It took many years to wear off, and for my 3 younger siblings, now in their ’50s, it still hasn’t.

There is a core belief-test standard that is imposed, and failing it relegates one to the ranks of the non grata, on whom permanent open season applies.

Liberti can be incompetent and that is apparently what Mr. Madison was with respect to this war. But I see no evidence that he was going to war to impose his will on others through the use of force for his own benefit, unlike Mr. Calhoun. Mr. Madison asked Congress for a declaration of war as the head of a sovereign state. When the war was over, I think it very unlikely that he would have made slaves of the British.

If you want to ask me how he could qualify as V. Libertas and still own slaves, I would have to answer that it is a close call. He didn’t free his slaves upon his death, nor did Jefferson. I think that if the Union had split over slavery during Jefferson’s and Madison’s lifetimes they might well have gone with the South.

But Madison did not work as hard as Jefferson to preserve the agrarian ways of the South, ways that depended on slavery.

My take on both men is that they spent much of their lives promoting liberty for all. Calhoun did not do that.

A third Virginian of those days was George Washington. He is clearly V. Libertas. He more than anyone else is responsible for the existence of this country. He freed his slaves on his death and left funds for their education. I think that he did about all he could do at the time. If he had tried to change the economic structure of the South, or even that of Virginia, he would have gotten no help from Jefferson or Madison, and probably would have been shot.

And he knew that the deal made to keep the South in the Union in 1787 was a bad one, but he went for it. I think that I can do no better than he did. He warned that the Constitution had “imperfections” and that they could not be “remedied” at that time. He expected “evils” to arise from these imperfections, and he relied on future generations to correct them. I think that we have not been very efficient in executing our assignment.

The thrust of Madison’s analysis was that “factions” were political parties which favored policies that were “adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison’s 18th century definition of “faction” is still the same in my late 20th century dictionary. A political party that favored the aggregate interests of the community did not have a special name.

So Madison’s position was that the majority could not bulldoze a minority when both favored the aggregate interests of the community. If the majority held a position favoring the aggregate interests of the community then a minority that disagreed deserved to lose. It is a close call in the conceivable case where the majority acts against its aggregate interests and a minority is in disagreement.

But Mr. Calhoun’s position is that any minority can have a veto even if it is acting against the aggregate interests of the community. He had no choice but to take this position because he was defending policies that were adversed against the aggregate interests of the community, and which were adversed to the rights of other citizens. No wonder it took him 7 years to write his “Disquisition.” He must have been trying mightily to make a sensible argument, but he couldn’t. Madison had him at his definition of “faction” in Federalist 10.

Of course Mr. Washington agreed with Madison in two places in his Farewell Address.

But there is still the problem when the majority is adversed to the rights of other citizens, like the majority is now adversed to the rights of homosexuals. If Calhoun had argued that the majority had no right to enslave a minority he would have been on the side of the angels. But of course Madison had him there too when he made his famous “if men were angels…“ statement. But Calhoun makes the argument that the majority does have a right to enslave a minority, and that minority loses even if it tries to cast its veto. So again I say that these two men represent the two living varieties of H. sapiens and they look at the same problems and develop two different and opposing solutions, because of their natures.

So we are left with the cases where the majority is adversed to the rights of other citizens.

On the question of genes and destiny there can be only one answer. At some point, because of some factors, probably the interplay of genes and the environment, we become a finished product. We become what we are to be. We become either V. Tyrannis or V. Libertas. There are degrees in each situation, but our instincts and inclinations are set. It is possible that a libertus can be raised by tyranni and start life acting in tyranno-fashion, but he is also acting against his nature. It is possible that he will revert to type. It is also possible that a tyrannus can, through self-control, act against his instincts and follow the liberto-path.

As for the habitat of fundamentalists, they favor urban/suburban settings. In Texas they thrive in large cities. The fundamentalists that led the fight against JFK were found in Dallas, Texas at the First Baptist Church, and W. A. Criswell was their minister. In cities throughout the South the fight was carried to the ballot box. Even today the largest and most influential churches in the fundamentalist world are in large cities. In Dallas there is a huge fundamentalist church in the suburb of Plano, itself a large city, that is called “Six Flags over Jesus” because of its huge theme-park nature.

Sure there are fundamentalists in the small places, they are everywhere in the thinly populated 20,000 square mile part of Texas I live in. The Creation Evidence Museum is not far from my front door. The KKK has an active chapter only 25 miles away in my old hometown. The leader of that chapter now lives on the farm that I grew up on. Blacks are still not permitted to overnight in my home county. So the small towns are the most extreme, but the big towns attract the largest congregations because of money. Fundamentalists like money, they really, really like it, and you just won’t find it in small town America, certainly not in small town Texas.

The foundation of Soviet Union was a pretty clear example of the idea that a leftist utopia would eliminate negative human traits like greed, selfishness, or envy. In fact, any sort of Soviet government was to be temporary, as the new improved “Socialist man” wouldn’t need any governmental control. (At least to the early Bolsheviks. It’s pretty clear Stalin didn’t hold much stake in leftist ideology.)

In a theocracy, every human action must be policed in order to protect humans from their inherent sinfulness, and modern technology/institutions are merely new and more insidious manifestations of human sin. Nazism too played up the idea that early Germans were pure and noble, uncorrupted by modern degeneracies such as “civilization.” (Of course, they used the latest technology build a police state and wage war/genocide on their neighbors.) On the hand, other Fascist movements thoroughly embraced the modern, but then I’d hesitate to call Fascism “conservative,” even though elements of it were. Certainly, both Fascist and theocratic states believed that intrusive government was necessary to control the populace, even as out of the side of their mouths they praised their citizens as “children of God” or “the master race.” In contrast, although it never worked out in practice, communism is fundamentally an anarchist ideology.

Calhoun did take contradictory positions, and maybe some of them were genuine. But the principal difference between V. Tyrannis and V. Libertas is the way they each treat other people. Tyranni are willing to take the lives of others in order to have their way, and the taking can take many forms: murder, blackmail, extortion, economic exploitation, bribery, assault, torture, rape, decapitation, robbery, fraud, spousal abuse, child molestation, wars of aggression, lynching, slavery, shootings, bombings, stabbings, immolation and other horrors.

Calhoun was comfortable with slavery and all of its horrors. He was a tyrannus, mentally tortured perhaps, but he was willing to use force to make other human beings do his bidding, and the bidding of his tyranno-brothers.

You are what you do — to others.

Hestal, Calhoun’s argument as you report it reminds me of Lani Guinier’s in The Tyranny of the Majority. She’s following up on Madison, who did worry about both the threat of factions and the tyranny of the majority; but doing it from the perspective of minorities who always lose, so she does argue for some kind of effective veto or at least turn-taking. Tocqueville and Durkheim both had a notion of secondary powers mediating between the state and the individual to accomplish the same interception of anarchy and tyranny. I think some folks notice and attempt to address both sides of the danger.

Your two varieties of h. sapiens strike me as consistent with Lakoff’s argument in Moral Politics that Americans use one of two dominant metaphors of the family to organize their thinking about politics: the authoritarian father (V. Tyrannis) and the nurturing parent (V. Libertas). Cultural ecologists like Ogbu might say that this is no genetic split but a basic developmental response to different life circumstances and prospects. It’s no accident that conservatives and fundamentalists tend to prevail in agricultural regions and liberals tend to prevail in urban/suburban environments. The kind of person who ‘fits’ those environments differs and parents build their children accordingly from generation to generation. I’m describing trends, of course, not destiny.

E.g. agricultural life at its best stays the same; at its worst catastrophically declines. Or it cycles between these poles of subsistence and disaster. Urbanity is associated with progress narratives, although only for the urban; for rural folk, city folk just look like dangerous clueless twits who don’t know they’re upsetting the delicate balance of things. Hence some of the very worst atrocities of the last couple hundreds of years have ironically occurred when rural folk have been transplanted to and gained power over the cities – Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge, Stalin purges.

So what I’m pointing at is contexts and dynamics producing situated responses and outcomes, rather than two inherent ‘types’ of us. That said, I encounter those two types in my daily life with great regularity, so for diagnosing a situation I think there’s a lot of traction in your classification.

I think I was writing my last comment while you posted your last comment and I missed it. But…

You wrote: “So in the religious version hestal’s been pointing at, everything happens because it’s God’s will unless we/they screw it up – bad us/them.” And I agree with you as far as it goes. But because the mechanism that drives my narrative of history depends on two varieties of homo sapiens, V. Tyrannis and V. Libertas, I think I should amplify my remarks about religion.

I was talking about fundamentalism, primarily the Southern Baptist Convention. Not all churches are like the SBC. Christianity is based on the liberto-principles and teachings of Jesus Christ, but the individual sects reflect the nature of their leaders more than they do Jesus’ teachings. So there are two kinds of Christianity, based on the variety of their managers. Thus we explain the great problem of Christianity, its hypocrisy. It is based on liberto-principles which favor one action, but its leaders are tyranni and they take tyranno-action. But there some sects with liberto-managers and they are not hypocrites. So we have two kinds of Christianity: liberto-Christianity (in the minority) and tyranno-Christianity.

Most of our national institutions are divided in the same way.