Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
The veto-power as a protective principle Calhoun regarded as the
hallmark of constitutional government. Granted that sovereignty
under the Constitution inheres in the people, and that all authority
is delegated, it follows that government is no more than an agent
with strictly defined fiduciary powers, all the acts of which are
subject to review by the principal. Whether such review shall be
immediate and plenary, or at more or less remove and limited,
becomes therefore a fundamental question of constitutional polity.
Unfortunately much confusion has resulted from an intentional
vagueness, contributed by interested groups to further particular ends,
in the common understanding of the terms, the people and government.
The former is rarely, as is usually assumed, a homogeneous body
with common interests, but a congeries of individuals and groups
and classes with diverse and often antagonistic interests; and the
latter--in a republic--is never a sacred entity, the residuary
legatee of sovereignty, to criticize which is to commit the crime
of _lèse-majesté_, but a group of officials invested with temporary
authority and actuated by motives common to all men. A necessary
preliminary, therefore, to an intelligent understanding of the
principle of veto is a critical analysis of these much misunderstood
terms.
Calhoun was far too honest a realist to be under any hallucinations in
regard to political government. He estimated at its full significance
“the never-ending audacity of elected persons.” Power he knew to be the
most insidious of poisons; every government is liable to the disease of
auto-intoxication. Seated securely in office the agent assumes all the
prerogatives of the principal and clothes his acts with the sanctity
of sovereignty. Armed with the taxing power, he distributes penalties
and benefits with partial hand, and unless an adequate defense
protects the weaker interests they will suffer a legal exploitation.
Every government justly rests under suspicion, and only the most
critical scrutiny of its conduct can keep it decently honest. Popular
government, from which the Republicans hoped too much, changes only
the outward form of the selfish struggle for power by substituting
party rule for class rule. With its disciplined party machine the
lure of political spoil encourages the most shameless exploitation of
the weaker groups, who have no recourse.[403] Hence, the more popular
the government, the more ruthless becomes the majority rule; and any
system of checks and balances that does not adequately restrain this
inherent tendency of party rule must prove a failure. However carefully
the political philosopher may provide for a division of powers among
executive, legislature and judiciary, he must fail of his object, for
a regnant majority will control all three branches of government, and
thus intrenched will defy the protests of the minority. The Montesquieu
theory had proved a failure in practice.
An even greater danger, in Calhoun’s judgment, lay in the current
misinterpretation of the term “the people,” the result of which was
the obscuring of the economic basis of society and the befuddling
of the whole problem of government. To this disastrous result, he
believed, both schools of political thought had contributed. The early
Republicans had oversimplified the political problem by assuming a
clear division between ruler and subject. The conception was a heritage
from European experience, where it had taken form as a strategic
move to align the unthinking mass against a despotic monarchy. The
Jeffersonians had used it to like purpose in their struggle against
consolidation, appealing to a common democracy against the aristocracy.
The early Federalists were even more blameworthy, for, understanding
clearly the economic origins of political power and the economic
ends served by the political state, they made their knowledge serve
their interests and concealed their designs by deceptive appeals to
patriotism. Every realist knows that “the people” is a political
fiction. Society is made up of individuals, each with his particular
interest. The total interests of the subject-citizens are necessarily
complex. Group and classify them as he may, the political philosopher
can never merge the parts in a coalescing whole, but must recognize
that the problem remains one of adjustments and compromises. It follows
therefore that any facile assumption that government represents the
people or rests on the will of the people is a disastrous fallacy.
Popular government rests on the will of the majority; aristocratic
government rests on the will of the aristocracy; and despotic
government rests on the will of the despot. It is an axiom that the
political state is partisan to those who administer it. The stakes of
rulership are high; the game of politics never lacks its devotees; the
business of deceiving the people in order to pluck the goose has long
been one of the respectable professions.
The perennial problem of constitutional government, then, in Calhoun’s
philosophy, remains what it was seen to be by the Federalist followers
of Montesquieu--the problem of restraining government by constitutional
checks to the end that it be kept just. Existing machinery having
demonstrated its inadequacy, it remained to provide more effective.
Freedom Calhoun regarded as the crown jewel of civilization, hardly
won, easily lost. But freedom was not to be measured by _habeas corpus_
acts and similar legal restraints on tyranny; it was freedom from legal
exploitation and statutory dictatorship. “The abuse of delegated power,
and the tyranny of the stronger over the weaker interests, are the two
dangers, and the only two to be guarded against; and if this be done
effectually, liberty must be eternal. Of the two, the latter is the
greater and most difficult to resist” (_Works_, Vol. VI, p. 32). In
more definite terms the problem is thus stated:
Two powers are necessary to the existence and preservation of
free States: a power on the part of the ruled to prevent rulers
from abusing their authority, by compelling them to be faithful
to their constituents, and which is effected through the right of
suffrage; and a power to compel the parts of society to be just to
one another, by compelling them to consult the interest of each
other--which can only be effected ... by requiring the concurring
assent of all the great and distinct interests of the community to
the measures of the Government. This result is the sum-total of all
the contrivances adopted by free States to preserve their liberty,
by preventing the conflicts between the several classes or parts of
the community. (_Ibid._, Vol. VI, pp. 189-190.)
In elaboration of the second phase of the problem Calhoun contributed
the principle on which his reputation as a political thinker must
rest--the doctrine of a concurrent majority. He found his solution
in an expansion of the principle of democracy--recovering the
true principle, he was fond of insisting--by superimposing upon
the consolidated, indiscriminate numerical majority the will of
a geographical majority; or in other words, by a special form of
sectional referendum.
It results, from what has been said, that there are two different
modes in which the sense of the community may be taken: one,
simply, by the right of suffrage, unaided; the other, by the
right through a proper organism. Each collects the sense of the
majority. But one regards numbers only, and considers the whole
community one unit, having but one common interest throughout; and
collects the sense of the greater number of the whole, as that
of the community. The other, on the contrary, regards interests
as well as numbers;--considering the community as made up of
different and conflicting interests as far as the action of the
government is concerned; and takes the sense of each, through its
majority or appropriate organ, and the united sense of all, as
the sense of the entire community. The former of these I call the
numerical, or absolute majority; and the latter, the concurrent,
or constitutional majority. (“A Disquisition on Government,” in
_Works_, Vol. I, p. 28.)
In such speculation on the possibility of achieving political justice
by the machinery of representation, Calhoun was face to face with a
revolutionary conception--the conception of proportional economic
representation. The idea was implicit in his assumption of an
existing economic sectionalism that must find adequate expression
through political agencies. He had come to understand the futility
of a miscellaneous numerical majority; he had only to go back to
eighteenth-century philosophy and substitute economic classes for
economic sectionalism, finding his social cleavages in economic
groups instead of geographical divisions, to have recast the whole
theory of representation. Clearly, he had made enormous strides in
his thinking. He had long since put behind him the philosophy of
Jefferson. He had subjected the principle of democracy to critical
scrutiny. But instead of rejecting it as an unworkable hypothesis, as
the Hamiltonian Federalists had done, he proposed to establish it on a
sound and permanent basis. The ideal of democracy he conceived to be
the noblest in the whole field of political thought, but misunderstood
and misapplied as it had been in America, it had become the mother of
every mischief. This betrayal of democracy he laid at the door of the
Jeffersonians. They had accepted too carelessly the romantic dogmas
of the French school, and had come to believe that democracy was
synonymous with political equalitarianism.
It was this false notion that had debased the noble ideal, and
delivered it over to the hands of the mob. To assert that men are
created free and equal is to fly in the face of every biological and
social fact. The first business of the true democrat, therefore,
was to reëxamine the nature of democracy and strip away the false
assumptions and vicious conclusions that had done it incalculable
injury. The Greeks, he pointed out, understood its essential nature
better than the moderns. Democracy assumes a co-partnership among
equals. Its only rational foundation is good will, and it can function
only through compromise. From this it follows that in a society
composed of high and low, capable and weak, worthy and unworthy--as
every historical society has been composed--a universal democracy is
impractical. The numerous body of social incompetents will suffer one
of two fates: they will be exploited by the capable minority under the
guise of free labor, or they will be accepted as the wards of society
and protected by the free citizens--they must inevitably become either
wage slaves or bond slaves, in either case incapable of maintaining
the rights of free members of the commonwealth. Democracy is possible
only in a society that recognizes inequality as a law of nature, but in
which the virtuous and capable enter into a voluntary co-partnership
for the common good, accepting wardship of the incompetent in the
interests of society. This was the Greek ideal and this ideal had
created Greek civilization.
Calhoun was thus brought face to face with the natural-rights theory,
which the glowing rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence had
disseminated throughout America, and which lay as a virus at the heart
of Jacksonianism. To destroy that theory, he believed, was a necessary
preliminary to any rational theory of democracy, and he turned to the
business with characteristic frankness. Upon the venerable dogmas he
threw the light of his realism, subjecting them to critical analysis.
The origin of government in compact was only a myth. The amiable being