American Democracy > Zombie John C. Calhoun

Moore v Harper Posed a Mortal Threat to the United States

Ever since the Supreme Court announced at the close of its disastrous 2021-22 session, in which it had just ruled that state government are allowed to take away from women the most fundamental human right, ownership of one’s body, that it would take up in the next session the case of Moore v Harper, I have been in great fear that the rightwing majority would use it effectively to end democracy. Yesterday, I exhaled.

The case concerned the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a zany rightwing misinterpretation of a few lines in the Constitution that would allow state legislatures to do anything, with no check from courts. The case concerned outrageous partisan gerrymandering by the Republicans* who control the legislature there. A decision upholding the state’s position would have allowed state legislatures to steal presidential elections as Donald Trump had tried to get them to do after his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden.

In a larger sense, all of this is another of the legacies of enslavement that continue to bind up the will of the American people. Those include each state having the same number of senators and the Electoral College. The filibuster is not in the Constitution, but it has been used for that purpose, too.

The most forceful advocate in the first half of the nineteenth century for limiting democracy to protect the “right” to own human beings and protect the fortunes of the wealthy was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. He was, as Duke historian Nancy MacLean puts it in her 2017 essential-to-understand-our-current-crisis book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Calhoun, was, like those who have been pushing against democracy in recent decades, “concerned with the ‘failure of democracy to preserve liberty.’” By liberty. he and many of today’s billionaires meant what they see as “economic liberty”: freedom for those who held immense fortunes from any government-imposed restrictions. Indeed, they saw and see the only purpose of government as to protect property rights from people’s rights.

Calhoun, who insisted that slavery is “a positive good,” sought “minority [the minority, of course, being the wealthy] veto power … to restrict what voters can achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.”

MacLean explains in words upon which I could not improve the origins of our current struggle over democracy:

“What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically extreme—and some would say greedy—subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could.”

She goes on to quote historian Robin Einhorn:

“Planters saw threats to their ‘property’ in any political action they did not control, even if the yeomen actually were demanding roads, schools, and other mundane services. … The anti-government rhetoric that continues to saturate our political life is rooted in [support for] slavery rather than liberty.’ The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of racial slavery.”

Had the Court ruled the other way in Moore v Harper, our democracy would be even more in the chains Calhoun and the forces of greed such as Charles Koch want to put it. Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch voted for Calhoun and vision of a tightly chained democracy, but the other three Court members on the right chose to “cancel” Calhoun and let democracy live for now.

Zombies are, though, notoriously difficult to eliminate. According to what I just found on the internet at a site called “Zombie Fandom”—which sounds to be at least as reliable a source of accurate information as Marjorie Taylor Greene—“nearly all zombie survivalists are in agreement that the destruction of the brain is the only surefire way to neutralize the zombie.” Calhoun did have a brain, if not a soul, so he will continue to carry his chains like the ghost of Jacob Marley, hoping to place them on our democracy.

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NOTE: My times they are a-changin’. I have just retired after teaching for, they tell me (I’m thinking of demanding a recount), a half century, at Millsaps College. I’ll miss the classroom and stimulating discussions with students, but my life won’t change that much, as I have for decades spent most of my time writing and that will continue.

One thing that will change, though, is our income. Without my teaching salary, I need a new source of revenue. A patron or group of patrons establishing a fund to support my writing would be nice, but that’s not in the cards. Accordingly, I have decided to start taking paid subscriptions to my Substack essays. I don’t want to keep anyone from reading them without charge, but for those who can afford a paid subscription, I hope you will do so. There will also occasionally be a premium essay that is only available to paid subscribers.