The obstacles the Biden administration now faces in its efforts to pass a radically scaled down version of its “Build Back Better” bill have reignited an old debate in US political history: Why have tax increases and robust social investment proved so difficult to implement in this country? In recent years, a number of historians, including Ariel Ron and Robin Einhorn, have sought to answer the question by pointing to the legacy of American slavery. They argue that widespread hostility to taxation and government spending grow out of a long-standing American commitment to white supremacy and that the connection was forged in the slave South.

Ron, in a recent piece for Slate, drew a straight line between the proslavery politics of Southerners such as John C. Calhoun in the decades prior to the Civil War and the obstructionist tactics of today’s Republican Party. Concerned above all with protecting the institution of slavery from interference by national authorities, Ron argues, Calhoun and other Southerners became staunch opponents of federal activism. A government that had the capacity to build infrastructure and shape the economy, they feared, might also emancipate the slaves. Republicans in Congress today, Ron suggests, are operating from the same antidemocratic priorities and commitment to racial hierarchy. Not coincidentally, their electoral heartland is composed of the former states of the Confederacy, and they are similarly working to protect white elite power from redistributive government action. As Ron puts it, “Calhoun died in 1850, the Confederacy in 1865. Yet the politics of austerity endure.”

Einhorn has advanced a similar diagnosis. Rather than looking for the roots of American austerity politics in places like Pennsylvania or Massachusetts — in events like the Boston Tea Party — she argues, “we should be digging in Virginia and South Carolina.” Slaveholders saw little need for robust public spending on infrastructure or education. They perpetually worried about the prospects of nonslaveholding majorities wielding the power to tax their human property and thus did their best to cut down the government’s revenue-raising authority. To this day, she writes, the weakness of the American state’s fiscal powers is “part of the poisonous legacy we have inherited from the slaveholders who forged much of our political tradition.”