Our politics are straining under back-breaking burdens. We are still saddled with several undemocratic compromises of the founders, are corrupted by money and corporate interests, and profess a democracy which in even its best incarnations is, historically, a brief reprieve betwixt tyrannies and oligarchies of various forms, inevitably brought down by the greed, fears, and passions of its subjects. We are experiencing division to a degree not seen since the civil war, and corruption, even treason at the highest levels of government. Where is all this going?
A recent multi-biography focused on the leading politicians of the early to mid-1800's: Daniel Webster, from Massachusetts, Henry Clay, from Kentucky, and John Calhoun, from South Carolina. Yoking them together this way is common in the teaching of this era, but it does something of a disservice to their strikingly divergent contexts and paths. Webster was a natural supporter of Northern interests, including Union, tariffs, but not abolition. He eventually agreed with the compromise of 1850 that enforced the fugative slave policy of the South, since that policy was written explicitly into the constitution. Clay was the most ambitious of the set, leading the Senate through decades of policy and legislative compromise. His lodestar was also Union, made increasingly difficult by the relative economic decline of the South, the entrenchment of slavery, and the fatal compromises that had already been made in the original constitution.
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| Mysterious, Romanesque bust of John Calhoun, senator and vice president from South Carolina. |
John Calhoun was different altogether. While the others tacked repeatedly to maintain the Union and its institutions, Calhoun lit out towards a bitter and uncompromising pro-Southern, pro-slavery position. He was the one who repeatedly threatened secession before the Congress. He was the one who turned intellectual and moral summersaults to defend slavery as consonant with the constitution, the founders, and human decency and progress. This was a time, of course, when Native Americans did not even get this level of discussion- they were packed off to Oklahoma with hardly a bleeding heart on their side. Racism was endemic, and the point of America was not harmony, but the manifest destiny of the Europeans who were remaking the continent. Still, the blatant FOX-news quality of Calhoun's arguments is unmistakable. Here he compares the state of African Americans in Massachusetts to those in the South:
"By the very latest authentic accounts, there was one our of every twenty-one of the black population in jails of houses of correction, and one out of every thirteen was either deaf and dumb, blind, idiot, insane, or in prison. ... The condition of the African race throughout all the states where the ancient relation between the two races has been retained enjoys a degree of health and comfort which may well compare with that of the laboring population of any coiuntry in Christendome; and it may be added that in no other condition or in any other age or country, has the negro race ever attained so high an elevation in morals, intelligence, or civilization."
All this led to a clear break:
"I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion. Entertaining this opinion, I have, on all proper occasions, endeavored to call the attention of each of the two great parties which divide the country to adopt some measure to prevent so great a disaster, but without success. The agitation has been permitted to proceed, with almost no attempt to resist it, until it has reached a period where it can no longer be denied or disguised that the Union is in danger. You have thus forced upon you the greatest and the gravest question that can ever come under your consideration: How can the Union be preserved?"
Calhoun brooked no embarrassment or qualm about slavery. As an institution, it was good, not bad; growing, not dying. While Clay and the founders generally hoped that it would wither away, though economic evolution and plain moral decency, Calhoun stood for its unrepentant expansion. The constitution was also behind him. The constitution gave Southern states the representation of 3/5 of its slaves, but none of their voting. The constitution said nothing about any powers the Union might have to restrict slavery in new states. The constution explicitly forbade the harboring of runaway slaves. The country had lost sight of its duties to the South, and were the abolitionists not muzzled from speaking their inconvenient moral truths, the South would have no more of it.
It is a story of a whole section of America gone off its moral rocker, in service of plain greed and conservatism. A religion has also evolved in the South that seems to blend the authoritarianism and social conservatism of Catholicism with independent elite governance and a scrim of protestant theology. When the South did secede, the Union government let loose a torrent of progressive legislation. One senses strongly that we could and would do the same today but for the anchor of a Southern political culture still petrified by true equality, dedicated to feudal economic relations, and to defend itself, still spouting the mantra of state's rights. The map of Red states tells the story.
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| Political divisions over the last sixty years, by presidential election. |
But it is the media and media leaders that serve to normalize immoral positions. Climate change is only an example, but perhaps the clearest and most dire of our time. Failure to act is simply criminal- an act of sabatoge against the future of every citizen and the entire biosphere. A fair portion of our culture, driven by right wing media and its nexus of money and fear, drives an utterly immoral political culture of denial, mean-ness, and blind conservatism. Trump has nowhere near the intellect or facility of John Calhoun, but the brazen support of palpably destructive policies, the headlong divisiveness, the antipodean moral compass have a certain resemblance.
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