John C. Calhoun, the intellectual godfather of the Confederacy, has finally been de-platformed at Clemson University in his native South Carolina.  The university sits on land that was once Calhoun’s plantation.  An honor college had been named for him.  At the request of leading alumni, the college removed Calhoun’s name.

The removal of his name is fitting.  The anti-democratic, pro-slavery Mr. Calhoun was an active and influential political theorist.  He has been called the “Marx of the Master Class”.  He coined two constitutional principles, two sides of the same coin, that helped to give intellectual heft to the secessionist movement and to its philosophical descendants.  One of these is “nullification” – the idea that any state in the Union has the authority to prevent the enforcement within its borders of federal statutes that are antithetical to the state’s interests.  The second is the “concurrent majority” – the idea that a numerical majority cannot impose its will on a minority without their concurrence on issues of critical importance to the minority.[1]

In “The Conservative Mind from Burke to Elliot”, one of the most disappointing books I can recall reading, Russell Kirk counts Calhoun among the conservatives.  I think this is wildly inaccurate.  Surely a central element of the conservative mind is the acceptance of constitutional and statutory principles as laid down in publicly available texts, interpreted according to their original and plain meaning without deconstruction or addition.  Calhoun did not derive the principles of nullification and concurrent majority from the text of the Constitution.  He invented them.  You have to ignore the text of the Constitution, you have to read right past the Supremacy Clause, to come to his conclusions.

President Andrew Jackson took nullification apart in a presidential proclamation.  See. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jack01.asp.  Harry Jaffa finished the job in “A New Birth of Freedom”.  Calhoun’s ideas are nothing more than smoking ruins at this point.  (If you elect to read Jackson’s proclamation, please be warned that Jackson owned slaves and ordered the relocation of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears.)

And yet, Mr. Calhoun’s removal from a place of honor at Clemson is not without its ironies.  Many of the people demanding the removal of his name have far more in common with him than they may realize.

Modern, woke, social justice warriors hold the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in disdain as the work of white supremacists who wrote those documents for their own profit and not for the benefit of the American people as a whole.  In this Calhoun fully agrees.  He thought that only members of the white race were intended as beneficiaries of the liberties chartered by the Declaration and the Constitution.

Calhoun and his de-platformers agree that federal law cannot be enforced in a state that finds enforcement abhorrent.  For Calhoun, such a law was the tariff of 1828, the “Tariff of Abominations”.  For his modern acolytes, it is immigration law.  Sanctuary cities and sanctuary states gleam with the same light as Calhoun’s image of a league of nullifying states.  They both agree that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution can be ignored when circumstances require.

The de-platformers and Calhoun believe that rights derive from membership in a group, not from one’s status as an individual equal in natural rights to all other individuals.  For both of them, the groups to which individuals are assigned, and from whose membership rights are derived, stand in a hierarchy.  Calhoun recognized only two such groups, white and black.  The modern warriors deal with a larger number of groups and also have to account for the intersection of groups, because humans are complex and can identify with more than category.  Nevertheless, the modern warriors have developed sophisticated if unarticulated techniques for ranging groups into a hierarchy and assigning merit or the lack of it to each person according to that person’s group membership.  Calhoun is with them.

They disagree on how groups should be ranked.  Forgive me for seeing this as a trivial disagreement.  The real division is between those who think that humans derive their rights from group membership and those who think that all humans are individuals who have equal natural rights regardless of any accidental characteristic they may possess.

The demonstration that any group, race, social class, you name it, is superior or more deserving always fails.  It must fail because it is not based on reason, logic, or fact.  To maintain the idea, it is necessary to use force.  Dissent can’t be allowed because it might be persuasive.  The belief in group rights leads to a need for social control.  Calhoun’s south would not allow the distribution of abolitionist literature.  The same function is performed by the de-platformers through “speech codes”, bans on anything defined as “hate speech”, and the removal of those whose acts or words trigger an untoward emotional response in a member of a group that has achieved the requisite protected status.

As the proponents of group rights drift toward totalitarianism, they cannot allow dissent because their opinions are not based on reason.  International socialism of the Soviet or Chinese variety, national socialism of the German type, the many fascist movements that the world has witnessed, including the American version curiously called “antifascist” – what could be more antifascist than men in black shirts breaking windows? – not to mention the campus and street versions aimed at more informal control, are all based on the idea that one group is superior to another and that the purpose of government is to advance the interests of the more deserving group.

As it happens, these aberrant ideas, which have visited so much pain and destruction on humanity and continue to do so, derive from a string of 18^th and 19th-century German philosophers, including in their first rank George Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas inspired both Marx and Calhoun.  This observation led Leo Strauss to comment after the end of World War II:

[Germany] defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.

To which Harry Jaffa has added the pungent postscript:

If ever there was a nation annihilated politically on the battlefield that nonetheless imposed the yoke of its thought upon its conquerors, it was the Confederacy.

Mr. Calhoun may fade into well-deserved obscurity and may take many Confederates with him, along with their flag.  But his spirit remains alive in the minds of those who oppose him, without realizing that they are paying unintended tribute to the “Marx of the Master Class”.

[1] The two issues he had in mind, tariffs and slavery, are reflected in the justification for secession that South Carolina published in December 1860.  Calhoun had been in his grave for ten years when South Carolina acted on his ideas.  The concurrent majority doctrine is not applied evenly to all minorities.  (Surprise.)  Calhoun held that slaveholders, a distinct minority, can require that a numerical majority obtain their concurrence before the majority can act against the slaveholders’ interest.  At the same time, the slaves themselves, also a minority, had to abide by the decision of the numerical majority in the state where they resided.  Raw power explains the difference in treatment.  By 1860, slaves were themselves a numerical majority in South Carolina and Mississippi.  At some point, the weight of numbers would have overcome the demand from slaveholders for concurrence.

CNN caught Fox News in an error.  To illustrate events in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Fox had shown a photo of a man with a semi-automatic rifle standing in front of a fire.  The photo was misleading.  The fellow with the weapon had been on the scene at one time.  The fire had been active at another time.  The man with the rifle had not stood in front of the fire.

Fox apologized and took down the photo.  CNN got a chance to gloat.  The Seattle Times ran a story near the top of their website headlined “Fox News runs digitally altered images in coverage of Seattle’s protests, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”.

CNN takes seriously its responsibility to report on Fox News.  If only they and their companions in the media – the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC among others – put the same effort into scandals taking place in plain view.

Consider that we have learned that James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, Andrew McCabe and a list of other Obama administration officials testified under oath in secret Congressional hearings that they had not seen any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in the course of the 2016 presidential election.  Yet, some of those same individuals spent years on air accusing Mr. Trump of heinous crimes.

Will these individuals be called to account for the difference between what they said under oath in private and what they said in public?   Surely the misdirection that their activities caused is no less important than Fox’s sin.  Fox’s treatment suggested that two events happened at the same time when they each happened at different times.  The media treatment of the “Russia-Trump Collusion” story told the public that events occurred when their sources knew that the events had not occurred at all.  Fox corrected their blunder and apologized.  Their media rivals have not done the same.

Imagine what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot.  President Trump and his senior advisors and cabinet officials have made countless public statements that the novel coronavirus originated in China.  Suppose that the national security advisor, secretary of state, attorney general, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI (assuming he could be found), and others had all testified under oath to Congressional committees that they had no information to support the China connection.

If their statements became public, think of the pounding they would take from the news media.  There would be questions about nothing else at news conferences and press briefings.  ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post would cover the story relentlessly.  And they would be right to do so.

The case of John Brennan, President Obama’s director of central intelligence, is especially telling.  On air at CNN, he accused Mr. Trump of treason.  When the Mueller report was released and Brennan’s claims were shown to be unsupported by any facts, he was asked, one time, how he got it so wrong.  His answer was that he was relying on bad information.

This from a man who ran the CIA for eight years.  He is supposed to be able to evaluate information, to separate the believable from the dross.

Was he asked a follow-up question?  Who were your sources?  Why did you believe them?

Now we know that there never was any evidence to support the accusations that Mr. Brennan made.  He must have figured that he could keep up the act as long as the sworn testimony of people like James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Sally Yates remained classified.  Until now, Mr. Trump’s directors of national intelligence had been content to cooperate.  Richard Grenell, then the acting director, finally declassified this scandalous material.

Where are the tough questions from CNN?  Why did you charge Mr. Trump on-air with treason when your colleagues testified in private that there was no information tying Mr. Trump to Russia?  Why did you mislead CNN’s viewers for so long?

Adam Schiff told us on many occasions that he had incontrovertible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.  It turns out he had none.  Has anyone asked him what evidence he was relying on?  He now claims that the materials being declassified by the director of national intelligence are being released selectively.  Will the chair of the House Intelligence Committee demand the declassification of the materials he was relying on?  If not, will he be called to account for misleading the public?

As Holman Jenkins points out in the Wall Street Journal, the news media were used by anti-Trump politicians to peddle a narrative that has proved to be false.  But, he notes, the reporters and editors who are among the victims of the hoax, people whose professional reputations should be erased, don’t seem to be upset.

Remember Arthur Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark in the night?  In “Silver Blaze” a valuable horse is stolen from its stable before a big race.  Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery by observing that the dog trained to guard the stable didn’t bark when the horse was taken.  The dog knew the thief and didn’t see him as an intruder.  He thought they were on the same side.

The dog had the excuse that its instinctive loyalty was misplaced.  It was not a willing accomplice to the crime.  The reporters and editors who want to bury the biggest political scandal of our time have the same canine loyalty but not the same excuse.  I count them as willing participants.

For much of our history, news outlets were aligned with political parties.  News media have been moving in that direction for some time and have now come home to their roots.  The only difference is that the reporters and editors of our day pretend to be objective.  The audience is catching on.