Via Atrios…  Matthew Yglesias notices something…

Ed Kilgore has a very interesting post on a new trend sweeping conservative politics in Dixie—“sovereignty resolutions” that appear to assert states’ rights to unilaterally invalidate federal action, a doctrine last seen in the hands of John C. Calhoun, the great antebellum theorist of white supremacy.

At any rate, while looking at Wikipedia for a Calhoun image, I saw this list of places named after John Calhoun. It’s a long list! And while I suppose I would hesitate to specifically place the blame for any current problems in American society on the fact that there are all these towns and counties and streets named after the guy, it is always striking for a historically informed northerner to see how thoroughly un-disavowed the legacy of white supremacy is in southern official culture. Get on 395 in DC and take the bridge across the Potomac, exiting onto Route 1, and you’ll find yourself on Jefferson Davis Highway. Yes. A highway named after the political leader of a rebellion against the duly constituted government of the United States of America, founded on the principle that democracy was less important than the right of white people to own black people. Right there on signs and everything.

Travel in the South much?  As Atrios said, Nobody could have predicted that the election of an African-American president would cause Southern states to start declaring their independence. 

Go ahead and laugh as you whistle past the civil war graveyard.  Calhoun was instrumental in getting the southern states of his time to pass similar nullification resolutions.  It was the first rumbling of the ocean of bloodshed to come.  That war killed more Americans then all our other wars combined.  And far too many leaders in the South today think they’re still living in the Confederate States of America, and that it would be a glorious thing to rise again.  Better millions of Americans die, better The United States of America is buried under a mountain of wreckage, then all Americans can live together peaceably, as equals, with liberty and justice for all.

If it happens here again, it will be more Sarajevo then Gettysburg.