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The 1619 Project

understand Ameri- majority, after Republicans won the
to
If you want
can politics in 2019 and the strain Senate in the 2010 midterm elections,
of reactionary extremism that has he led an extraordinary blockade of

taken over the Republican Party, a the Supreme Court, stopping the

good place to start is 2011: the year Senate from even considering the
after a backlash to Barack Obama’s president’s nominee for the bench.

presidency swept Tea Party insur- Where did this destructive, sec-

gents into Congress, flipping con- tarian style of partisan politics come

trol of the House. from? Conventional wisdom traces

It was clear, at the start of that its roots to the ‘‘Gingrich Revolu-

year, that Congress would have to tion’’ of the 1990s, whose architect

lift the debt ceiling — the limit on pioneered a hardball, insurgent

bonds and other debt instruments style of political combat, under-
the government issues when it mining norms and dismantling

doesn’t have the revenues to fulfill congressional institutions for the

spending obligations. These votes sake of power. This is true enough,
were often opportunities for grand- but the Republican Party of the

standing and occasionally brink- Obama years didn’t just recycle its

manship by politicians from both Gingrich-era excesses; it also pur-

parties. But it was understood that, sued a policy of total opposition,

when push came to shove, Congress not just blocking Obama but also

would lift the limit and the govern- casting him as fundamentally ille-

ment would pay its obligations. gitimate and un-American. He may

2011 was different. Congressio- have been elected by a majority of

nal Republicans, led by the new the voting public, but that majority

Tea Party conservatives, wanted didn’t count. It didn’t represent the

to repeal the Aff ordable Care Act ‘‘real’’ America.

and make other sharp cuts to the Obama’s election reignited a fight

social safety net. But Democrats about democratic legitimacy — about

controlled the Senate and the who can claim the country as their

White House. So House Republi- own, and who has the right to act as
American
cans decided to take a hostage. ‘‘I’m a citizen — that is as old as

asking you to look at a potential democracy itself. And the reactionary

increase in the debt limit as a lever- position in this conflict, which seeks

age moment when the White House to narrow the scope of participation John C. Calhoun, perhaps the most prominent political theorist of the

and President Obama will have to and arrest the power of majorities slaveholding South and an influence on modern right-wing thinking.

deal with us,’’ said the incoming beyond the limits of the Constitu-

majority leader, Eric Cantor, at a tion, has its own peculiar history:

closed-door retreat days before not just in the ideological battles of this economic and social hierarchy. by kinship, economic, political and

the session began, according to The the founding but also in the institu- Those ideas permeated the entire cultural ties.’’ The government they

Washington Post. Either the White tion that defined the early American South, taking deepest root in places built was the most undemocratic in

House would agree to harsh auster- republic as much as any other. where slavery was most entrenched. the Union. The slave-rich districts of
ity measures or Republicans would South Carolina was a paradig- the coasts enjoyed nearly as much

force the United States to default on The plantations that dotted the land- matic slave state. Although the representation in the Legislature as

its debt obligations, precipitating scape of the antebellum South pro- majority of enslavers resided in the more populous regions in the inte-

an economic crisis just as the coun- duced the commodities that fueled ‘‘low country,’’ with its large rice and rior of the state. Statewide office was

try, and the world, was beginning to the nation’s early growth. Enslaved cotton plantations, nearly the entire restricted to
wealthy property own-

recover from the Great Recession. people working in glorified labor state participated in plantation agri- ers. To even qualify for the governor-

The debt-limit standoff was a camps picked cotton, grew indigo, culture and the slave economy. By ship, you needed a large, debt-free the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Right: From Bettmann/Getty Images.

case study of a fundamental change harvested resin from trees for tur- 1820 most South Carolinians were estate. Rich enslavers were essen-

within the Republican Party after pentine and generated additional enslaved Africans. By midcentury, tially the only people who could

Obama took office in 2009. Repub- capital in the form of their chil- the historian Manisha Sinha notes in participate in the highest levels of

T
licans would either win total victo- dren, bought, sold and securitized ‘‘The Counterrevolution of Slavery,’’ government. o the extent that there

ry or they would wreck the system on the open market. But plantations it was the first Southern state where were popular elections, they were

itself. The Senate Republican lead- didn’t just produce goods; they pro- a majority of the white population for the lowest levels of government,

er, Mitch McConnell, used a variety duced ideas too. Enslaved laborers held slaves. because the State Legislature tended

of procedural tactics to eff ective- developed an understanding of the Not surprisingly, enslavers domi- to decide most high-level offices.

ly nullify the president’s ability to society in which they lived. The nated the state’s political class. But immense power at home could

nominate federal judges and fill people who enslaved them, like- ‘‘Carolinian rice aristocrats and the not compensate for declining power

vacancies in the executive branch. wise, constructed elaborate sets cotton planters from the hinterland,’’ in national politics. The growth of the
In the minority, he used the filibuster of beliefs, customs and ideologies Sinha writes, ‘‘formed an intersec- free Northwest threatened Southern Left: From

to an unprecedented degree. In the meant to justify their positions in tional ruling class, bound together dominance in Congress. And the
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