No, Nay Never; No, Nay Never, No More!

Over at the re-energized (if still conspicuously centrist) New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus has an interesting, and provocative article, Original Sin: Why the Republican Party is and Will Continue to be the Party of White People. Some of the article is, in a sense, old hat--a rehash of the Southern Strategy's success, and of the costs in today's electoral politics it now exacts. Old news, on the surface. But where Tanenhaus shines is in his tracing of the intellectual core of teh Southern Strategy:

But that history, with its repeated instances of racialist political strategy dating back many decades, only partially accounts for the party's electoral woes. The true problem, as yet unaddressed by any Republican standard-bearer, originates in the ideology of modern conservatism. When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s, they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun. This is not to say conservatives today share Calhoun's ideas about race. It is to say instead that the Calhoun revival, based on his complex theories of constitutional democracy, became the justification for conservative politicians to resist, ignore, or even overturn the will of the electoral majority.

This is the politics of nullification, the doctrine, nearly as old as the republic itself, which holds that the states, singly or in concert, can defy federal actions by declaring them invalid or simply ignoring them. We hear the echoes of nullification in the venting of anti-government passions and also in campaigns to "starve government," curtail voter registration, repeal legislation, delegitimize presidents. There is a strong sectionalist bias in these efforts. They flourish in just the places Kevin Phillips identified as Republican strongholds—Plains, Mountain, but mainly Southern states, where change invites suspicion, especially when it seems invasive, and government is seen as an intrusive force. Yet those same resisters—most glaringly, Tea Partiers—cherish the entitlements and benefits provided by "Big Government." Their objections come when outsider groups ask for consideration, too. Even recent immigrants to this country sense the "hidden hand" of Calhoun's style of dissent, the extended lineage of rearguard politics, with its aggrieved call, heard so often today, "to take back America"—that is, to take America back to the "better" place it used to be. Today's conservatives have fully embraced this tradition, enshrining it as their own "Lost cause," redolent with the moral consolations of noble defeat.

Tannenhaus sketches the evolution of the Southern Strategy, from tactic to ethos, and finds in Calhoun's theory of nullification a way of countering the loss of legitimacy of the viewpoints that cemented the Reagan Coalition:

This remains the perspective of the American right, only today the minority of "concurrent voices" speak in the bitter tones of denial, as modernization and egalitarianism go forward. In retreat, the nullifying spirit has been revived as a form of governance—or, more accurately, anti-governance. Its stronghold is the Tea Party–inflected House of Representatives, whose nullifiers would plunge us all over the "fiscal cliff." We see it too in continuing challenges to "Obamacare," even after it was validated by the Roberts Court. And we see it as well in Senator Rand Paul's promise to "nullify anything the president does" to impose new gun controls. Each is presented not as a practical attempt to find a better answer, but as a "Constitutional" demand for restoration of the nation to its hallowed prior self. It is not a coincidence that the resurgence of nullification is happening while our first African American president is in office.

Calhoun taught, as Tanenhaus explains, that "each state was free to override the federal government, because local and sectional imperatives outweighed national ones." This is, of course, a perfect rational upon which to base grinding majoritarian preferences to a complete standstill--it's positively noble, d'ye see, because the majority is unworthy to lead, and the minority, with right, and justice, and puppies and kittens on its side, must prevail.

Never mind the fact that the philosophy was born in an effort to justify the worst, most systemic violation of human rights in our history; never mind that it prevented a political resolution short of the bloodiest war in American history.

Just say no.

Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers deserve better than to have their music associated with this toxic viewpoint, but today's Republicans seem to embrace their solution, but not to the right problem:



Think of them as a palate cleanser.