The Republican Party's Unspeakable Pig-Sty Of Terrible Ideas

John Calhoun came from a southern colonial family that opposed the federal constitution. He was elected to Congress from South Carolina in 1810 and immediately joined the ranks of the most hawkish, pro-war elements and he was instrumental in dragging the U.S. into the War of 1812. He was named Secretary of War-- the 5th choice-- by James Monroe in 1817. In 1824 he ran for president but found no support but was chosen vice president to John Quincy Adams by the Electoral College. in 1828 he betrayed Adams and ran as vice president on Andrew Jackson' ticket, which won.

What Calhoun is most famous for is his nullification doctrine, which he created as a way of countering what he considered central government tyranny. He saw himself a great defender of minority rights-- minorities being the wealthy white slave-owners. His doctrine, of course, was the philosophical undermining of secession. When he talked about using even the most extreme measures to protect "liberty and sovereignty," he was only talking about the liberty and sovereignty of the very wealthy. in 1832 Jackson sent naval warships to Charleston over nullification and threatened to hang Calhoun, who resigned as vice president as was selected by the South Carolina legislature to be a senator. He quit the Senate in 1843 to run for president in 1844 but found no support and quit the race before started. He was selected by the state legislature as senator again and served in that position until he died in 1850, basically Congress' most outspoken advocate of slavery and of secession over slavery.

This week, in his fascinating Guardian review of Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, George Monbiot brings Calhoun's villainy to the fore again. He writes about how MacLean accidentally stumbled upon the literary legacy of obscure right-wing nut, James McGill Buchanan-- largely a creation of the Koch brothers-- soon after he died. She discovered that Buchanan and the Kochs had been working on a secret plan for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. That plan now dominates the Republican Party and is reshaping politics.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of “differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.

Any clash between “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.” Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was a “constitutional revolution”: creating irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he developed a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution would look like, and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American south could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private schools. It was he who first proposed privatising universities, and imposing full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was to crush student activism. He urged privatisation of social security and many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links between people and government, and demolish trust in public institutions. He aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as “sellouts,” as they sought to improve the efficiency of government rather than destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanan’s work at George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause). Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy MacLean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential.” Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical “reforms.” (The same argument is used by those attacking the NHS). Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia,” allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment.

Through the network of thinktanks that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their transformation of the Republican party, and the hundreds of millions they have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass colonisation of Trump’s administration by members of this network and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanan’s vision is maturing in the US.

...In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanan’s programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism. And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to MacLean’s discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first rules of politics is, know your enemy. We’re getting there.

Is The Republican Party Really Committing Suicide?

Calhounism & the Republican Party

The GOP is barely a national party any longer anyway and would be better described as a creepy and reactionary revanchist movement in the former slave-holding states with support in backward, socially-primitive Mormon parts of the country. Friday Jamelle Bouie posted about the revival of Calhounism as a hallmark of the modern Republican Party. South Carolina right-winger, John C. Calhoun, an anti-American slave fanatic, helped ignite the Civil War with his attempts to insist that states could nullify any federal laws they didn't agree with. His doctrine is still popular with right-wing extremists in the GOP. And, of course, it's South Carolina once again in the forefront of the movement, this time over healthcare (for the descendants of their former slaves). Bouie doesn't see this leading to anyone firing on federal troops this time.

The most likely outcomes involve a lawsuit against the state of South Carolina-- filed by businesses, like hospitals and health insurers, who want implementation-- or nothing, as the state moves forward and its citizens are kept from access to decent, affordable health insurance. Congrats, South Carolina Republicans! You’ve scored an ideological win at the cost of immiseration of your fellow residents. [White Republican elites in the Old Confederacy do not consider African-Americans their "fellow residents." Why do you think they revived the Republican Party down there?]

This push to essentially nullify the Affordable Care Act within the state’s borders is another indication of how far the modern Republican Party has fallen from the ideas that animated its creation. The GOP of Abraham Lincoln wasn’t just an anti-slavery party-- or at least, one opposed to the expansion of slavery-- it was a unionist party, one dedicated to the idea that there was a single United States, whose government could not be shattered by individual states.

This idea is in wide currency now, but it wasn’t in the middle of the 19th century. Then, an influential wing of Southern conservatives-- led by the fiery John C. Calhoun of South Carolina-- pushed the view that the federal government was subordinate to the states, who could nullify the Union at any time. This was an ideology borne of history—the exact nature of the constitutional pact signed in 1783 was unclear-- and of economics. Calhoun and his allies, intellectual and political, were overwhelmingly slave owners, deeply invested in the system of bondage and white supremacy that supported their society.

Calhoun died in 1850--10 years before Lincoln won the presidency and sparked a rebellion among Southern states-- but his ideas motivated and inspired the secessionists.

Of course, the Civil War settled the broad question of national authority. But Calhoun’s core idea-- that political minorities owed no allegiance to the decisions of majorities-- lived on. It found refugee in the Southern wing of the Democratic Party-- through segregationists who opposed every effort to pass civil rights laws and end state-sponsored violence against African-Americans-- and eventually fused with conservative ideology in the 1960s and ’70s as the center of gravity in the GOP moved from the West to the South.

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.

Noam Scheiber has another way of looking at the way the Republicans have taken hold of Obamacare and fashioned it into a noose around their own necks. Writing for the New Republic, he explains how Republicans have bet their future on the disaster they expect from Obamacare and how they plan to use it from now until 2016 to drum up support. It is certainly motivating the Tea Party types. But Scheiber's main point is that "the GOP’s health care preoccupation is absolutely destroying its long-term prospects."

However well the issue may work in the midterms, when an uptick in conservative turnout can flip a few dozen House seats, 2012 proved that it’s at best a wash in a presidential election, when Democrats can swamp that turnout with their demographic edge, and when the GOP’s challenge is to win moderates and independents as a result. Conservatives argue that the only reason health care didn’t work in 2012 is that Romney was a flawed messenger, given his patrimonial link to Obamacare. But with the Supreme Court largely blessing the law last June, the issue was mostly settled in the public mind, making it at best a non-factor among swing voters.

Even if implementation goes terribly, it isn’t like to rekindle widespread angst. Most people will be untouched by implementation-- even a disastrous implementation—for the simple reason that they won’t be relying on Obamacare. As Bloomberg’s Josh Barrohas explained, 78 percent of us get coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, or our employers, a figure isn’t likely to change very much, or at least very quickly. Meanwhile, my colleague Jonathan Cohn points out that life for many people who do end up on Obamacare will improve, however flawed the program is, because it translates into insurance they didn’t have before.

Having said all that, the real problem with conservatives’ Obamacare strategy isn’t that it won’t work. It’s that the Obamacare obsession is actively sabotaging the GOP. Earlier this week the Washington Post ran an article about the ongoing dysfunction among House Republicans. Easily the most telling anecdote had to do with a largely symbolic measure called the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, concocted by Majority Leader Eric Cantor to help Republicans look like they care about the problems of ordinary people. (The bill feinted at easing the lot of the uninsured.) That, apparently, is where Cantor erred. As the Post explains:

A few dozen Republicans opposed the modest Helping Sick Americans legislation because they said it came from nowhere. Instead, Cantor pulled the bill and held another vote to repeal Obamacare-- their 37th attempt to repeal part or all of the landmark health-care law-- to appease conservatives.

To put the problem in Marxian terms, Obamacare has become the opiate of the GOP. By its own admission, the party must broaden its appeal to Latinos, gays, and young voters. It needs an economic agenda that encompasses more than tax cuts for the rich and brutal spending cuts. It has to persuade voters it’s more than just a nihilistic force bent on triggering global financial apocalypse if it doesn’t get its way in Washington. And yet, when party leaders so much as broach these liabilities, conservatives revolt and the leadership caves, appeasing them with an issue whose political utility peaked two-and-a-half years ago. (Suffice it to say, after the last few years, the words “reinvigorating the Tea Party movement” won’t exactly help Cantor and Boehner sleep at night.)

If you want to appreciate how truly incorrigible conservatives are on the subject, I recommend watching them grapple with the early news about Obamacare implementation, which has suggested the program could work better than anticipated. It’s a bit like watching a speculator learn he’s bet his life savings on a failing company-- which is to say, chock full of denial and elaborate self-delusion.

For example, in late May, when the head of California’s insurance exchange announced that insurers were submitting cheaper bids than the state expected (and cheaper than many critics predicted), the conservative columnist Avik Roy tried to disprove the claims by visiting an online clearinghouse for private insurance plans. Roy solicited bids for a healthy 25-year-old male and a healthy 40-year old male, then pointed out that they came in far below what coverage would cost through the Obamacare exchange. All fine and good, except that Roy’s hypothetical bids were neither here nor there. The point of Obamacare is to provide affordable insurance to people who may be sick or older.

Alas, the fact that Roy basically affirmed the rationale for a program he set out to discredit-- healthy, affluent young people are the one group that will do worse under Obamacare; everyone else will do better; no one has ever disputed this-- didn’t stop every conservative outlet on the Internet from trumpeting his analysis. “Obamacare drives up insurance premiums by up to 146 percent in California,” screamed the Daily Caller. Even after a succession of wonks highlighted the glaring flaws, the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal leaned on Roy to declare an “ObamaCare Bait and Switch.”

The desperation here is palpable, but also understandable. If, instead of trying to fix your party’s deepest pathologies you wagered its entire future on a high-risk strategy that was starting to turn bad, you’d be a little desperate, too. Perhaps it’s a subset of Obama Derangement Syndrome that afflicts conservatives when they talk about health care-- call it Obamacare Derangement Syndrome. Maybe one day, once the dust has settled, it’ll be covered under Obamacare, too.

Andrew Jackson Was Sorry He Didn't Hang Calhoun For Treason-- Obama Will Be Sorry He Didn't Hang DeMint For The Same Reason

First they're working on weekends-- two in a row so far-- and now they're voting at 1:01 AM! Last night/early this morning, the Senate beat down a craven Republican filibuster against a Pentagon appropriations bill, 63-33. Four Republicans miss the late night session-- Bond, Bunning, Chambliss and Cornyn-- and all 33 voting against cloture were Republicans. But, ashamed of their party's blatant and dangerous hypocrisy and willingness to put national security in jeopardy three Republican women broken with the obstructionist core to vote with the Democrats: Snowe, Collins and Hutchinson. As today's Washington Post points out, "after years of criticizing Democrats for not supporting the troops, just three Republicans supported the military funding."

Smelling blood in the water-- Obama's-- congressional Republicans will do anything, even putting fighting men and women serving in battle zones in danger, to stop healthcare reform. Conservatives are as passionately opposed to anything approaching universal healthcare as they were opposed to voting rights for the middle class, for women and for ex-slaves. Conservatives are as adamant about defeating healthcare as they were about defeating the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare and the abolition of slavery. And it should come as no surprise that, once again the charge is being led largely by southern reactionaries like Jim DeMint (R-SC), Richard Burr (R-NC), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Miss McConnell (R-KY), David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), plus the 6 goofballs from Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama.

Republicans have provided the backbone of support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many have praised Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan. When the House considered the same legislation Wednesday, 164 of the 175 Republicans present voted for it, so the Senate GOP plan to oppose defense spending Friday morning put them in an unusual position.

...Because of the narrow timeline on health care, Democrats decided to schedule votes on the defense spending bill shortly after 1 a.m. so that, under parliamentary rules, that legislation can be finished by breakfast-time Saturday. That is a preemptive move to allow extra floor time for other potential delay tactics by Republicans on health care.

Democrats were furious at the filibuster attempt on Pentagon funds. "They are prepared to jeopardize funding for troops at war," Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday evening. "If Democrats did that, there would be cries of treason."

The Democrats are too polite for that, part of the reason Americans are already sick of them and getting ready to deal them a devastating electoral blow in the midterm elections.


UPDATE: Dems went part-way there. If they're serious, though, they'll customize this ad for state races in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Iowa where it might do some good: