Those who are leading today’s push to upend the political system are heirs to a set of ideas that goes back almost two centuries: the pushback of imperious property against democracy. Its earliest coherent expression in America came in the late 1820s and ’30s, from South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, a strategist of ruling-class power so shrewd that the acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed him “the Marx of the master class.”1 Hofstadter’s label gestured, with his signature sense of irony, to the revolutionary nature of Calhoun’s strategy for how the wealthiest one percent (actually, far fewer) of his day could wield outsize power in a constitutional republic. A former vice president and, at the time he devised his plan, a U.S. senator, Calhoun was America’s first tactician of tax revolt, and arguably the nation’s most influential extremist.
It’s not a secret legacy. Some of James M. Buchanan’s intellectual heirs have remarked on how closely his school of political economy mirrors that of John C. Calhoun’s. Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, two economics professors at the core of the operation funded and overseen by Charles Koch at George Mason University, Buchanan’s last home, have called the antebellum South Carolina senator “a precursor of modern public choice theory,” another name for the stream of thought pioneered by Buchanan. Both Buchanan and Calhoun, the coauthors observe, were concerned with the “failure of democracy to preserve liberty.” In particular, Buchanan and Calhoun both alleged a kind of class conflict between “tax producers and tax consumers.” Both depicted politics as a realm of exploitation and coercion, but the economy as a realm of free exchange. And both designed inventive ways to safeguard minority rights that went beyond the many protections already enshrined in the Constitution.2 Calhoun and Buchanan both devised constitutional mechanisms to protect an elite economic minority against “exploitation” by majorities of their fellow citizens, and advocated a minority veto power that, as the acolytes note, had “the same purpose and effect.”3 Both thinkers sought ways to restrict what voters could achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.4
Appreciation for John C. Calhoun turns out to be not an aberration but a recurrent theme in the brain trust the Kansas-based billionaire Charles Koch has funded over the years. What is so valuable to them in Calhoun’s antidemocratic theorizing, notably in his Disquisition on Government and in his long magnum opus, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States?5
One of the first scholars subsidized by Koch, the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, spoke openly of the cause’s debt to Calhoun, crediting his class analysis of taxation as foundational to the libertarian cause. “Calhoun’s insight,” Rothbard explained, was “that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the classes and the conflict,” not the labor relations of the economy, as previous thinkers believed. Calhoun saw “that some people in the community must be net payers of tax funds, while others are net recipients.” (In today’s parlance, makers and takers.) By his theory, the net gainers of tax monies were “the ‘ruling class’ of the exploiters”; the net losers of tax funds were “the ‘ruled’ or the exploited.” Most crucially, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for. “Calhoun was quite right,” Rothbard instructed, “in focusing on taxes and fiscal policy as the keystone” of democracy’s threat to economic liberty.6 To see how Calhoun’s project unfolded in his day is to better understand the stealth plan for transformation under way in our own.
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By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops—particularly cotton—produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.7
And no one thought harder about how to safeguard those investments than John C. Calhoun. One female contemporary referred to him as “the cast-iron man,” in reference to his hammering manner. With blazing eyes and a raw-boned face, he had a countenance as stern as that of the militant abolitionist John Brown, but with a mission fully opposite. In his day—indeed, for more than a century thereafter—Calhoun had no rival in the sheer wizardry of what one famous political scientist called the “set of constitutional gadgets” that Calhoun engineered to constrict the operations of democratic government.8
Calhoun had enjoyed the kind of education available to only a sliver of the elite in early America, including an undergraduate degree at Yale and legal training. He enlisted that education to advance what he took to be the interests of his peculiar class, a richer one than the world had ever known, and one whose interests were not adequately protected, Calhoun believed, by the Constitution as then understood.
There was something alarming, even to his allies, in the monomania with which Calhoun conducted ideological warfare against the political liberalism of his day. He wore people out with his certainty that “the force of destiny” guided him, his relentless reductionist logic, and the nakedly instrumental manner with which he approached human relationships. Compassion, patience, and humor all seemed as foreign to him as the notion that the people he owned had intellects and dreams of their own. President Andrew Jackson, the leader of Calhoun’s political party, suggested that the man be hung for treason. That was imprudent. But there was a logic to it, and not only because Calhoun was so unlikable. His ideas about government broke sharply from the vision of the nation’s founders and the Constitution’s drafters, and even from that of his own party. He wanted one class—his own class of plantation owners—to overpower the others, despite its obvious numerical minority.9
Calhoun and his modern understudies are not wrong: there is a conflict between their vision of economic liberty and political democracy. Where they are allowed to, majorities will use the political process to improve their situations, and that can result in taxes being imposed on those with the wealth to pay them. The American people have used their power to do many significant things that required tax revenues: provide public education, develop manufacturing, build roads and bridges, create land-grant universities, protect the safety of food and drugs, enable workers to speak as one through unions, prevent old-age poverty, fight discrimination, assure the right to vote, and clean up our air and water, to name a few. These are achievements in which most citizens have taken pride.10
But they all came about through means that have become anathema to the militant economic libertarians among today’s donor class. They, like Calhoun, believe that Madison’s Constitution was flawed by its failure to fully hamstring the people’s ability to act “collectively.” All the government policies just named came about through group action, after all. The groups persuaded government to act in ways that necessarily limited the freedom of a minority of citizens: those who wanted to go on in the old way.
And that is why Calhoun concluded that if something must be sacrificed to square the circle between economic liberty and political liberty, it was political liberty. The planters’ will must prevail. Their property rights should trump all else. The southern delegates to America’s founding Constitutional Convention had built numerous protections for property owners, including slave owners, into the document. But that was inadequate in Calhoun’s view. He also advocated that states be able to pass whatever laws they saw fit to ensure “their internal peace and security”—in particular, “all such laws as may be necessary to maintain the existing relation between master and slaves.” That included measures to outlaw the circulation of antislavery literature. In the name of secure property, he called on the federal government to use its control of the Postal Service to enforce such prohibitions on others’ First Amendment freedom to publish and read what they liked.11
Note the emerging pattern, which we will see again: while criticizing government action that threatened his own liberty as a property owner, Calhoun saw nothing untoward in calling on the federal government to use its police powers to help his class stifle debate about its practices. That sleight of hand—denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good while using government power to suppress others—appears repeatedly in the pages that follow. Indeed, like Calhoun, the members of the team now applying Buchanan’s thought are interested not so much in fighting big government, per se, as in elevating that branch of government they can best control in a given situation.
After all, government, for someone like Calhoun, was there to protect property rights, even at the expense of the rights of others to freedom of speech and movement. He opposed allowing popular sovereignty to decide whether slavery should be legal in new states entering the Union.12 Similarly, in 1847, he warned a free abolitionist of African descent that he would be “turned out of town” if he dared come to Charleston. On what grounds? If “free blacks were allowed to come here,” Calhoun noted, “they might excite their fellow Africans to insurrection.”13
Calhoun’s yen for repression appeared in another way that is also revealing for our present situation—and for the history recounted in this book. While he waxed eloquent on the threat of a strong federal state, do not imagine that he preferred local government to state government as a more authentic expression of the people’s will. On the contrary, Calhoun led a campaign in the early republic that, in the name of property and individual rights, took powers away from local authorities, on whom ordinary people had more influence, and shifted them to central state governments. Why? State government was the level that men like him could most easily control. In South Carolina, he implemented a new style of state government with centralized power that, the legal historian Laura Edwards explained, was “a radical departure from the past.” Under his leadership, South Carolina became the one state in antebellum America furthest from the ideal of government of, by, and for the people. Another leading southerner judged it a “despot’s democracy.”14 Far from expressing the original intentions of the Constitution’s framers, then, Calhoun and his allies conceived a novel reshuffling of authority in the pursuit of more power for their class.
That pattern of newly power-hungry state governments treading on the time-honored powers of local communities is reappearing in red-state America today, along with the revival of Calhoun-like moves in the nation’s capital.15 Slavery is a moot point now, of course, but the quest to shore up the desires of the most aggressive few over the collective rights of the many is not. Where they have achieved control of state governments since 2010, the ardent advocates of liberty from the federal government have been overturning the accustomed rights of local governments and rushing through radical alterations of established law, as this book’s final chapter will show.
The revival of such tactics points to a core theme of this book. 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.
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Interestingly, in light of the role of the Tea Party in shaking up American politics after 2009 and the role of U.S. manufacturing’s decline in the face of foreign competition in the presidential election of 2016, it was complaints about taxes to help infant industries that first induced Calhoun to advocate extremist measures—and to make his own original contributions to what he called “political science” to justify what he advocated.16
Outraged southern planters dubbed the 1828 federal tariff on imported manufactured goods the Tariff of Abominations. Designed to help the infant industries of the United States grow after the War of 1812 with Britain, a war that had exposed America’s grave economic weakness, the protective tariff most benefited the region interested in nurturing manufacturing: the free states of the Northeast. The tax disproportionately pinched the export-oriented cotton-growing South, whose most powerful citizens, owing to the profitability of slave-based production, had little concern for economic diversification. Calhoun cried foul. “We are the serfs of the system,” he fulminated. Rage over what he viewed as discriminatory taxation led him to radical positions that could all but undermine the effective framework of government that the Constitution’s authors had crafted only a generation earlier. A “government based in the naked principle that the majority ought to govern,” Calhoun warned, was sure to filch other men’s property and violate their “liberty.”17
Stepping up to lead the first regionwide tax rebellion in U.S. history, Calhoun was also moving, willy-nilly, to question representative government itself. It may surprise today’s readers to know that in those days, Calhoun and like-minded large slave owners found themselves to be very much alone in their questioning of the legitimacy of taxation to advance public purposes. Such concerns did not arise where slavery was absent, the historian Robin Einhorn has shown, in the first careful study to examine state and local tax practices in early America. Einhorn found that where they were free to do so, voters regularly called on their governments to perform services they valued and elected candidates who pledged to provide them. They believed, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. later put it, that taxes are “the price we pay for civilization.”18
What early free-state American voters liked about tax policy in their self-governing republic was that they, the people, decided by majority rule what they wanted their elected officials to do and how to tax for it. For these citizens, liberty meant having a say in questions of governance, being able to enter the public debate about the best way forward. Tracing such debates from the Colonial Era to the Civil War, Einhorn concluded, “American governments were more democratic, stronger, and more competent” where slavery was negligible or nonexistent. They were “more aristocratic, weaker, and less competent” where slavery dominated, as well as more likely to be captured by the wealthy few, who turned them to their own ends. Voters in free states wanted active government: they taxed themselves for public schools, roads to travel from place to place, canals to move their goods, and more. In the southern states, the yeomen of the backcountry, where slaves were fewer, often tried to get their governments to take up their concerns but found that “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 irony of all this is vast, as Einhorn points out: “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.19
More than that, to stop what he imagined to be the exploitation of men like himself, Calhoun set out to alter understanding of the U.S. Constitution. The system that James Madison and the other framers had devised for the protection of property rights did not go far enough, according to the South’s most self-seeking capitalist. It did not shackle the people’s power sufficiently—even though one of the main goals of the U.S. Constitution’s famed checks and balances was precisely to keep sudden swings of public opinion from undermining political institutions, particularly those that protected property. But the Constitution no longer seemed enough.
To grasp the scale of Calhoun’s departure from the vision of the founders, it bears remembering that neither Madison nor his colleagues had been fans of pure democracy. As the main architect of the Constitution and a slave master of great wealth himself, Madison thought long and hard about how to protect minority rights in a government based on sovereignty of the people, a people then understood to be white men of property. He and his fellow framers built numerous protections of minority rights and property rights into the document, among them the Electoral College and the Senate, with their systems of representation that favored less populous states. They also safeguarded slavery, the most well known example being the clause of Article I, Section 2, that counted “all other Persons” other than “free Persons” and Indians as “three fifths” of a person in apportioning representation and taxes. Still, Madison, Jefferson, and other statesmen of the founding era were sufficiently ashamed of slavery that they never mentioned it by name in the document. They anticipated that their system of human bondage would and should wither away.20
Not so Calhoun. Not of the revolutionary generation himself, he had none of the founders’ embarrassment over “the peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. His was the cohort of the cotton gin, the technological innovation that turned plantation slavery into the most profitable capitalist enterprise the world had yet seen. Calhoun made slavery a point of pride, going so far as to announce from the Senate floor that it was “a positive good.” It was good, Calhoun asserted, for the masters of the South, good for the capitalists of the North (because it made the South “the great conservative power” able to protect the interests of property nationwide against any rebellion from free labor), and good even for the enslaved, who, according to Calhoun, could count on food and shelter where the free wage earners of the North could not.21
Calhoun, the precocious political scientist, began making his aggressive case for slavery’s superiority just as the free-labor North was outstripping the South in population and its political institutions were becoming more inclusive of working people (rather akin to the changes in demography and voting rights in the early twenty-first century that alarmed some billionaires). Calhoun was not about to forgo the riches King Cotton augured for men like him just because some escaped slaves, free blacks, and born-again white abolitionists had started campaigning against slavery as an affront to God that desecrated the teaching of Jesus and despoiled the Declaration of Independence. Being a shrewd man, Calhoun could see the arithmetic of national politics changing. If something was not done, slave masters would lose the sway they had enjoyed at the founding, when the regions were more evenly matched in population. “The South,” Calhoun warned in 1831, was already “a hopeless minority.”22
The South Carolina statesman left no stone unturned in his quest to make his region’s labor system appear acceptable. Nature decreed, he avowed, that those of different races “cannot live together in peace, or harmony, or their mutual advantage,” unless one dominated the other, as whites did blacks in the South. Slavery was the proper condition for those not of European descent.23 And had not the Bible condoned enslavement? As Calhoun once summarized his case, “Slavery is an institution ordained by Providence, honored by time, sanctioned by the Gospel, and especially favorable to personal and national liberty.”24
Slavery favorable to liberty? For all their invocations of the Bible and the era’s pseudoscience of race, Calhoun and his peers knew the cold reality that they were practicing a type of capitalism that would not pass democratic scrutiny much longer if majority opinion was allowed to prevail in Washington. Even if those outside the South were not prepared to abolish slavery outright, let alone grant its victims civil and political equality, they were increasingly inclined to see the institution as an affront to the nation’s founding principles—and a mortal threat to their own economic and political future. The cry “free soil, free labor, free men” captured their hopes and fears.25
To Calhoun, by contrast, freedom above all concerned the free use and enjoyment of one’s productive property, without any impingement by others. If he deemed it necessary to punish one of his workers with “30 lashes well laid on” and a diet of “bread and water,” as he did a young runaway slave named Aleck, such was his prerogative as an owner. How he disciplined his labor force to keep his enterprise profitable should be no one else’s business.26 Such practices fell under the heading of the property rights that Calhoun was trying to make absolute in a society that, in point of fact, had always regulated property rights in all kinds of ways, albeit then mainly at the state and local level.27
Where the economy should be the realm of total liberty for the owning class in Calhoun’s interpretation, government—particularly the federal government—was the realm of potential abuse, such that men of property must ever guard against the certainty of “oppression” if that government came under the control of the majority. As his class’s interests increasingly diverged from those of other citizens’, Calhoun more and more identified the federal government as a menace to liberty. Scared of what democracy in the nation’s capital portended for the security of slavery in his region, Calhoun became almost hysterical in his denial that such a “community ever existed as the people of the United States.” No, he railed, all “sovereignty” was vested “in the people of the several states” that consented to the federal Union—“not a particle resides . . . in the American people collectively.”28
What exactly did Calhoun so fear coming from “the American people collectively”? He feared, as his successors today do, a government that his band of like-minded property supremacists could not control. It is unlikely that many of his current heirs have read Calhoun in the original. Rather, they have learned the ideas from modern-day libertarians who exhumed Calhoun’s analysis to address matters that troubled them, too.
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Indeed, the path to the present of advocacy for the rights of the radical rich minority has been not continuous, but broken for long stretches.29 Calhoun’s ideas went into abeyance for almost a century after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox in April 1865. Yet their value remained understood by some in the South’s educated elite, those who cherished a mythical version of the War Between the States (as they called the Civil War) and portrayed it more as a quest to preserve liberty than a defense of slavery. The South as Calhoun and such admirers imagined it was not the actual South, with its biracial population and millions of low-income and middle-class whites who have benefited greatly from the public resources that taxes enable in democracies.
Rather, among the white elite in America’s most history-minded region, a refusal to acknowledge the danger of extreme wealth and inequality went hand in hand with antidemocratic and racist strategies of rule. Propertied southerners took the lead in devising schemes to subdue democracy because of their determination to safeguard the distinctive race-based, hyperexploitative regional political economy that Calhoun and his fellow planters did so much to shape, one based first on chattel slavery and later on disenfranchised low-wage labor, racial segregation, and a starved public sector.30 In no other part of America has the divergence been starker between the affirmations of the Declaration of Independence and the realities of economic and political power.
The only force strong enough to stop the injustice was the federal government, when pushed to act against the violation of widely shared ideals. As a result, nowhere were elites more self-conscious and strategic in thinking about how to preserve their domination over those they bent to their will—and how to hamstring national democracy. Central to their efforts was a self-serving yet astute interpretation of the Constitution that emphasized states’ rights, buttressed by a battery of other rules to subdue the people, black and white. A case in point: to suppress a biracial movement of the region’s farmers at the turn of the century without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment, white elites in state after southern state devised new laws that decimated black voter turnout without ever mentioning race. Those rules held down everyone but the most wealthy for generations, but they hurt racial minorities most, because they needed the federal government to preserve their rights in the face of abusive employers and state authorities. They still do. And from the start, as Calhoun’s calculations illustrate, the notion of unwarranted federal intervention has been inseparable from a desire to maintain white racial as well as class dominance. Not surprisingly, then, but with devastating consequences all around, attacks on federal power pitched to nonelites have almost always tapped white racial anxiety, whether overtly or with coded language.31
By the 1950s, the nation’s premier workshop for the shrewd construction of elaborate rules to ensure the minority elite’s power over the majority was the state of Virginia. The Old Dominion had a venerable tradition of political leadership, as the birthplace of four of the nation’s first five presidents, the capital of the Confederacy, and the veritable fiefdom of Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., the archnemesis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. Byrd presided over midcentury Virginia like a lord over his manor. Dr. James Buchanan arrived at the state’s flagship university just as Senator Byrd’s allies were exhuming Calhoun’s theories of government for the battle against Brown v. Board of Education.