Calhoun was a Hegelian Jacobin who spent his life trafficking in post-hoc rationalizations for slavery. Conservatives must reject his example.
Calhoun was a Hegelian Jacobin who spent his life trafficking in post-hoc rationalizations for slavery. Conservatives must reject his example.
I n my last piece, I alluded to an article by Hunter Derensis of The American Conservative, which makes the case that conservatives should look to John C. Calhoun, of all people, for political guidance. Though I didn’t have space to fully address it yesterday, I believe Derensis’s argument is historically illiterate and intellectually shabby enough to merit a longer response.
Derensis begins his piece by sounding a note of alarm about the growing hostility of progressives toward the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, and America’s other counter-majoritarian institutions. He cites various voices on the left who have been spouting off recently about the need to tear down these institutions so that the untrammeled will of the (presumably) Democratic majority can reign. These calls from the left are, indeed, concerning. As I wrote in my article yesterday, the proper role of democracy in the American tradition is as a safeguard for individual rights and liberties against the encroachment of the state. It is the least undesirable mechanism we in the free world have found for warding off tyranny and maintaining liberty under the law. So one can understand, and even laud, the conservative impulse to check its excesses. If the security and defense of individual dignity are, indeed, the chief ends of government, then a democratic majority must be greeted with hostility when its express will undermines these ends.
But to turn to John C. Calhoun, the ideological progenitor of the Confederacy, for advice on how best to protect the individual rights enshrined in our Constitution would be akin to asking Adolf Eichmann how he celebrated Hanukkah. Calhoun didn’t just believe that black Americans possessed fewer rights than white Americans if they possessed any at all; he believed that no human being possessed inherent rights of any kind, and that rights could only be claimed through membership in a community. Thus he wrote of the “natural state” of the human being:
Society can no more exist without government, in one form or another, than man without society. It is the political, then, which includes the social, that is his natural state. It is the one for which his Creator formed him, into which he is impelled irresistibly, and in which only his race can exist and all his faculties be fully developed.
For Calhoun, human beings only really become human beings by taking part in a political community. The community has rights and privileges, not the individuals that make it up. It’s not for nothing that many scholars have called Calhoun the philosophical father of the interest-group progressivism that dominated the 20th century: The idea, embraced by some on the left, that “minority rights,” whether racial, sexual, class-based, or otherwise, are more fundamental for political purposes than individual rights has his fingerprints all over it.
The denial of individual natural rights is the cornerstone of Calhoun’s political philosophy. Everything else he ever wrote about statecraft flows from it. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to compare and contrast his thought with that of the Founding Fathers and of President Lincoln. For the Founders, government derives all of its authority from the natural rights of the individuals who make up the citizenry. Each individual has complete power and liberty over their own person, but surrenders the exercise of some of these powers to the state in exchange for security and protection. There are, however, certain inalienable rights that inhere in each individual person by nature, and that cannot be delegated to the government. These rights were outlined by James Madison in the Bill of Rights and constitute the American vision of what it means to be an individual human being.
The Founders permitted democratic majorities to decide questions of government policy so long as their decisions did not infringe upon these inalienable, individual rights. As Madison wrote in his essay, “Sovereignty:”
Whatever be the hypothesis of the origin of the lex majoris partis [law of majority rule], it is evident that it operates as a plenary substitute of the will of the majority of the society for the will of the whole society; and that the sovereignty of the society as vested and exercisable by the majority, may do anything that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members; the reserved rights of individuals (of conscience for example) in becoming parties to the original compact being beyond the legitimate reach of sovereignty, wherever vested or however viewed.
Madison writes that majorities can be justly permitted to do “anything that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members.” The key word here is “rightfully,” because it implies that there is a fundamental moral standard of right and wrong that even a “unanimous concurrence” of every citizen cannot be allowed to violate. This is more radical than most people realize. Madison is arguing here that even if every single citizen of a polity voted to relinquish the right to free speech or the right to bear arms, the unanimous will of the people would still have no right to give effect to its desire in law. So preeminent are the rights of the individual in the minds of the Founders that not even the purest expression of the “general will” can justly violate them. Governments are formed by the delegation of these individual rights and exist to protect them. The legitimacy of government, furthermore, rests on the question of whether or not it adequately performs these tasks. This is why there existed no tension between individual rights and states’ rights for the Founders — the latter were derived straightforwardly from the former. It’s also why Lincoln argued that secession in 1861 was illegal: None of the individual rights of southern citizens had been violated by the federal government.
Calhoun, by way of contrast, comprehensively rejected the notion of individual natural rights, as we have seen. The chief end of government, in his eyes, was something entirely different. As Derensis outlines in his article, this “something different” is the idea of the concurrent majority. The doctrine of the concurrent majority holds that no majority should be allowed to act without soliciting the consent of the minority. Minorities each and all get a veto on any government measure, which then requires the majority to negotiate with the aggrieved minority until an agreement can be reached that commands universal support. Thus every piece of legislation expresses the will of the entire citizenry.
In order for Calhoun’s theory to work in practice, it’s essential that individual rights be ruled out of consideration as a viable idea, lest they become the standard by which democratic decisions are judged, as they were for Madison and Jefferson. If the standard of individual rights is operative, then there is no need to work for a concurrent majority; a simple majority that doesn’t violate individual rights is quite enough to be regarded as legitimate. Calhoun, recognizing this and the problem it posed to his ultimate political aim of preserving slavery in the South, dismissed individual rights and endeavored to discover and give effect to the collective will of the whole nation. This “general will” is held up by Calhoun as something almost sacred and infallible in and of itself. It dissolves the interests of various factions into one unanimous will that can truly be called “the will of the people.” But whereas Madison set limits on what even a unanimous consensus could rightly demand, Calhoun viewed unanimous consensus itself to be the highest political value, regardless of the policies it might want to pursue. Far from countervailing the forces of democracy, Calhoun’s theories gesture toward a world in which democracy is not only unconstrained but omnipotent.
You see, then, why it’s rather frustrating to read Derensis when he writes that “understanding the relevance of Calhoun’s political theory does not require adopting his worldview wholesale; conservatives should not reject natural rights theory.” Natural-rights theory and concurrent-majority theory are mutually incompatible, simply because the quest for the former is driven by a denial of the latter on Calhoun’s part. I wouldn’t want to accuse Derensis of arguing in bad faith by neglecting to mention this fact; I can only assume that he’s insufficiently familiar with the primary sources to credibly write on the subject. But it’s extremely disappointing that the editors of a publication called The American Conservative would allow a contradiction of this magnitude to make it into print. Calhoun’s theory of the concurrent majority is not conservative; it’s not even American insofar as America is defined by the central idea laid out in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. As Harry Jaffa, among other scholars, has noted, Calhoun’s concurrent-majority theory was more influenced by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his notion of the “general will” than by anything else. Not exactly promising intellectual ancestry for an allegedly conservative idea.
It gets worse, though, because while Calhoun’s ideas may have been directly influenced by Rousseau’s, they also bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Karl Marx. Like Marx, Calhoun was a determinist. He believed that necessity, rather than freedom or choice, governed the political fate of mankind. His Disquisition on Government, which Derensis references approvingly, begins thusly:
In order to have a clear and just conception of the nature and object of government, it is indispensable to understand correctly what that constitution or law of our nature is, in which government originates; or, to express it more fully and accurately — that law, without which government would not, and with which it must necessarily exist.
In other words, Calhoun believes that there are certain fixed habits of human behavior that “must necessarily exist” in order for politics to be possible. Without such a “law of our nature,” he writes, it would be,
. . . as impossible to lay any solid foundation for the science of government, as it would be to lay one for that of astronomy, without a like understanding of that constitution or law of the material world, according to which the several bodies composing the solar system mutually act on each other, and by which they are kept in their respective spheres.
Putting it even more simply, he says that government, “like breathing . . . is not permitted to depend on our volition.” For Calhoun, the huge, impersonal social forces that sweep over the human race across space and time are what determine our political and economic fortunes. Remind you of anyone?
Calhoun argued that the British and Roman constitutions “originated in a pressure, occasioned by conflicts of interests between hostile classes or orders,” rather than from reflective statesmanship or from the gradual discovery of humane principles of government. This line could easily have been written by Charles Beard, Noam Chomsky, or even Marx himself, and yet Derensis would have us believe that the time is ripe for a Calhounian revival on the American right. Thankfully, conservatives are quite attached to the idea that personal responsibility plays a non-trivial part in the fates of men and nations alike, and are likely to pass on Calhoun’s quasi-Marxist determinism along with his Jacobinism.
It’s true, as Derensis points out, that there are a few noteworthy names who hold a much higher opinion of Calhoun than I do. Russell Kirk claimed that “Calhoun’s political thought is more original and more closely reasoned than that of any other American statesman,” Derensis writes, while JFK praised Calhoun’s “profoundly penetrating and original understanding of the social bases of government.” It’s easy to see what Kirk and Kennedy were impressed by: There are some superficially plausible ideas in Calhoun’s thought. But they collapse upon closer inspection.
Calhoun had a firm grasp on a crucial feature of American politics that the Founders hadn’t anticipated: the rise of political parties. The men who wrote our Constitution separated power both vertically between the federal and state governments and horizontally among the three branches of the federal government. This division of power would, they thought, prevent a tyranny of the majority from emerging as each institution jealously guarded its own prerogatives. They were mistaken. As Calhoun rightly understood, various factions of similar interests would simply join with one another in extra-constitutional organizations such as parties in order to seize the governing institutions of the nation and give effect to their majoritarian will. Derensis cites Calhoun’s analysis on this subject:
For this purpose, a struggle will take place between the various interests to obtain a majority, in order to control the government. If no one interest be strong enough, of itself, to obtain it, a combination will be formed between those whose interests are most alike—each conceding something to the others, until a sufficient number is obtained to make a majority. . . . When once formed, the community will be divided into two great parties—a major and minor—between which there will be incessant struggles on the one side to retain, and on the other to obtain the majority—and, thereby, the control of the government and the advantages it confers.
This more or less sums up how our politics work today, which leads Derensis to conclude that “if a majority is able to dictate policy to a minority, you have an absolute government—whether superficially ‘democratic’ or not.” He is, as we have seen, wrong. Provided that the actions of the majority do not violate the unalienable rights of the minority, the majority has every right to “dictate policy.” To deny this is to repudiate the entire political philosophy of the Federalist Papers, which American conservatives are rather attached to, even if The American Conservative isn’t.
It is true that the advent of party politics has seriously compromised the effectiveness of Madison’s separation of powers. In Federalist No. 47, he argues that the concentration of control over the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary in the hands of a single faction would be tantamount to tyranny, even if obtained by constitutional means. And yet, we’ve lived under such “tyranny” many times since 1787 and it’s never become permanent. After the 2016 election, Republicans held sway over the whole federal government, but they did not move to cancel all future elections or jail their political opponents (even if the president made threats on the second count). In fact, it’s eminently possible that Democrats end up with control of the executive and both houses of the legislature in January. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Antony, tyranny should be made of sterner stuff.
The coalitions that make up governing majorities in the United States have always been protean and mercurial. They come together, dissolve, and reform themselves into different combinations all the time. Derensis doesn’t need me to tell him how common it is for one party to hold the presidency and another to hold the House; it seems to happen after practically every mid-term election. This alone proves that we are still a politically diverse enough nation to make and break new alliances over time. If further evidence is demanded, we need only consider the fact that Donald Trump was put in office by Midwesterners who voted for Barack Obama twice. The final and ultimate reason why the idea of the concurrent majority is redundant, quite apart from being unethical, is that there has never been a permanent minority in American politics.
Well, except for one.
As the 19th century progressed, Calhoun could see the writing on the wall for the pro-slavery South. Eventually, enough new free states would be admitted into the Union for an abolition amendment to be ratified and foisted upon the South against its will. Slaveholders would be a permanent minority in the Union. For their benefit and for their benefit alone was the doctrine of the concurrent majority formulated and promulgated. Calhoun said repeatedly that the Founders’ conviction that all men were created equal would be what brought down the United States in the end. When he theorized in his speech on the Oregon bill in 1848 about how a future historian might account for the fall of the American republic, he said this:
If he should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors. The proposition to which I allude, has become an axiom in the minds of a vast minority on both sides of the Atlantic, and is repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth; it is that “all men are born free and equal.
The equality of all men was, for Calhoun, the rock on which the Union would eventually founder. Those with the requisite wisdom to save the Union from this festering, Jeffersonian dogma — namely, dyed-in-the-cotton white supremacists — needed a constitutional mechanism through which to do so, even if they were in the minority. The doctrine of the concurrent majority was therefore developed in an attempt to preserve slavery ad infinitum on these shores. As Calhoun said himself:
We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in our declaration of independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits. It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document, which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was both unjust and immoral.
Emancipation is the real “danger” that Calhoun feared. Minority obstruction was merely the nearest weapon to hand that could be used to oppose it.
The proof of this came several years after Calhoun’s death, when his ideological progeny seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861. At each of the state conventions where secession was voted on, there was a minority of delegates who wished to remain in the Union. Unsurprisingly, the doctrine of the concurrent majority was not adhered to. No attempt was made to negotiate with the pro-union minorities until “unanimous consensus” was reached, nor were they given the right to nullify the acts of each convention. Simple majorities carried the day, because for Calhoun’s disciples, as for the man himself, the maintenance of slavery was always the first and most important goal. Calhoun resolutely held that chattel slavery was, “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” Somehow, he managed to sell this perverse bill of goods to both his voters and his own twisted, malformed conscience. We can only answer, with President Lincoln:
Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it is good for the lambs!!!
(I’m pleased to say that I didn’t add any of the exclamation marks. They are all Lincoln’s.)
No one of sound mind and moral fiber who analyses Calhoun’s life and work could possibly share Derensis’s conclusion that he was “one of the first-rate minds of the nineteenth century,” a man from whom conservatives today can “find guidance.” Calhoun was a foaming-at-the-mouth racist, a Hegelian Jacobin who spent his life and career trafficking in post-hoc rationalizations for human subjugation. American conservatives looking for inspiration in the past mustn’t under any circumstances look to him.