of federal powers and the added guarantee of a bill of rights. These had not sufficed:

We have acted, with some exceptions, as if the General Government had the right to interpret its own powers, without limitation or check; and though many circumstances have favored us, and greatly impeded the natural progress of events, under such an operation of the system, yet we already see, in whatever direction we turn our eyes, the growing symptoms of disorder and decay—the growth of faction, cupidity, and corruption; and the decay of patriotism, integrity, and disinterestedness. In the midst of youth, we see the flushed cheek, and the short and feverish breath, that mark the approach of the fatal hour; and come it will, unless there be a speedy and radical change—a return to the great conservative principles which brought the Republican party into authority, but which, with the possession of power and prosperity, it has long ceased to remember.

“Conservative principles” — here Calhoun, so early as 1832, had begun to discern a necessity greater than “liberalism” and “progress” and “equality.” These conservative principles, if efficacious, must be radical—they must go to the root of things; but their aim is to conserve freedom and order and the quiet old ways men love. Calhoun is talking of American “conservatism” in the year of the English Reform Bill, despite the customary dependence of America upon Britain for philosophical discoveries. One catches here a glimpse of the prescience of a solitary, powerful, melancholy mind which has pierced through the cloud of transitory political haggling to a future of social turbulence and moral desolation.

For eighteen years, then, Calhoun probed in his sober Scotch-Irish mind these conundrums; and in the year after his death there were published two treatises which condensed his meditations into a form as forceful and as logical as Calvin’s Institutes. The germ of his argument he had expressed cogently in a letter to William Smith, July 3, 1843: “The truth is—the Government of the uncontrolled numerical majority, is but the absolute and despotic form of popular governments; —just as that of the uncontrolled will of one man, or a few, is of monarchy or aristocracy; and it has, to say the least, it has as strong a tendency to oppression, and the abuse of its powers, as either of the others.” How is democratic government to be made consonant with justice? A Disquisition on Government endeavors to provide a general answer to this question; A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States is an application of these general principles to the exigencies of mid-nineteenth-century America.

“Whatever road one travels one comes at last upon the austere figure of Calhoun, commanding every highway of the southern mind,” observes Parrington, with that picturesqueness he sometimes attains. “He subjected the philosophy of the fathers to critical analysis; pointed out wherein he conceived it to be faulty; cast aside some of its most sacred doctrines; provided another foundation for the democratic faith which he professed. And when he had finished the great work of reconstruction, the old Jeffersonianism that had satisfied the mind of Virginia was reduced to a thing of shreds and patches, acknowledged by his followers to have been mistaken philosophy, blinded by romantic idealism and led astray by French humanitarianism. Calhoun, therefore, completes the work of Randolph in demolishing Jefferson’s abstract equality and liberty, which rights Jefferson had assumed to be complementary; and Calhoun, accepting Randolph’s warning against the tyrannical tendencies inherent in the manipulation of positive law by callous majorities, struggles to devise an effective check upon numerical preponderance.

The old Senator from South Carolina, writing in haste because conscious of his approaching end, makes no endeavor to follow John Adams’ historical method for studying effective checks upon arbitrary power. “What I propose is far more limited,—to explain on what principles government must be formed, in order to resist, by its own interior structure, or, to use a single term, organism,—the tendency to abuse power. This structure, or organism, is what is meant by constitution, in its strict and more usual sense.” He has commenced, then, by employing a term which since has become of major significance in any discussion of the state, “organism”; and he proceeds in a tenor equally modern. He repudiates root and branch the compact theory of government, as had Burke (except for his metaphorical adaptation of the phrase) and John Adams; government is no more a matter of our choice than is our breathing, being instead the product of necessity. No “state of nature” in which man lived independent of his fellows ever did exist, nor ever can. “His natural state is, the social and political—the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race.” But constitution, far from being the product of necessity, must be the work of refined art; and without this tender construction, the end of government must in great measure be baffled. “Constitution is the contrivance of man, while government is of Divine ordination. Man is left to perfect what the wisdom of the Infinite ordained.”

Now true constitutions are always based upon the conservative principle: they are the product of a nation’s struggles; they must spring from the bosom of the community: human sagacity is not adequate to construct them in the abstract. They are a natural growth; in a sense they are the voice of God expressed through the people; but nature and God work through historical experience, and all sound constitutions are effective embodiments of compromise. They reconcile the different interests or portions of the community with one another, in order to avert anarchy. “All constitutional governments, of whatever class they may be, take the sense of the community by its parts,—each through its appropriate organ; and regard the essence of all its parts as the sense of the whole. . . . And, hence, the great and broad distinction between governments is,—not that of the one, the few, or the many,—but that of the constitutional and the absolute.”

We should not judge of whether a state is governed justly and freely by the abstract equality of its citizens, therefore. The real question is whether individuals and groups are protected in their separate interests, against monarch or majority, by a constitution founded upon compromise. If (for instance) government, by unequal fiscal action, divides the community into two principal classes of those who pay the taxes, and those who receive the benefits, this is tyranny, however egalitarian in theory. And so Calhoun comes to the doctrine of concurrent majorities, his most important single contribution to political thought. A true majority (to express the concept in its simplest terms) is not a simple headcount: instead, it is a balancing and compromising of interests, in which all important elements of the population concur, feeling that their rights have been respected:

There are two different modes in which the sense of the community may be taken; one simply by the right of suffrage, unaided; the other, by the right through a proper organism. Each collects the sense of the majority. But one regards numbers only, and considers the whole community as a unit, having but one common interest throughout; and collects the sense of the greater number of the whole, as that of the community. The other, on the contrary, regards interests as well as numbers,—considering the community as made up of different and conflicting interests, as far as the action of the government is concerned; and takes the sense of each, through its majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all, as the sense of the entire community. The former of these I shall call numerical, or absolute majority; and the latter, the concurrent, or constitutional majority.

Calhoun has rejected with scorn the demagogue’s abstraction called “the people” No “people” exists as a body with identical, homogeneous interests; this is a fantasy of metaphysicians; in reality, there are only individuals and groups. Polling the numerical majority is an attempt to determine the sense of the people, but it is unlikely to ascertain the sense of the true majority; for the right of important groups may be altogether neglected under such arrangements. In his Discourse on the Constitution, Calhoun cites as an instance of this injustice the tendency of simple numerical majorities to throw all power into the grasp of an urban population, in effect disfranchising rural regions. “The relative weight of population depends as much on circumstances, as on number. The concentrated population of cities, for example, would ever have, under such a distribution, far more weight in the government, than the same number in the scattered and sparse population of the country. One hundred thousand individuals concentrated into a city two miles square, would have much more influence than the same number scattered over two hundred miles square…. To distribute power then, in proportion to population, would be, in fact, to give the control of government, in the end, to the cities; and to subject the rural and agricultural population to that description of population which usually congregate in them,—and, ultimately, to the dregs of the population.”

In general, Calhoun’s is a view similar to Disraeli’s opinion that votes should be weighed, as well as counted; yet Calhoun proposes to weigh not merely the individual votes of particular persons, but the several wills of large groups in the nation. He proposes to take into account the differing economic elements, the geographical sections, perhaps yet other distinct interests; and they are to be protected from the encroachments of one another by a mutual negative, or rather a commonly available negative. “It is this negative power, — the power of preventing or arresting the action of the government, — be it called by what term it may, —veto, interposition, nullification, check, or balance of power, —which, in fact, forms the constitution. They are all but different names for the negative power.” Perhaps such an arrangement invites the stalemate of the Polish liberum veto-, but Calhoun believes that common convenience will dissuade these chief interests or groups from petty interference with the conduct of affairs. Promptness of action, indeed, is diminished, but a compensating gain in moral power occurs, for harmony and unanimity and the confidence of security from oppression make such a nation great. In neither of his treatises does Calhoun attempt to outline a precise reorganization of the American government upon these principles, although he suggests that a plural executive might be one means of accomplishing the design: either member of the executive to represent a particular section and to conduct a particular portion of the executive business, such as foreign affairs or domestic matters, but the approval of both officers to be required for the ratification of acts of Congress. Calhoun states that true responsibility for accomplishing beneficial reorganization lies with the North, where the oppressive tariff and the anti-slavery agitation commenced; the North having set this train of events in motion, the North should be prepared to draw up a solution.

Democratic institutions will be safer in a state which has adopted the principle of concurrent majorities, Calhoun proceeds to demonstrate, and under such conditions the suffrage may be extended more widely than prudence would allow otherwise, “but it cannot be so far extended in those of the numerical majority, without placing them ultimately under the control of the more ignorant and dependent portions of the community.” Where the theory of the concurrent majority prevails, the rich and the poor will not huddle in opposing camps, but will rank together under the respective banners of their sections and interests; the class struggle will be diminished by establishing a community advantage.

At this point, Calhoun enters upon a kind of digression concerning absolute liberty vs. real liberty. Application of the concurrent-majority principle, he says, will allow each section or region to shape its institutions according to its particular needs; a numerical majority tends to impose standardized and arbitrary patterns upon the whole nation, which is an outrage against social liberty. Two ends of government exist: to protect, and to perfect society. Historical origin, character of population, physical configuration, and a variety of other circumstances naturally distinguish one region from another. The means of protecting and perfecting these separate societies must vary accordingly. This is the doctrine of diversity, opposed to the doctrine of uniformity; Calhoun echoes Montesquieu and Burke.

Liberty and security are essential to the improvement of man, and the particular degree and regulation of liberty and security in any society should be locally determined; each people know their own needs best. “Liberty, indeed, though among the greatest of blessings, is not so great as that of protection; inasmuch, as the end of the former is the progress and improvement of the race, — while that of the latter is its preservation and perpetuation. And hence, when the two come into conflict, liberty must, and ever ought, to yield to protection; as the existence of the race is of greater moment that its improvement.” Calhoun is referring obliquely to the menace of slavery in the South, here, but with propriety he expresses himself in general terms. Some communities require a greater amount of power than others for self-protection; these local necessities would be recognized by the idea of the concurrent majority, or mutual right of veto.

Liberty per se presently becomes Calhoun’s topic; and he severs himself completely from Jeffersonian theory. Liberty forced on a people unfit for it is a curse, bringing anarchy. Not all people are equally entitled to liberty, which is “the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual.” Liberty and complete equality, far from being inseparable, are incompatible, if by pure equality is meant equality of condition. For progress, moral and material, is derived from inequality of condition; and without progress, liberty decays:

Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other in intelligence, sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habits of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity,—the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality between those who may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree, and those who may be deficient in them. The only means by which this result can be prevented are, either to impose such restrictions on the exertions of those who may possess them in a high degree, as will place them on a level with those who do not; or to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions. But to impose such restrictions on them would be destructive of liberty,—while, to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions, would be to destroy the desire of bettering their condition. It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files. This gives progress its greatest impulse. To force the front rank back to the rear, or attempt to push forward the rear into line with the front, by the interposition of the government, would put an end to the impulse, and effectually arrest the march of Progress.

This is tellingly put, as neat an indictment of the social ennui la-tent in egalitarian collectivism as the literature of politics affords. Calhoun immediately adds, “These great and dangerous errors have their origin in the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal;—than which nothing can be more unfounded and false.” He means his observations to be applied particularly to Negro slavery, but one may lift them out of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day.

Liberty and security, then, should be measured and applied upon practical and local considerations, rather than upon abstract claims of universal right. Real liberty is best secured by the concurrent majority, and thus the impetus toward progress which accompanies and nourishes liberty is healthiest under the harmony of concurrence. Yet is any arrangement of this sort possible in government? Are not great interests too diverse for concurrence, and is not agreement obtained too tardily for efficient action by the state? Calhoun believes he can answer these objections. Necessity will provide sufficient incentive. Cannot the twelve individuals who compose a jury manage to concur? Will not the necessity of mutual conciliation promote a common good feeling? Supreme among historical examples, was not this veto power an essential characteristic of the Roman Republic? Calhoun will confess the existence of no obstacle which practice and forbearance cannot surmount.

Some persons may object, says Calhoun, that a free press might accomplish all the good he expects from the principle of concurrent majority. So exalted an opinion of the function of newspapers may seem amusing in the twentieth century, the press not having followed that line of progress which nineteenth century optimists charted for it; but Calhoun answers the suggestion soberly. His argument is a passable summary of his whole doctrine of concurrence.

What is called public opinion, instead of being the united opinion of the whole community, is, usually, nothing more than the opinion or voice of the strongest interest, or combination of interests; and, not infrequently, of a small, but energetic and active portion of the whole. Public opinion, in relation to government and its policy, is as much divided and diversified, as are the interests of the community; and the press, instead of being the organ of the whole, is usually but the organ of these various and diversified interests respectively; or, rather, of the parties growing out of them. It is used by them as the means of controlling public opinion, and of so moulding it, as to promote their peculiar interests, and to aid in carrying on the warfare of party. But as the organ and instrument of parties, in government of the numerical majority, it is as incompetent as suffrage itself, to counteract the tendency to oppression and abuse of power; —and can, no more than that, supersede the necessity of the concurrent majority.

Bold and fertile opinions, these. Calhoun’s Disquisition is open to many of the objections that commonly apply to detailed projects for political reform. He slides quickly over formidable objections, he evades any very precise description of how the principle may be applied, and he really has small hope of any immediate practical consequence from these ideas. Yet these flaws yawn more conspicuously in the great popular reform-schemes of our era — Marxism, Fabian Socialism, distributism, syndicalism, production-planning. Calhoun is not playing Lycurgus; he is describing a philosophical principle, and it is one of the most sagacious and vigorous suggestions ever advanced by American conservatism. The concurrent majority itself; representation of citizens by section and interest, rather than by pure numbers; the insight that liberty is a product of civilization and a reward of virtue, not an abstract right; the acute distinction between moral equality and equality of condition; the linking of liberty and progress; the strong protest against domination by class or region, under the guise of numerical majority — these concepts, provocative of thought and capable of modern application, give Calhoun a place beside John Adams as one of the two most eminent American political writers. Calhoun demonstrated that conservatism can project as well as complain.

Randolph’s sombre devotion descends into the violence of Beverley Tucker’s Partisan Leader; Calhoun’s exacting logic is followed by a decade of fire-eating, and then explosion. So far as preservation of the Old South was concerned, their conservatism was impotent — indeed, it hurried the Southern states along the road to the Civil War, which in five years did more to extirpate Southern society than a generation of civil domination by the North could have effected. The repressive nervousness of the South after Nullification was no atmosphere encouraging to serious thought, and the poverty of spirit and body which, like an Old Man of the Sea, clung upon Reconstruction discouraged any respectable intellectual conservatism. Only vague cautionary impulses guided the South after 1865, combining with popular distrust of the Negro, and lack of material resources to slacken the rate of social alteration. The modern South cannot be said to obey any consciously conservative ideas — only conservative instincts, exposed to all the corruption that instinct unlit by principle encounters in a literate age. The affection for state sovereignty, the duties of a gentleman, and the traditions of society which Randolph and Calhoun extolled found their finest embodiment in General Lee; and, with Lee, these ideas yielded to superior force at Appomattox. The political representative of those principles was a man of parts less exemplary than Lee’s, but still a man of high courage and dignity, Jefferson Davis. Eighty years later, progressive vulgarization of those Southern instincts put into the Mississippi senatorship that had been Davis’ such a man as Theodore Bilbo.

Randolph and Calhoun left no disciples really worthy of their preceptors, nor did they save the planter-society. Those Southern fears and prejudices which Randolph’s erratic brilliance sublimated into aristocratic libertarianism, and which Calhoun’s precise wisdom compressed into a legal brief, broke free from the slender tether by which these two lonely minds had controlled their fierce energy. The force of Southern popular enthusiasm was smashed by the younger violence of Northern industrialism and nationalism; long thereafter, the Southern people groped dazed through the dark wood of the modern world, unhappily envious of a mechanized age which was not meant for such as they.

The great majority of Southern people, indeed, never apprehended much more of the doctrines of Randolph and Calhoun than their apology for slavery and its defense through state powers. The more subtle and enduring details of the conservatism for which these statesmen spoke were lost upon the common Southern mind—their distrust of popular fancies, their anxiety for continuity of institutions, their devotion to an ennobling liberty. Within the South itself, the levelling and innovating urge that everywhere dominated American life was at work remorselessly all the while Southern orators paid lip-service to the Virginian orator and the Carolinian prophet. A series of state constitution conventions—Virginia’s in 1829-1830 only the first—swept away those protections for property, those delicate balances of power, and those advantages of compromise which Randolph and Calhoun praised; the new constitutions expressed the triumph of doctrinaire alteration. North Carolina in 1835, Maryland in 1836, Georgia in 1839; a second wave in the ‘fifties, with change coming to Maryland in 1850-51, for a second time to Virginia in 1850, and, in the form of constitutional amendments, a large alteration of the Georgia constitution still farther during those years—these popular victories brought greater equality of abstract political right, but hardly greater freedom. Popular demands for equality and simplicity met with no effective opposition in the new Southern states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida. Thus the way was cleared for the radical constitutions of Reconstruction days, the subsequent disgrace and reaction, and the permanently blighted character of Southern political life.

Democratization and simplification of government were not peculiar to the South, of course, being only the local manifestation of a national tendency; Chancellor Kent, in New York, spoke against it as bitterly as did Randolph in Virginia. The Southern planter-aristocracy could no more withstand this tide of feeling than could, in the North, the Federalists and their heirs the Whigs. Better than anyone else, Tocqueville analyzes this American enthusiasm for constitutional alteration and social levelling. It was the expansive impulse of a people whose links with traditional society were nearly severed and among whom the wide distribution of new land diminished reverence for magistrates and establishments; Rousseau and Paine and even Jefferson did no more than furnish the tinsel with which this buoyant social impulse was trimmed. In America most of all, during the universal flux of the nineteenth century, things were in the saddle. Randolph and Calhoun could forge the South into a section, could rally Southerners to a defense of their own economic interests, could impress upon the popular imagination the menace of centralization to the Peculiar Institution; but their talents were insufficient to reinvigorate deeper conservative ideas even in a region so much inclined toward old ways as were the Southern states. They did not much impede the advance of those impulses toward consolidation, secularization, ‘industrialism, and levelling which were everywhere the characteristics of nineteenth-century social innovation.

Randolph and Calhoun both discerned with a good deal of acuity the nature of the threat to tradition, but they could oppose to these revolutionary energies hardly more than their vaticinations and their ability to rouse a rough and confused spirit of particularism among the mass of Southerners. This was not enough. Despite its faults of head and heart, the South—alone among the civilized communities of the nineteenth century—had hardihood sufficient for an appeal to arms against the iron new order which, a vague instinct whispered to Southerners, was inimical to the sort of humanity they knew. Grant and Sherman ground their valor into powder, Emancipation and Reconstruction demolished the loose structures of their old society, economic subjugation crushed them into the productive machine of modern times. No political philosophy has had a briefer span of triumph than that accorded to Randolph’s and Calhoun’s.

Yet they deserve to be remembered, these devoted Southern leaders — Randolph for the quality of his imagination, Calhoun for the sternness of his logic. They illustrate the truth that conservatism is something deeper than mere defense of shares and dividends, something nobler than mere dread of what is new; their arguments, and even their failure, reveal how intricately linked are economic change, state policy, and the fragile tissue of social tranquility. Perhaps Randolph and Calhoun and other Southern statesmen did not employ to the full that transcendent conservative virtue of prudence which Burke so often commends. But their provocation was severe; and the echo of the fight which a doomed Southern conservatism waged in the name of prescriptive rights has not yet died in the enormous smoky cavern of modern American life.

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About Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. (See more)

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John C. Calhoun was the last eloquent political philosopher to stand against the ideology and intentions of the Federalists. He was the last to stand firmly in the halls of the Senate and articulate exactly what it would mean to allow power to become centralized under an unconstrained federal government.

He died in 1850.  His words are ignored and personage vilified by the left, his very name and image are ever-more stripped from the public square. This is not news. It is interesting that 170 years after Calhouns’ last debate with Webster the Federalists continue their attacks on the man.

An article in The Federalist by John Daniel Davidson, The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun Haunts Today’s American Left, discussed how Jamelle Bouie, writing for the NYT 1619 project goes astray in tracing a 2011 Republican filibuster to John C. Calhoun and secession.

Davidson does a fair job of adding to the many voices that have demonstrated that the 1619 project is a preposterous piece of pseudo-academic rubbish. Davidson, echoing the view of numerous historians, stated: “It’s impossible to understand The New York Times’ 1619 Project as anything but sweeping historical revisionism in the service of contemporary left-wing politics.”

Davidson is spot on it the errors of the 1619 project but he quickly launches into error of his own.

Consider Bouie’s treatment of Calhoun, a figure the left desperately wants to associate with Republicans but whose legacy is alive today nowhere so much as in the far-left wing of the Democratic Party. Bouie either ignores or is unaware of how Calhoun’s political thought sharply deviates from that of the American Founders.

Davidson, by his very statement, would exclude from the list of ‘Founding Fathers’ men like George Mason, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Yates, James Monroe, and many others.  If we accept Davidson’s argument there was only one group of founders, Federalist. That is absurd.  The Federalist were many, they were active, they went to great lengths to get certain elements into the Constitution – writing many words to the public explaining why certain elements would simply never materialize into the fears the Anti-Federalist raised; many of which became reality. However, to claim that all of the Founders held some sort of lock-step view of government and the form of government created in the late 1780s is neither honest nor accurate.

To paint Calhoun as a man that single-handedly came up with the idea that the Republic should be more decentralized, that Federal power should be checked not only by the institutions of the Federal government itself but by the will of the people through their states is plainly inaccurate. These were not novel and new ideas that Calhoun expressed, these were Anti-federalist ideas, these were ideas much truer to an accurate definition of federalism than the nationalist, statist, centralized idea that became the Federalist position.

The Anti-federalist position, as proven by what has become of the Republic, was the only true, realistic and conservative position in 1788. The Federalist position, as evidenced by history, turned out to be totalitarian in nature, it is the power behind progressivism, it was from the start the seeds of the eventual destruction of the Republic; debt, discord, endless wars, less liberty.  One simply could not have enacted the federal income tax, the New Deal, social security and all the enormous government and taxation that came from that without the Federalist position winning out.

But, it did not win out the moment the Constitution was ratified. The founders were not all Federalists.  America spent the next 70 years debating the issue.  Federalism did not win until Lincoln made war on Americans that disagreed with his statist view of the world. Davidson rolls out the troupe that that war was was certainly not about  States’ Rights, it was about slavery.  In that his is also wrong, it was about the rights of States, even to the extent to hold a wrong position about slavery. History is more complex than a cliche.

Davidson does not stop there it seems.  In a previous article, The Confederacy Still Lingers Within The Progressivism That Birthed It, he argues that the Confederacy was more centralized than many nostalgically believe. He is correct in this, the Confederacy indeed ran state-controlled armament factories and introduced the draft to North America.  But, Calhoun died a decade before the Confederacy set up shop.

Nonetheless, he turns his attention back to Calhoun, making the bold statement that “John C. Calhoun sowed modern progressivism”. He quotes Harry V. Jaffa  who wrote: “that Calhoun’s theory was the antithesis of the Founders’ and Abraham Lincoln’s understanding of the Constitution.” Jaffa, hardly a traditional conservative or correct thinker, a man who’s influence gave us Neoconservatism and three decades of geopolitical turmoil and war. Yes, Mr. Davidson, Calhoun had a different view of the Constitution, opposed the Federalist camp among the Founders and very much opposed to that of Lincoln. But his view was not in opposition to all Founders, and not even in disagreement with what most ordinary citizens believed they were getting when the Constitution was ratified.

As George P. Fletcher points out in Our Secret Constitution: How Lincoln Redefined American Democracy we essentially had a second constitution after 1865 based upon “organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy” concepts different and opposed to those of our first constitution which promulgated “peoplehood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republicanism”.(G. P. Fletcher 2003)(The Philosophy of Commonsense) Federalist protestations to the contrary, the redefined Federalist version of the United States was not always a foregone conclusion and it was never the universal view held by all the Founders.

That this debate was so strong is evidenced by the fact that it required war and several hundred thousand deaths for one side to win – any rational person that reads history surely recognizes that there was something more foundational at issue than just slavery for events to lead to that. (See this article posted at the Abbeville Instutute just today as one example)

Calhoun, despite his flaws, despite the fact that the rights he defended are offensive to our modern sensibilities, despite all that, Calhoun was right on some important foundational issues. Progressivism could never have raised its head to expand government without the efforts of the Federalist from 1788-1870; no federal income tax, no prohibition and the resultant birth of organized crime, no New Deal, no dysfunction of government at the Federal level (because the Federal government would matter a lot less) no massive debt, no tariffs, no endless wars. This is the legacy of the Federalists.

Mr. Davidson, if you want a reason why progressivism has turned the US into a proto-socialist state and why everything around us just seems wrong – look to the Federalist heritage.

The American Republic cannot long stand in freedom and harmony if power is centralized, the voices of the minority view silenced through impotence,  power centralized with no check or balance placed upon it outside of the institutions of that very power – in short, centralized power in the hands of any majority must necessarily lead to totalitarianism and tyranny; the death of the Republic.

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We that after changing the name of Lake Calhoun to the much “better option” of Bde Maka Ska (that simply rolls off of one’s tongue), the city is now exploring ways to expunge the Calhoun name from the streets around the lake.

Calhoun is not without his defenders or at least those that see the silliness of this all, even in Minnesota it seems.

Because liberals and news organizations such as yourself are intolerant of anything that offends you, and you seek to change names of things just to appease your own dissatisfaction. It was originally named lake Calhoun by the people that founded our state and just because he owned slaves does not mean we should eradicate a name. AJ Wacek

Tired of political correctness and liberals cramming social justice down every aspect of our lives. Seriously, I get the world has problems but 24/7? Someone is offended by something. It’s a lake, and the name is well known. I dont give a shit if the guy used to be a racist, he is an historical figure and how dare anyone who purposely try to erase history…even the negative dark history. Reminds me of the Nazi book burning. Stephen Noel

The irony is that the current name of the lake is based upon a Dakota Sioux Indian name.   The Sioux, of course, are famous for their expansion, at the cost of other tribes, across the plains soon after they mastered the horse.  Some of those previously displaced tribes it seems might find a reason to be triggered by the current name of the lake.

Perhaps the safest option is to name all lakes things like “Blue or Green Lake”, surely that would not offend nearly anyone anywhere – it would have no meaning of place or history but it would be safe for the easily offended among us.

The point.  When one digs around through history with the intention fo finding reasons to be offended it is easy to find “Justifications”.   It is silly for Minneapolis to spend money to change the name of these streets, the Lake was named in honor of John C. Calhoun who was Secretary of War and sent an expedition to build a fort in the area – the streets and the lake were named in his honor.  It is part of Minneapolis history.

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