If the U.S. government could fund turnpikes and canals, observed North Carolinian Nathaniel Macon, it could also free the slaves. More than any other factor, fear for the future of chattel slavery was the motivating force behind limited-government theory in America. This is an intellectual heritage that haunts conservatism to this day.
North Carolina Republicans have distributed school-voucher funding to schools that use textbooks defending the morality of African enslavement. I suspect more than a few unreconstructed Southern conservatives remain wedded to the romanticized narrative of “cavaliers and cotton fields” that Dixie propaganda-makers crafted in the century after the fall of Reconstruction. But it would be polemical and absurd to claim that even the most ardent reactionaries in America today can be equated with the fire eaters and proslavery ultras who are besmirched the country 160 years ago. That said, proslavery advocates are the intellectual godfathers of mainstream American conservatism.
Consider two key tenets of limited-government conservatism, strict construction and nullification. Thomas Jefferson, an immensely complicated man with some admirable qualities, became an increasingly hysterical defender of slavery as he approached old age and saw the country changing around him. He was the progenitor of minimal government thinking in American politics, in part as a means of handicapping the federal government should Yankees try to interfere with chattel slavery. The “Old Republicans” who succeeded him tended to favor interpretations that prohibited the federal government from doing almost anything besides national defense and the regulation of interstate commerce because they believed that, if the range of federal powers were to expand, an active federal government could impinge upon the human property of slaveholders in the South.
Today, strict constructionism has nearly a cult status in conservative circles. The main glue holding together the conservative coalition is a commitment to putting strict-constructionist–now called “originalist” and “textualist”–jurists onto the federal bench. These judges have limited the power of the federal government to protect the voting rights of African Americans. And that is, of course, what one would expect of judges who follow in the racially dubious tradition that Jefferson and his heirs created for the purpose of preserving slavery.
Onto nullification. One of the most radical innovations of antebellum politics, nullification holds that the federal government’s authority is so weak that states can actually void federal legislation within their borders. The leading advocate of this cause was the proslavery radical from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun It’s a close intellectual cousin of strict constructionism, in that it envisions a federal government with extremely limited powers. The first people to attempt to nullify a federal law were the fiery racists who ran South Carolina during the Jacksonian era. In North Carolina today, high-profile Republican politicians have spoken at conferences with names like “Nullify Now,” and some of the wilder legislators have tried to enact legislation somehow arrogating the power of nullification to the North Carolina General Assembly.
Certainly, there are non-racist reasons to favor a limited federal government. But small-government politics is irrevocably tainted by its associations to the cause of slavery and white supremacy that goes back to this country’s Founding. Far too many efforts limit the power of the state over domestic policy would arrest the progress of Black people toward full equality in our country. We see this in the retraction of federal oversight on Southern elections, the gutting of safety net programs that disproportionately benefit the Black and the Brown, and anti-regulatory rulings that leave African Americans subjected to foul environmental pollution. I wonder if limited government can ever be purged of its racist heritage. Given that Donald Trump reigns over the GOP, I rather doubt it.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
Did you mean to say “Thomas Jefferson” here: “Thomas Jefferson, an immensely complicated man with some admirable qualities, became an increasingly hysterical defender of slavery as he approached old ….”?
I guess you did because you used his name again. I thought the article was about Nathaniel Macon. I’ll read more carefully before replying next time.
The Constitution is the primary source of limited government. Powers were granted to both State and Federal governments. The federal government is divided into three separate but equal branches. The Congress was divided into the House and Senate. Speaker of the House is the equal of the president as is the leader of the Senate. The president is head of the Administration, while the top Congressional officers head the legislative branch. Each justice on the Supreme Court shares equal standing with the president. The Judicial Branch does not answer to the Executive on a day-to -day basis.
The Constitution was written to make tyranny extremely difficult, something that Trump discovered after his election. He found out that everyone did not work for him. He did not know about the three branches of government. Trump did not understand the American government and his attempts to make the speaker or our justices bow to his wishes were ineffective and always will be.
Limited government is a unique feature of the American Constitution. The president has very little to do with our state education systems. States write and control their own laws, except when the federal government has taken that field. Similarly, the states have very little to do with American foreign policy and treaties with other nations. The defense of America is, on paper, shared by Congress’s power to declare war and the presidents authority as Commander In Chief. In fact, Congressional power is minimal when compared to the Commander in Chief, especially in a nuclear age. Nuclear war can destroy the planet within this hour. That power is not shared. It is existential.
States have significant rights under the Constitution. The problem isn’t the assertion of power by states. States must pave the roads, hire our teachers and operate our courts. It is the assertion of racism and the popularity of racism among the the Red States and Republicans that is the problem. State legislatures can overturn the outrage of cancelling voting rights of minorities tomorrow, if they wished. Republicans want only Republicans to vote. They do not want blacks, Muslims, the young, or old, or poor to vote. They want to eliminate voting rights for union members, gun control advocates, librarians or people who use libraries and any liberal-leaning group. They want people who oppose American values, who want to destroy our Constitution, white people and Christians. That is the work of the Republicans in our state governments – the use of their limited power to oppress those who are not Republicans.
They pretend that their racism is a practical matter, that they oppose black votes because blacks tend to vote for Democrats. In fact, they don’t want black people in their schools, in their homes, in their businesses, or in their clubs. The problem isn’t state’s rights. It’s simpler than that. Republicans, in general, are racists. They use all their powers to establish and create racist institutions, racist laws and racist results at the polls.