Conservative Thinkers: From John Adams to Winston Churchill by Peter Viereck

Author:Peter Viereck [Viereck, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Conservatism & Liberalism, Political Science, General, Political Ideologies
ISBN: 9781351526425
Google: 5S0rDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35635360
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1956-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

— 15 (The United States) —

Calhoun

Calhoun (1782-1850). John Calhoun, champion of Southern aristocracy, is being increasingly rediscovered today as America's most original political theorist. He combined profound political philosophy with practical politics. That combination was not to recur in American history. Subsequent conservative men of action did not bother with a theoretical justification, while subsequent conservative theorizers have usually been intellectuals far removed from political office. Hence the uniqueness and importance of Calhoun in American conservatism: the last knowing doer and doing knower. His two chief essays, published after his death in 1850, were A Disquisition on Government and its longer sequel, A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States. The former defended minority rights against majority dictatorship by his doctrine of "concurrent majority." The latter defended state rights against central government. The stain on his otherwise ethical leadership was his defense of slavery. That defense had not been shared by the abolitionist Burke and by earlier conservatives like the Federalists. It reflected the intense sectional hates preceding the Civil War and the increasingly defensive position of the South.

Calhoun became chief representative of the Southern conservative wing of the Democratic party. He was variously Senator from South Carolina, Secretary of War, twice Vice President, twice almost President. He was elected Vice President first in 1824, again in 1828. In 1824 he had to serve under his enemy President J. Q. Adams; in 1828 under his enemy President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). It was a three-cornered fight, each detesting the other two: the Southern conservative Calhoun, the Southern liberal Jackson, the anti-slavery Yankee conservative Adams.

Jacksonian Revolution. Finally, Jackson (his daring new slogan: "the supremacy of the people's will") defeated Calhoun and J. Q. Adams alike. Thereupon, America left the elitist conservative era of its founders and entered the new era of mass democracy. An era of mass conformity, mass mediocrity, and mob tyranny, warned Calhoun and J. Q. Adams alike. An era of the greatest liberty and greatest material progress in history, retorted the triumphant egalitarians.

The Jacksonian revolution was backed above all by the new unconservative West, with its faith in an idealized a priori abstraction called "the common man." As if Original Sin could cease at the Alleghenies. Or as if a semi-Rousseauistic West could dissolve the Burkean contract with the past without suffering from two retributions ever after: demagogy and a cultureless materialism. Such were the allegations—perhaps entirely incorrect ones—of conservatism.

Part Ottantottist, Part Burkean. By defending traditional local rights, Calhoun was closer to his hero Burke than were those earlier Burkeans, the centralizing Federalists. For Burke had taught the primacy of loyalty to one's own local "little platoon." On the other hand, Calhoun went to greater extremes than Burke or the Federalists in opposing change and wanting, in his own term, to "restore" a lost past. As restorationist, he was not Burkean but America's closest equivalent of the ottantottist Maistre. Maistre and Burke would both have approved Calhoun's insistence that freedom springs not from rational, a priori blueprints but from the blind, slow, organic growth of history.

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