Calhoun’s majoritarian suspicion survived to drive twentieth-century Southern sectional politics

Evidence

Calhoun died in 1850. Ten years later, Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single Southern state and, following the idea of nullification and the concurrent majority to its conclusion, the South seceded from the Union. War came a few months later, and four years of fighting destroyed the system of slavery Calhoun had fought to protect. But parts of his legacy survived. His deep suspicion of majoritarian democracy—his view that government must protect interests, defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics, more than people—would inform the sectional politics of the South in the twentieth century, as solid blocs of Southern lawmakers would work collectively to stifle any attempt to regulate the region. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 642

Categorization

• XREF: Closes the causal loop in the reader’s origin-story frame: the concurrent-majority theory outlived slavery and became the solid-South bloc’s working method — ideology as infrastructure.