"The New Nullifiers"

"After four years of Civil War, in a 'new birth of freedom' that resurrected the Union, Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrines were utterly disgraced—but they did not disappear forever. Nearly a century later they were exhumed to justify the so-called 'massive resistance' of the segregationist South against civil rights and, in particular, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The current rage for nullification is nothing less than another restatement, in a different context, of musty neo-Confederate dogma."

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic attacks "the current wave of enthusiasm for 'states’ rights,' 'interposition,' and 'nullification.'"