The dog whistle wasn’t hard to hear. John C. Calhoun In the last four years, Calhounism—the tyranny of the minority—has moved to the forefront of conservative ideology. You can see it in the parade of Republicans’ bills (37, at last count) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as if it were forced on the country and not passed by majorities in the House and Senate. You can see it in the moves—some aborted, some not—to rig presidential elections by changing the distribution of electoral votes to favor land and rural areas over cities and people. And you can see it in the Mitch McConnell–led effort to block implementation of duly elected laws through obstruction of Senate business. Republicans have blocked nominations to vacant judgeships and federal agencies for no other reason than opposition to the president’s agenda—in the case of his judicial nominees—or opposition to the law, in the case of Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. These moves, as many observers have noted over the last four years, are unprecedented. The Senate was never meant to be a super-majoritarian institution, and lawmakers have never been able to block implementation of laws because they disagree with the contents. But in the Calhoun-infused GOP, this is the new normal. If there’s anything positive you can say about the Republican Party’s Calhounism, it’s that they haven’t embraced the full spectrum of Calhoun’s ideas on race. In a speech on the Senate floor in 1837, Calhoun defended slavery as a “positive good” and not a “necessary evil.” It was, he argued, a universal truth that “there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” With that said, it’s not as if the Republican Party has shied away from using ugly racial rhetoric for political advantage. Mitt Romney’s Ohio campaign was centered on the (false) claim that President Obama had ended the work requirement in welfare, and was simply sending checks to recipients. Given the established rhetorical association between “welfare” and African-Americans, the dog whistle wasn’t hard to hear. More recently, a Tea Party activist in Texas told a crowd of Republicans that “the Republican Party doesn’t want black people to vote if they’re going to vote 9 to 1 for Democrats.” And on top of this, Phyllis Schlafly —a luminary of conservative activism—argued that the GOP should abandon immigration reform and further commit itself to being the party of white people. Losing 82 percent of nonwhites, it seems, just isn’t enough. None of this is to say that the GOP can’t change direction and move away from the legacy of John C. Calhoun. For now at least, it’s barreling ahead to the past, eager to avoid any change.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:25:15 +0000