1. You could spend all day on the slanted & misleading history in this @jbouie column why Mitch McConnell is...the new John C. Calhoun? To start with, search the column for mention of Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, or Lyndon Johnson. You won't find them.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/republicans-racism-african-americans.html …
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10. Now, Calhoun began with a germ of truth: the American system runs on multiple tracks - the president, Senate, House, & states each answer to separate electorates. Those distinct majorities can each, within limits, obstruct the others. But that's not why Calhoun's wrong.
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11. The federal system, including the provision of a written & amendable constitution, ultimately allows large or lasting majorities to override all opposition. Calhoun clung to a pre-1787, anti-originalist view that the concurrent systems had an absolute veto.
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12. To belabor the obvious, Calhoun was also bad on the merits - he also turned away from the Founders' view of slavery & embraced it as a positive good.
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13. Antebellum South Carolina was also uniquely bad. Bouie describes it as "the paradigmatic slave state" but it was more the extreme example. From 1828-60 it was the only state that held no popular vote for POTUS. Its state government was likewise out of step w/even the South.
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14. Anyway, there are deeper issues w/transporting Calhounism to the modern GOP while totally whitewashing the entire history of the Democratic Party outside the South & the modern progressive posture towards popular sovereignty & constitutional government, but you get the idea.
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End of conversation
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Goldwater is always the target for historians who want to tie conservatives repubs to racism. He uses the Dixiecrats as the catalyst, yet ignores Goldwater and GOP support of Civil Rights throughout the ‘50s. Also, more GOP conservatives voted for CRA64 than against it.
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