"The Idol of Origins Is an Attractive God Because It Tells Us What We Must Do"

"If the filibuster's opponents wish to avoid being misled by false gods they have to ask inconvenient questions. What about John Davis and John Quincy Adams? What about the 289 non-civil rights filibusters, far outnumbering measures focused on civil rights, that Binder and Smith also found between 1837 and 1992? Does the fact that the filibuster appears nowhere in the Constitution mean that it is unconstitutional? Has the Senate, our political system, or our deeply fractured society changed in ways that might make the filibuster in some form necessary or even desirable? Jentleson argues that the filibuster favors conservatives because they only need to stop things to accomplish their mission, while liberals need to do things. But does anyone doubt that Trumpist Republicans, if not conservatives, have quite a lot they want to do?"

Robert Elder at The Bulwark challenges the charge that John C. Calhoun created the Senate filibuster.

"What Was Wrought by White Supremacy"

"Today, Mississippi is politically polarized along racial lines. Whites are Republicans, blacks are Democrats, and the former controls state politics. Public investment isn't just disdained, it's attacked as racially suspect. 'The Republican Party has never been the food stamp party, or the party of pork until desperation set in with Thad Cochran's re-election bid,' said state Sen. Angela Hill during the Mississippi Senate Republican primary, in reference to Sen. Cochran's outreach to black voters. The state is harshly carceral—jailing more people per capita than almost anywhere in the country, the majority of them black—and has a huge number of all-white private schools while the public school system is largely segregated.
"You can understand all of this in terms of ordinary conservatism—and many people do—but this is a particularly strong conservatism shaped by a particularly brutal racial history. It's a small-government philosophy that has its roots in the pro-slavery thought of John C. Calhoun, emerged as resistance to Reconstruction, resurfaced in the fight against civil rights, and is now mostly ideological, if attenuated—but not separate—from its roots."


Jamelle Bouie in Slate looks at Mississippi.

Massive Resistance

"Mihm said today’s fight has a parallel in the nullification movement of the 1830s when John C. Calhoun, who had resigned the vice presidency to run for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, devised a strategy to oppose a tariff that he said hit the South unfairly. If the state legislature passed a law that refuted the federal one, the state could ignore it based on what he called a 'concurrent majority.'
"President Andrew Jackson eventually interceded and thwarted the nullification movement. Had it gone forward, Mihm said, it may have led to the breakup of the Union before the Civil War.
"Now, he said, those who want to stop Obamacare 'are trying to find another way to nullify that poses a much graver threat, but not to the law,' Mihm said, referring to a possible failure to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
"'Our debt is something we all, every one of us, are on the hook for,' he said. 'And the idea that you can take that and make that a bargaining chip is very similar to the idea of the nullifiers.'"

Michael Tackett at Bloomberg compares today's Republican Party to Southern conservatives of the past.

Null Hypothesis

"But the key thing is that the Republican Party has now rejected its Southern Strategy and is embracing Calhounism instead. The high period of the Republican Party’s most explicit racial appeals was also the time when it had the least use for Calhounian methods of minority rule. The Southern Strategy, as a political method, was not based on Calhounism. It was closer to the opposite of Calhounism.

"Why? Because Republicans were winning."

Jonathan Chait at New York reacts to Sam Tenenhaus's article in The New Republic about the influence of John C. Calhoun on today's Republican Party.

The Ghost of John Calhoun

"Republicans today face an increasingly desperate political predicament, similar to the one that Calhoun and his contemporaries faced in the early 1800s. They are a sectional party whose ranks are dwindling, relative to the rest of the country. Since they don’t want to give ground on their political agenda, they’re grasping at levers for thwarting the majority. In Congress, that has meant transforming the filibuster into a routine means of blocking simple majorities from passing laws. (Among those who have observed the parallels to Calhounism are James Fallows.) More recently, in state capitals of conservative states, it has meant taking advantage of lingering majorities there to ram through policy changes, like eliminating income taxes, that will undermine the welfare state for generations.
"But the most pernicious part of this campaign may be the campaign to thwart Democratic voters from exercising their rights to have equal influence in politics—whether by preventing them from going to the polls on election day or, via this latest effort in Virginia and other swing states, to prevent majorities from having the power to determine election outcomes."

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic discusses how the GOP is trying to undermine to will of the majority.

Thru the Perilous Fight

"Historians of the period and of the war may resent Hofstadter’s summary dismissal, but it offers some clues as to why neither is the subject of much popular interest. The very things that put Hofstadter off—the bumbling diplomacy, the bitter infighting, the ineptly executed war effort—force us to confront a vision of the United States that doesn’t generally fit our understanding of its origins. The war plays out as a disappointing second act to the Revolution, with the nation suddenly at the whim of Europeans and Indians and riven by internal dissent, and the heroes and heirs of 1776 acting without the pluck and ingenuity that we expect of them. How are we to commemorate that?"

In Slate, James M. Lundberg observes the War of 1812's bicentennial.

"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.'"