One of the statues that was taken down in the 2020 purge of the Southern statues was that of the great American statesman from South Carolina, John. C. Calhoun. The then mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, John Tecklenburg, said that “while we acknowledge Calhoun’s efforts as a statesman, we can’t ignore his positions on slavery and discrimination.” The reason why, in his opinion, “slavery and discrimination” could not be ignored, was that Black Lives Matter were at the height of their political power, mounting protests in the streets of Charleston in the wake of the George Floyd riots.
In his commitment to “not ignoring slavery and discrimination” he was prepared to overlook everything else said or done by a man whom he admitted to be an influential statesman. Such destruction of historic statues illustrates how political expediency causes politicians to pursue a destructive course of action that will have deleterious longer-term implications. The mayor of Charleston allowed the temporary political furor surrounding BLM, which has now faded away from public discourse almost as quickly as it began, to override the importance of Calhoun’s legacy.
In his book, Calhoun: A Statesman for the 21st Century, the great historian Clyde Wilson emphasizes that Calhoun was “South Carolina’s greatest son” and also “an internationally recognized statesman and philosopher.” He was not merely a politician representing the partisan perspectives of the South, but also a statesman, meaning “something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not.” By contrast, a mere politician is someone who “says and does whatever he thinks will get or keep him in power.” In highlighting the value of Calhoun’s legacy for contemporary political discourse, Wilson observes that, “Statesmen were rare in Calhoun’s time. Today they have disappeared entirely. We know that Calhoun was a statesman because his words about government are as true and relevant today as they were in his time.”
One of the most important areas of contemporary debate where it is important to distinguish the statesmen from the politicians is the question of constitutional interpretation. Unlike many politicians today, for whom the Constitution means whatever they would like it to mean, Calhoun approached constitutional questions from a philosophical perspective. He understood the Constitution to represent specific principles, rather than being simply a document that could mean almost anything, a mere starting point for whatever political argument one might wish to make. Thus, Calhoun’s legacy is relevant not only in understanding the debates that raged in his own time, but also in resolving contemporary political challenges. For example, in his article “Can John C. Calhoun Save America?” Tom DiLorenzo analyzes how Calhoun’s views on government and society help to understand “how the American political system could evolve into tyranny, and how to stop that from happening.”
Calhoun’s warning about the tyranny that follows when the Constitution fails to limit government power resonates strongly today as debates rage concerning the balance of power between state and federal authority. In For A New Liberty, Rothbard highlights Calhoun’s views on the growing power of the federal government: “One of America’s most brilliant political theorists, John C. Calhoun, wrote prophetically of the inherent tendency of a State to break through the limits of its written constitution.” Rothbard is referring to Calhoun’s argument that a powerful government will always construe its constitutional powers as widely as it possibly can, while the party threatened by government power will construe the limitations on that power as strictly as possible, leading to “subversion of the constitution”:
It would then be construction against construction—the one to contract and the other to enlarge the powers of the government to the utmost. But of what possible avail could the strict construction of the minor party be, against the liberal interpretation of the major, when the one would have all the powers of the government to carry its construction into effect and the other be deprived of all means of enforcing its construction? In a contest so unequal, the result would not be doubtful. The party in favor of the restrictions would be overpowered. . . . The end of the contest would be the subversion of the constitution . . . the restrictions would ultimately be annulled and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.
Similarly, Tom DiLorenzo draws attention to Calhoun’s critique of the “implied powers” theory of constitutional interpretation, a theory which allows a government to adopt any powers it deems expedient. DiLorenzo explains:
It was Hamilton who invented the “implied powers” (aka, not listed in the document) theory of constitutional interpretation; the perversion of the Contract and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution; and other subterfuges designed to turn the document into a de facto rubber stamp on anything the government wanted to do – as long as it was “properly” interpreted by people like himself. That is why Jefferson and his political heirs, such as Calhoun, considered the brilliant and Machiavellian Hamilton to be a dangerous threat to American freedom.
Calhoun also emphasized the principle that the states were sovereign and independent and not merely the creation of the federal government, and that therefore, as Wilson puts it, “The Constitution should be the instrument of society’s control of government, not vice versa.”
These insights have great relevance to disputes over the correct interpretation of the constitution, as many commentators swing wildly from one argument to the very opposite when the party in power changes. For example, the principle of states’ rights, and the related principle that there should be as wide a scope for state sovereignty as possible, are defended by political analysts when their goals are backed by their state. Yet the same analysts often swing to a robust defense of federal power to crush the states when they happen to approve of federal policies. While some of this may be explained by the hypocrisy that is endemic in political life, there is another factor at play—and that is plain short-sightedness or a tendency to think only of the immediate implications of the specific policy in question. Wilson’s observation on this point is apt, that in Calhoun’s time “most people most of the time, preferred to live in the short-run, ignore distant threats, and hope for the best.” Calhoun’s importance as a statesman is recognized in large part because he was able to take a principled view even when it lost him popular support. Wilson observes that while some historians considered Calhoun to be too theoretical or philosophical to be of much help in resolving political disputes, it is this very ability to rise above the political fray that marks Calhoun as a principled statesman:
And the most common criticism of his writings, by pragmatic-minded politicians and journalists, was that they were too philosophical for the commonsense American world. It is just these two qualities of simplicity and higher generalization that make his words all the more durable – still alive in another age when those of his critics are dead on the page.
