The Republicans: The New Whigs?

I've never seen a poll on this, but I'd guess that most Americans couldn't identify the Whigs. Of all the major political parties in American history (defined as those that got at least one president elected), they remain the most obscure. Their brief history, however, is looking strangely relevant to me these days.

The Whigs were one of the two major parties in what American historians call the second party system. The first party system was the Federalists (led by Washington, Adams, and Hamilton) and the Republicans (led by Jefferson and Madison), which lasted roughly from the 1790s to the 1810s. The third is today's Democrats and Republicans, which emerged in the mid-1850s. In between was the second, made up of the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs.

I've always found it a bit of challenge to teach about the Whigs, because they represented an odd collection of views. The very name reflected their amorphous identity.

The name has two meanings. Since they claimed as a foundational principle a dedication to the republican government of the Founders, and the Whigs were the anti-monarchy party in Britain, the American Whigs adopted the same name.

There was a second meaning, however. On a practical level, one of the organizing principles of the party was its opposition to Andrew Jackson, whose high-handed style led them to label him "King Andrew." So the American "Whigs" were the opponents of the "King," Andrew Jackson.

This led to some odd political bedfellows in the Whig Party. While it is certainly possible to identify a Whig ideology (active government, particularly in pursuit of economic development), there were also members of the party who were not supporters of the ideology, but who sided with the Whigs out of an anti-Jackson animus.

So, for example, when Jackson faced down John C. Calhoun and the state of South Carolina during the nullification crisis of 1832-33--despite the fact that the Democrats were the party of states rights--some of the more vehement supporters of states rights joined the Whigs.

The resulting ideological incoherence came out in the presidential election of 1840, the first the party ever won. To hold together its diverse anti-Jackson coalition in the race against Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, the Whigs nominated the old Indian-fighting general, William Henry Harrison.

For most Americans, that campaign is remembered (if at all) for its alliterative slogan: "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too!" John Tyler, the vice-presidential candidate, was in the words of Daniel Walker Howe an "eccentric Virginia state-righter," who joined the Whigs "because he found Andrew Jackson high-handed."

The Whigs, as Howe notes, "possessed a more coherent program" than the Democrats, but when Harrison died only month into his presidency, Tyler--who did not believe in most of that program--became president. He then proceeded to thwart his own party on important issues such as a national bank and tariff policy. The ideological incoherence of the Whigs wrecked their first administration.

What does this have to do with today?

My last post examined the ways that various forms of conservative thinking have been clashing below the mudslinging surface in the Republican debates. This, I argue, suggests an ideological cracking up of the Reagan coalition that has survived and prospered since 1980.

What holds it together? Right now, one thing: hatred of Barack Obama.

No matter how nasty things get in this primary season, all of the candidates and their surrogates return to that theme: the need to defeat Obama. After winning the Florida primary Tuesday, Mitt Romney tweeted:

Thank you FL! While we celebrate this victory, we must not forget what this election is really about: defeating Barack Obama.

Whenever they are searching for unity, they go back to that.

That's fairly natural. Obama is the incumbent president, after all. But there is a particularly harsh edge to it this time. It's personal, it's vitriolic, it's irrational. And it's potent.

That is what reminds me so much of the 1830s: the tendency to reduce the party platform to the opposition to an individual, to personalize everything. It is no coincidence that its enemies never call it "The Affordable Care Act," but rather "ObamaCare." There is a whole "King Obama" meme on the internet, like this Photoshopping of Obama's head onto a famous painting of Emperor Napoleon.

The effects of another Obama term are put in apocalyptic terms. It's not his policies, but his person. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, in a Romney radio ad, says: "America cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama." Seriously? Cannot survive? This, from the campaign whose slogan is "Believe in America"?

Of course, apocalyptic rhetoric is practically the norm in American presidential elections. One Whig, in the 1840 campaign, said the following about President Van Buren:

Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order, there you may be certain of a voter for Van Buren.

Republicans today would need to do little more than change the name.

There is, of course, not much evidence put forth to justify the gloom and doom. As comedian Bill Maher noted, the opposition to Obama is mostly to a deluded fantasy of the man, not the actual president: "Republicans have created this completely fictional president ... The Republican hatred of Obama is based on a paranoid feeling about what he might do, what he's thinking, what he secretly wants to change."

Note how Gingrich put it Tuesday night: "If Barack Obama gets re-elected, it will be a disaster for the United States of America, make no bones about it.... you can’t imagine how radical he’ll be in his second term." No, Newt, I can't. Because he has never been a radical president, outside of your fevered imagination. The Republican caricature of "Obama the radical" is nothing but imagining.

(Again, this is not unlike the Whig caricature of Jackson--he was called "King Andrew," but his era is now more commonly known as the "Age of the Common Man," because of the democratizing forces that brought him into office.)

What the Republican Party as an institution needed more than anything after the George W. Bush years was some serious ideological self-examination. The Tea Party, for all its many faults, was at least in part an attempt to begin that process. But if the pundits are right, and the nomination is now inevitably going to Mitt Romney, that will not happen.

Romney is a man without any ideological core. There is no ideological there there. He will say or do anything to be president. In poll after poll, Republican voters say that they support him mostly because he is seen as the most electable, the most likely to defeat Obama. The fact that he does not truly stand for anything is secondary to the hope that he will vanquish their fictional "King Obama."

Already, voices on the right are crying out in despair. This week an editorial in the Wall Street Journal began: "Let's just say right now what voters will be saying in November, once Barack Obama has been re-elected: Republicans deserve to lose."

And the target of their ire is the ostensible candidate of Wall Street, Mitt Romney:

Thus the core difference between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama: For the governor, the convictions are the veneer. For the president, the pragmatism is. Voters always see through this. They usually prefer the man who stands for something.

Another voice from the right, of a more Tea Party bent, had this to say:

The Establishment could not have made a more strategic blunder. They will, in all likelihood, succeed in securing the nomination for Mitt Romney, but the damage they have inflicted upon themselves is approaching irreversible. The public now sees the length to which the Establishment will go to make certain their hand-picked candidate is chosen regardless of the dire circumstances facing the nation. 

Average Republican or conservative voters are the same people that buy the books or magazines or subscribe to the websites ... A number of them (how many is anyone's guess right now) will no longer be willing to support those factions within the Establishment and the Party or to believe what they are told. These are the people suffering the consequences of the disastrous policies pursued over previous decades, while those in the Establishment live lives of relative ease and comfort, which seems to be their primary concern.

The cracks are showing. For now, they are being papered over with posters bashing "King Obama." For all I know, given the hard economic times, that could be enough--for now.

Historian Michael Holt, the author of a comprehensive account of the Whigs, wrote:

the history of the Whig Party can best be understood in terms of a tension or balance between centrifugal forces that always threatened to tear it apart and the centripetal force of conflict with Democrats that held it together.

Under the strains of the polarized politics of the 1850s, the Whigs fell apart and disappeared.

Today, the Republicans are in no danger of disappearing, but they are being held together by their centripetal forces. Like the Whigs, they ignore the centrifugal forces of ideology at their peril.

The Highwaymen of South Carolina

[Y]ou will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"--Abraham Lincoln, February 27, 1860, Address at Cooper Institute

Lincoln was speaking of the secessionist fire-eaters who would, with South Carolina in the lead, try to destroy the Union later that same year. Last night, that same attitude was on vivid display in the United States Congress, and once again, South Carolina played a prominent role.

All seven Republican members of Congress from South Carolina voted against Speaker John Boehner's debt ceiling bill. The bill passed the House by the bare minimum, with 22 Republicans voting against it and no Democrats voting for it. It then went to the Senate, where Senators Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham joined the Democrats in voting it down.

Although they voted with the Democrats, they did so for different reasons. The Democrats opposed the bill primarily because it would return us to this debt ceiling nightmare again in another six months. The highwaymen of South Carolina did so because its spending cuts were not draconian enough, its demand for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution not iron-clad enough.

On the CBS Evening News last night, the four freshmen Republican House members from South Carolina (the veteran Joe "You lie!" Wilson excepted) were featured in a story about opposition to raising the debt ceiling.



They spoke with apparent sincerity about the need to make fundamental change. Jeff Duncan spoke about the potential problems of the future: "I've got three young boys ... and I don't want them ten years from now to say, 'Dad, when y'all were at the brink, what did you do?' ... I don't want to have to answer him, 'I didn't do enough.'"

Touching as that is, it shows no concern at all for the very real consequences of failing to compromise. When asked about the potential disaster of failing to raise the debt ceiling, Trey Gowdy, who is my representative from the 4th Congressional district, rather self-righteously dismissed the question: "What is one person's intransigence is another person's deeply held conviction."

What Gowdy is really saying is that he values his own "convictions" above the national interest. He will follow his convictions, and if the result is financial disaster, and another Great Depression, that's not his responsibility. He is only responsible to his personal convictions.

Gowdy's refusal to accept any responsibility for his actions is stunning, and as I've noted before (here and here), typical of the baneful influence of South Carolina's most famous senator, John C. Calhoun.

In the same speech quoted above, Lincoln succinctly summed up this mindset:

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is, that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This attitude is deeply, fundamentally, undemocratic. That is what is so dangerous politically about the situation in which the United States finds itself today. Above and beyond the financial dangers, we are facing a test of our political system. That system values process over any specific outcome.  Whether they realize it or not, these freshmen representatives, and the rest of the Tea Party radicals, value results over process.

There is no need for the nation to be staring into the abyss of financial chaos. Like the pre-Civil War fire-eaters, they have created a crisis, confident that they can get their way--one, by the way, which they know--they know--they cannot get through the normal democratic process--by putting a gun to the nation's head.

They blithely, like Lincoln's highwayman, tell us that the rest of us will be to blame if we force them to wreck the economy because our "deeply held conviction" tells us compromise, not blackmail, is the right way to go.

There is an extremely important principle at stake here: that the American government should not be forced to function with a gun to its head. If the highwaymen get their way, they will do incalculable damage to the nation's political system. It is well past time for leaders in both parties, not just one, to recommit to process over results, and put an end to this unnecessary, dangerous, and manufactured crisis.

The Economic Equivalent of the Civil War?

I made the mistake of watching some cable news while eating lunch today, and heard Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), member of the House Tea Party Caucus, say that not only will he refuse to vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances, he thinks Congress should lower it.  Andrea Mitchell was dumbstruck, and like a teacher with an amazingly dense six year old student, tried to explain to him that raising the debt ceiling was necessary to account for spending already appropriated by Congress. Broun was unmoved by this appeal to reality.

Broun seems either unaware or unconcerned that his position would require an immediate cut of about 40% in government spending. And since things like interest on the debt cannot be cut, it would really mean a larger cut on the rest of government spending. Does Broun want an immediate 40+% cut in defense spending? No? Then we have to cut even more from everything else.  Next week.

Tea Party activists gather on Capitol Hill for a 'Hold the Line' rally, June 27, 2011 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

You could not find a single economist in the country, no matter how conservative, who would tell you such a massive and instant cut in government spending would do anything but plunge the U.S. into another Great Depression in a matter of months, if not weeks.

But Broun does not seem to care. In his world, all that matters is paying down the debt. Everything else will just work itself out. He lives in a fantasy land of ideology, where facts can be made to conform with beliefs.

Broun and other reality-denying Republicans like presidential candidate Michele Bachmann insist that the debt ceiling should not be raised. Period. They are on the verge of causing a financial cataclysm.  Speaker John Boehner may not be able to pass debt ceiling his bill through the Republican-controlled House tomorrow because of them.

And it is his own fault.

Last December, in the wake of the November elections, I wrote that the GOP had become John C. Calhoun's party--the party of no compromise, of standing on principle come hell or high water, consequences be damned. I concluded then:

A decade later, Calhoun's irresponsible mindset would lead to the Civil War. Today's Republicans will not, one must hope, produce any calamity on such a dramatic and grand scale. But they embody the same narrow, anti-majoritarian, self-destructive approach to politics that the senator from South Carolina did. And the results of that will not be pretty.

Well, it has now gotten ugly. It may not be the economic equivalent of the Civil War, but it's close enough.

I noted then that Boehner had adopted the "no compromise" rhetoric of the Tea Party in his "60 Minutes" interview. That was the first sign that he would attempt to appease and co-opt rather than lead the Tea Party caucus.

Then in February on "Meet the Press," when confronted with the birther nonsense so prevalent among Republicans, he said:

It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people.... the American people have the right to think what they want to think.

No, it isn't the job of a leader to "tell the American people what to think." But it IS the job of a leader to educate people about the difference between the truth and a lie. Boehner treated the question of Obama's citizenship as a mere matter of opinion. I don't believe it, he said, but it's OK if other people do. No, it isn't. Not when we are talking about matters of fact and not of opinion.

And that bring us to where we are today. Boehner's caucus is filled with people so economically ignorant that they really don't think we need to increase the debt ceiling, that we can let it go by, only pay some bills, and thereby, by default, balance the budget now. Boehner knows that this is not true, and he has said so.

But he has spent the last 8 months appeasing the Tea Party know-nothings. He has treated matters of fact as matters of opinion. He has played their game, and now that it is coming down to the wire, he cannot suddenly get them to see reality. Today a Tea Party leader called for Boehner to be replaced as Speaker for not reducing spending right now.

Boehner will have a choice over the next few days. He can either continue to bow to the Tea Party radicals who have no sense of economic reality, or he can make common cause with Democrats and pass a bill that gets us beyond this manufactured crisis and thereby incur Tea Party wrath. He can be John C. Calhoun and go down in flames, or he can be Henry Clay and put the good of the nation first, ahead of party unity and personal ambition.

I hope he chooses the latter, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

The Tea Party's Real Founder

In my last post, I compared the current debt ceiling crisis to the political paralysis that led to the Compromise of 1850. It was the last slavery crisis that was resolved peacefully. The spirit of compromise was exhausted. The difficulty of resolving the issues in 1850 was a harbinger of the utter inability to find a compromise a decade later.

The most interesting part of that crisis was South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun 's final address to Congress. Calhoun's 1850 speech was historical foreshadowing, indicating that Southern Democrats were ceasing to be "normal" (as David Brooks would put it). Ten years later, the mere election of a president without Southern votes would appear to them reason enough to destroy the Union.

The most prominent part of the address is Calhoun's utter rejection of compromise. And that makes him the Tea Party's real Founding Father.

Speaking of his section, the South, Calhoun said: "She has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make." He insisted that if the Union were endangered, it was not because of the atrocious institution of slavery that he spent most of his career defending, but due to the "agitation" of the opponents of slavery.

Having himself raised the specter of secession, Calhoun demanded that the North show that it loved the Union by surrendering unconditionally to southern demands.

Calhoun's tone finds its modern parallel in the current uncompromising attitude of the Tea Party Republicans on the debt ceiling. The crisis of 1850 was a crisis because slaveholders threatened secession if they did not get their way. Today the debt ceiling is a crisis because Tea Party Republicans have decided to take the previously uncontroversial vote and use it for leverage to impose an ideological agenda.

Southerners in 1850 were in the minority, but stood in the way of everything, blocking majorities from passing legislation of which they did not approve. Today, Republicans control the House, but are in the minority in the Senate and do not control the Executive branch. Yet they insist on a one-sided deal and threaten to cause default if they do not get their way.

Rather than accepting that their minority position meant that they were in no position to dictate, Southerners turned their weakness into a strength. They were willing to bring the house crashing down if they did not get their way. If the North did not give the South everything it wanted, Calhoun said, it would mean that "her love of power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the Union." This, coming from a man who raised the prospect of secession in the very first sentence of this speech!

For Calhoun, his support of slavery had become an inviolable principle. Any limit on the growth of the institution was, for him, a deal-breaker.

So it seems today with taxes and the Tea Party. Rep. Tom Graves, Republican and self-identified Tea Party Congressman from Georgia, said: "You know, when we hear the word 'compromise' on Capitol Hill, that's what got us into this mess over the last several decades…. This is no time for compromise."

Conventional wisdom has it that Speaker John Boehner wants a deal, and that fear of the Tea Party caucus is what prompted Majority Leader Eric Cantor's temper tantrum when taxes were raised in the bipartisan deficit reduction talks. It seems that Speaker John Boehner had to back away from a "grand bargain" this past weekend because he could not sell the Tea Partiers on a deal that included any increases in revenue.

Calhoun sought leverage in the South's willingness to destroy the unity of the nation over the issue of slavery. Today's anti-tax fanatics find leverage in their willingness to push the nation to the brink of financial disaster and debt default.

Being so committed to principle that you would prefer disaster to compromise is liberating, if reckless and irresponsible. Calhoun finished his address, and his political career, with these words: "I shall have the consolation let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility."

The next two weeks should tell whether Tea Party Republicans prefer flirting with disaster to governing with responsibility.

Today’s GOP: It’s Calhoun’s Party Now

John C. Calhoun did not live to see the rise of the Republican Party, or the secession of South Carolina, but he anticipated and dreaded both.  Ten years before the election of Lincoln, he foresaw the emergence of “two great hostile sectional parties,” and expected that within the next ten or twelve years a presidential election would bring things to a head and lead to secession and the dissolution of the Union.

Calhoun came to mind last week when I was bemoaning the fact that, despite a 57-40 margin in favor of voting on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the minority Senate Republicans were able to use the filibuster to block a measure that the vast majority of Americans support.  In a Facebook exchange on that subject, Wofford College archivist Phillip Stone observed: “Maybe Calhoun won after all.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that today’s GOP really has become Calhoun’s party.  Like Calhoun, they see themselves as defenders of a besieged (and privileged) minority.  Like him, they foreswear compromise.  Like him, they claim that the original balance of the Constitution has been altered.  And like him, they seek to find ways to thwart the will of the majority when it suits their political agenda.

Last Sunday on “60 Minutes,” Speaker-to-be John Boehner refused to even use the word “compromise.”  Recent polls have shown Republican voters far less supportive of the idea of compromise than either independents or Democrats.

Here is Calhoun 1847: “I see my way in the constitution; I cannot in a compromise…. Let us be done with compromises!  Let us go back and stand upon the constitution!”

Last week on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli defended his proposed “repeal” amendment to the Constitution as “an attempt to bring back the balance of authority between the federal government and what goes on in the states … back toward establishing, re-establishing the balance of the Founders.”

Here is Calhoun: “the original character of the government has been radically changed … the equilibrium between the two sections, in the Government as it stood when the constitution was ratified and the Government put into action, has been destroyed.”

Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota has organized a Tea Party caucus for the new Congress, and is planning a program to teach the Constitution to new members.  Her spokesman called it “a response to conservatives’ calls for a return to constitutional principles in governing.”

Calhoun in 1850: “The South … has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make.”

Republican legal challenges to the health care law have centered on the individual mandate as an unconstitutional expansion of federal power. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said the recent ruling against it "sets the correct limits on federal power in favor of individual liberty, and supports the critical tenets of federalism enshrined in the U.S. Constitution."  His attorney general has suggested that any other ruling would mean the government could force anyone to do virtually anything.

Calhoun: “the government claims and practically maintains the right to decide in the last resort, as to the extent of its powers.”

But it is Senate Republicans who over the last two years have really been Calhoun’s acolytes.  Calhoun’s main concern was that the slaveholding South was becoming a permanent minority, and for the last 15 years or so of his life he frantically sought ways to thwart majority rule.  He wanted, he said, “a change which shall so modify the Constitution as to give to the weaker section, in some form or another, a negative on the action of the government.”

Calhoun came up with the idea of the “concurrent majority,” which implied that nothing should be done by government without the consent of each section.  He even toyed with the idea of a dual presidency—one for each section, each one with a veto.  What both ideas had in common was minority veto.

It turns out Calhoun had nothing on Mitch McConnell.  Through his unprecedented abuse of the filibuster in the Senate, McConnell has achieved what Calhoun only dreamed of: a de facto minority veto.  Note who the participants were in the recent tax negotiations: the president and the Senate minority leader.

Republicans in the Senate have used the “minority veto” to get their way on the tax issue.  They refused to allow any bill but their own to pass—even though the Democrats had the presidency and a clear majority in both Houses, even though numerous pubic opinion polls demonstrated that the majority of Americans favored the Democratic proposal.  The House passed the president’s proposal, and 53 Senators voted for it—but it died by minority veto.

But perhaps most chilling to me is not these surface similarities, but the victim mentality that both Calhoun and today’s Republicans share. Calhoun in his famous final speech said: “the responsibility of saving the Union rests on the North, and not on the South.”  He warned that the Union could only be preserved if the majority submitted completely to the demands of the minority.  If northerners ignored his warning, he said, the consequences would be their fault: “I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility.”

That last phrase could be the slogan of the Senate Republicans.  They have held everything—unemployment benefits, a nuclear arms treaty, the Defense authorization act, the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”—hostage to their desire to protect the wealthiest two percent of Americans from paying the same tax rate on income over $250,000 that they did in the 1990s. 

The Republicans have taken no responsibility.  They have said to Democrats: “if you do not submit to the demands of the minority, if you fail to give us the bill we want, then the failure of all of those other bills, and the resultant increase of everyone’s taxes on Jan. 1, will be your fault.  We shall have the consolation, let what will come, that we are free from all responsibility.”

A decade later, Calhoun's irresponsible mindset would lead to the Civil War.  Today's Republicans will not, one must hope, produce any calamity on such a dramatic and grand scale.  But they embody the same narrow, anti-majoritarian, self-destructive approach to politics that the senator from South Carolina did.  And the results of that will not be pretty.

Senator John C. DeMint

My first exposure to South Carolina politics came from academic study rather than personal experience. While a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, I became fascinated with the southern states rights movement before the Civil War, and in particular its foremost proponent, South Carolina's John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun was a fascinating figure.  He was an active politician for his entire adult life: he served as Secretary of War, Secretary of State, Vice-President (for two different presidents—the only person to have ever done that) and Senator from South Carolina.  But he was also a serious political philosopher, perhaps the most original political thinker of the Jacksonian era.  He dedicated his formidable intellect to the problem of securing the rights of the slaveholding minority in the South, and is responsible of the doctrine of nullification: the idea that a state can veto a federal law it finds unconstitutional.

I've found myself thinking a lot about Calhoun recently, due to the antics of current South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint.

You have to hand it to DeMint.  He knows how to call attention to himself.  Last week, it was his reiteration of his belief, first stated six years ago when he was first running for senate, that gays and sexually active unmarried women should not be allowed to teach in public schools (he was silent on the subject of sexually active unmarried straight men, so it would seem they are not subject to the same standard).

That wasn't the only strange statement DeMint made here in Spartanburg that day.  There was also this bizarre mixture of deficit reduction and religion:

People are beginning to see that there's no way we can pay the interest on our debt and every week, we're borrowing money to pay the debt we have and are creating new programs that are costing more money.  Hopefully in 2012, we'll make headway to repeal some of the things we've done, because politics only works when we're realigned with our Savior.

I understand the concern about the deficit.  I understand the desire to get right with God.  I cannot understand how DeMint comes to the conclusion that the two are in any way connected.

Then there was this largely unnoticed story from a couple of weeks ago.  DeMint announced that he would bring the Senate to a standstill.  He would personally block any of the normal, unanimous consent business that had not been cleared with his office, he said.  He was basically asserting his right to personally veto bills.


DeMint does not seem to have followed through on his threat, but he does seem intent on using the expected Republican gains in Congress in the coming elections to shut down the federal government.  DeMint simply does not believe in government action.  In an interview with the despicable Bryan Fischer, he said this:

So this idea that government has to do something is not a good idea. So I think the less we do, the better except maybe to dismantle some of the federal programs that are making it harder for America to be competitive.

So what does this have to do with Calhoun?  Consider this description of Calhoun by his biographer, John Niven:

Calhoun had been driven by what he believed was the growing weakness of his state and his section in an industrializing society.  Uncertain about a future in which the slave-plantation system seemed to be increasingly on the defensive, Calhoun, with his speculative mind and his latent insecurity, tended toward rationalizing a potential minority position as the only proper logic that was blessed by Jeffersonian precedent and confirmed by historical fact.

Although his simple-mindedness bears no resemblance to Calhoun's intellectual complexity, I think DeMint is in some sense Calhoun's heir in insecurity.  Like Calhoun, DeMint considers himself the defender of an imperiled way of life.  Every change seems to be hastening the end of his group's political dominance, and so in our national politics he becomes the living embodiment of "no."

DeMint represents a demographic that is increasingly an endangered species nationally, even while it remains dominant locally in South Carolina.  The narrow-minded bigotry of his statement about school teachers (and in particular the absurd double-standard that applies no moral standard to straight men) is a throwback to an intolerant America that is rapidly disappearing.  His obsequious devotion to business interests and knee-jerk laissez-faire economic policy is straight out of Herbert Hoover's long-discredited playbook.  His mindless political nihilism that rejects any compromise offers no real solutions to the problems that face us as a nation.

In his final address to the Senate, too weak to actually read the speech himself, Calhoun abjured the very idea of political compromise.  Instead he overtly threatened secession if his political enemies failed to surrender to the South's every demand.  Having led the nation to the brink of disaster by insistently defending a doomed institution, Calhoun granted himself absolution: "I shall have the consolation, let what will come, that I am free from all responsibility."


But we cannot absolve ourselves, and history has not absolved Calhoun.  Political leaders are responsible for the choices they make and the consequences of those choices.

Like Calhoun before him, DeMint will be returned to the Senate this year, and in all likelihood again in 2016.  Like Calhoun, DeMint will rail against the forces of progress and champion the forces of reaction, all the while pretending that he is championing the Constitution.  And lastly, like Calhoun, DeMint will end his career knowing that the world he defended is ending too, and he will not escape responsibility for standing in the way of progress.