Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

by Nancy MacLean

Its earliest coherent expression in America came in the late 1820s and ’30s, from South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, a strategist of ruling-class power so shrewd that the acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter dubbed him “the Marx of the master class.”1

One of the first scholars subsidized by Koch, the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, spoke openly of the cause’s debt to Calhoun, crediting his class analysis of taxation as foundational to the libertarian cause.

In other words, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for.

By 1860, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops—particularly cotton—produced by enslaved men, women, and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.7

Calhoun and his modern understudies are not wrong: there is a conflict between their vision of economic liberty and political democracy. Where they are allowed to, majorities will use the political process to improve their situations, and that can result in taxes being imposed on those with the wealth to pay them.

And that is why Calhoun concluded that if something must be sacrificed to square the circle between economic liberty and political liberty, it was political liberty.

Note the emerging pattern, which we will see again: while criticizing government action that threatened his own liberty as a property owner, Calhoun saw nothing untoward in calling on the federal government to use its police powers to help his class stifle debate about its practices.

That sleight of hand—denying the legitimacy of government power to act for the common good while using government power to suppress others—appears repeatedly in the pages that follow.

While he waxed eloquent on the threat of a strong federal state, do not imagine that he preferred local government to state government as a more authentic expression of the people’s will. On the contrary, Calhoun led a campaign in the early republic that, in the name of property and individual rights, took powers away from local authorities, on whom ordinary people had more influence, and shifted them to central state governments. Why? State government was the level that men like him could most easily control.

What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically extreme—and some would say greedy—subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could.

surprise today’s readers to know that in those days, Calhoun and like-minded large slave owners found themselves to be very much alone in their questioning of the legitimacy of taxation to advance public purposes.

The paralyzing suspicion of government so much on display today, that is to say, came originally not from average people but from elite extremists such as Calhoun who saw federal power as a menace to their system of racial slavery.19

The system that James Madison and the other framers had devised for the protection of property rights did not go far enough, according to the South’s most self-seeking capitalist.

As the main architect of the Constitution and a slave master of great wealth himself, Madison thought long and hard about how to protect minority rights in a government based on sovereignty of the people, a people then understood to be white men of property. He and his fellow framers built numerous protections of minority rights and property rights into the document, among them the Electoral College and the Senate, with their systems of representation that favored less populous states.

And had not the Bible condoned enslavement?

To Calhoun, by contrast, freedom above all concerned the free use and enjoyment of one’s productive property, without any impingement by others. If he deemed it necessary to punish one of his workers with “30 lashes well laid on” and a diet of “bread and water,” as he did a young runaway slave named Aleck, such was his prerogative as an owner.

Where the economy should be the realm of total liberty for the owning class in Calhoun’s interpretation, government—particularly the federal government—was the realm of potential abuse, such that men of property must ever guard against the certainty of “oppression” if that government came under the control of the majority.

What exactly did Calhoun so fear coming from “the American people collectively”? He feared, as his successors today do, a government that his band of like-minded property supremacists could not control.

The South as Calhoun and such admirers imagined it was not the actual South, with its biracial population and millions of low-income and middle-class whites who have benefited greatly from the public resources that taxes enable in democracies.

The only force strong enough to stop the injustice was the federal government,

And from the start, as Calhoun’s calculations illustrate, the notion of unwarranted federal intervention has been inseparable from a desire to maintain white racial as well as class dominance.

Not surprisingly, then, but with devastating consequences all around, attacks on federal power pitched to nonelites have almost always tapped white racial anxiety, whether overtly or with coded language.31

By the 1950s, the nation’s premier workshop for the shrewd construction of elaborate rules to ensure the minority elite’s power over t...

Like many other southern states, Virginia required voters to pay a tax to participate in the political process, and it was one of the states that also made that tax cumulative, so that if, say, two elections had not featured candidates who interested you but the third one did, you would have to pay all three years’ taxes to vote.

Collective organization, including strikes, was how the disempowered became strong enough to right the balance against the elites who lorded over them in those days,

The organizing committee arrayed behind her on the stage like a Greek chorus, Barbara delivered her speech. With controlled fire she laid out what every student knew—all the problems of their broken-down, overstuffed school, how they were denied resources that every high school student should have to promote learning, not just the white kids. Nothing would change, she told her rapt listeners, unless they joined together and demanded a new school facility.

“Man, you talk about rocking,” Stokes would reminisce; amid all the clapping and stomping, “no one was seated.” The students rose and walked out en masse, some carrying picket signs made days earlier and hidden for this moment. Heads held high, they marched into town to see the white superintendent of schools.

their campaign required endless one-off battles—with seventy-five school districts in Virginia alone. Taking on Jim Crow itself seemed a surer remedy, if harder to achieve.14

“Anybody who would not back these children after they stepped out on a limb is not a man,” he said.

And that was it: the strike was over. The 450 teenagers, who had maintained complete solidarity, with not a single student returning to school until they all agreed to, pledged to resume classes on Monday, May 7. That was the day their attorneys brought their lawsuit to federal court: Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, named for the ninth grader, Dorothy Davis, whose name headed the list of 117 students and 67 parents.18

The lawsuit astounded the white elite. Its members could not believe that “their” Negroes would show such ingratitude.

County officials refused to renew the principal’s contract. Blacklisted throughout the state, Principal Jones and his new wife, Inez Davenport Jones, the teacher who had secretly advised Barbara Johns, moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where they found new jobs and joined Reverend Vernon Johns’s congregation. Parents who signed on to the lawsuit and whose names were published in the Farmville Herald incurred economic retaliation. Even self-employed farmers, th...

When Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County reached the U.S. Supreme Court, as one of the five cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education,

In May 1954, the justices announced their verdict in Brown v. Board of Education. Lost to all but the scholarly literature is the fact that most of Virginia’s white citizens were inclined to accept it. Hardly any liked it, but it was the unanimous decision of the highest court in the land, after all. More than a few knew, too, deep down, that the system had been grossly unfair; seeing the latest ruling as definitive, they took the end of segregation to be beyond their control. For a time, calm prevailed.

As important to them, segregation was bound up in a complex of institutions that sustained the rigid social order and culture they were determined to hold in place—what they liked to call “our way of life.”24

Into the breach stepped a young Oklahoma-born journalist named James Jackson Kilpatrick,

His mentor at the paper, John Dana Wise, a learned conservative, was fond of quoting John Randolph of Roanoke, the scion of one of Virginia’s esteemed First Families, who had proclaimed, “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty; I hate equality.”

He had issued a startling suggestion when the students filed their lawsuit in 1951. It might soon be time, he announced, to “abandon tax-supported public education altogether.”26

To protect his region’s distinctive political economy, anchored in the treatment of black people as property, Calhoun had argued that state governments had the right to refuse to abide by those federal laws that they found odious. He based his case on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which specifies that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Fearing a rising national antislavery majority in the North and the West, Calhoun insisted that the authority for the U.S. Constitution came not from the American people collectively but from the states that consented to the Union.

Most Americans who thought about such matters at all assumed that the Union victory in the Civil War had settled the question. A national Union “of the people, by the people, and for the people” had defeated the planter class’s bid to insulate its power from the collective will of the majority from whom federal authority flowed.

all, tax-subsidized tuition grants. These vouchers, to use today’s language, would enable white parents who could not stand the idea of integration to send their children to segregated private schools, something only the richest could do without such financial help.

But as an ABC News investigative report in the 1950s revealed, he had become a very rich one in part by importing “cheap labor from the Caribbean” to work his land, despite “considerable local unemployment.” One federal official depicted aspects of the program “at worst as a modern counterpart to the slave trade, [and] at best as a system of indentured servants.” With no rights in America, the guest workers could be paid “$60 or less for a 60-hour week”—with transportation and other expenses deducted from their wages. Those from the Bahamas, like Senator Byrd’s workers, “suffer the worst exploitation of all.”34

Such imported workers were desirable to big growers precisely because their employment was not subject to irritating “federal standards of living or working conditions.”

No single man has ever dominated a state so completely for so many years, albeit with studied courtliness. He presided as governor for most of the 1920s and as U.S. senator from 1933 until his retirement in 1965,

Because the Byrd Organization favored policies that were against the majority’s interests, it was preoccupied with manipulating the rules for voting and representation. Among its tried-and-true tools was a poll tax that effectively kept most whites as well as nearly all blacks away at election time.

For forty years, in fact, the Byrd Organization had to win only about 10 percent of the potential electorate to hold on to power.

“Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy,” the political scientist V. O. Key Jr. observed in his classic study of southern politics. Key went on to quip that, compared with Virginia, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”39

Virginia’s oligarchs maintained their control not with night rides but with carefully designed rules. They showed little tolerance for the vigila...

A case in point: Virginia was among the first states in the nation to outlaw the closed shop—that is, to outlaw contracts that required union membership of employees. Months before a conservative Congress passed the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, called “the Slave Labor Act” by critics and passed over President Harry Truman’s veto, the state’s governor had signed a pioneering “right-to-work” law to weaken labor unions.

the Southern Manifesto.