In response to the question whether one should characterize Rand Paul as a racist for his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I will go beyond Josh Marshall’s polite “far from uncontested” and say that the answer is “yes.” If your claim is that you oppose racism but you are sadly unwilling to end it, the difference between this position and “being a racist” may matter to our philosophical colleagues, but it seems to me a distinction without a difference. Below, and related, an old column of mine on Barry Goldwater, who inspired similar convolutions, but about whom the right answer is Jackie Robinson’s.
Liberals love Barry Goldwater, the late five-term Arizona senator who launched the modern conservative movement. In the HBO documentary Mr. Conservative, now out on DVD, Goldwater gets glowing praise from Democrats Edward Kennedy and Hillary Clinton; the new edition of Goldwater’s 1960 “The Conscience of a Conservative,” the first volume to appear in the historian Sean Wilentz’s series of works in American political thought, has a warm afterword by the liberal activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This unseemly outpouring of liberal affection for a right-wing icon owes only partly to the socially accepted, but no less peculiar enthusiasm of American politicians for their late opponents (Ronald Reagan showed similarly odd affection for the safely long-dead Franklin Roosevelt). Mostly, it has to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of Goldwater, in whom the basic contradictions of Republican libertarianism were plainly visible from the start.
The charming CC Goldwater, Barry’s granddaughter, edited the new printing of “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and she also produced and presents the HBO film, which bears the fetchingly honest subtitle, “Goldwater on Goldwater.” The man who emerges from both is her man — fiscally conservative and socially liberal, staunchly opposed to the arbitrary concentration of power in the U. S. presidency and thus increasingly uncomfortable with the Republican majority he helped to forge. And it’s true that Goldwater disliked the evangelical Christian tenor of today’s Republicans, true that he became an outsider because, as Ben Bradlee says in the film, “he didn’t care what the Republican Bible said.” Goldwater even declared himself an “honorary gay” in 1994, standing up for sexual freedoms. So liberals can admire, as Clinton does, “his wonderful sort of Western ways and values,” and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., can declare Goldwater “a man of principle.”
Though it’s sadly incomplete, this picture of Goldwater as a great American cowboy is true as far as it goes. He was born in Arizona when it was still a territory, grew up with the state, and loved its land. CC tells how her grandfather rose to fame by filming a boat trip down the Colorado River and personally touring it around the small towns of the state. He won a Senate seat in 1952, a Republican year, and kept it in 1958, a Democratic one. In 1960 he published his credo, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” which Wilentz diplomatically says was written “with the editorial help of conservative writer L. Brent Bozell”; Rick Perlstein, in his 2001 biography of Goldwater, says Bozell wrote the book himself in a six-week sprint. In any case, its call to cut taxes, services, federal enforcement of civil rights — everything except national defense (which needed endless expanding) — became the Goldwater platform, and in 1964, at the end of his second term, he ran for president on it. And he got beat worse than almost anyone else in modern presidential history.
In the 1970s, Goldwater put increasing distance between himself and the Republican Party. It started with Watergate, when he brought down the hatchet on Richard Nixon. Goldwater told his son’s best friend, John Dean III, “that SOB was always a liar, so go nail ‘im” in Congressional testimony. And it was Goldwater — rather gleefully, if Ben Bradlee is to be believed — who went to the White House on August 7, 1974, to tell Nixon he couldn’t win an impeachment trial.
But the real separation between Goldwater and the GOP came when Republican operatives realized, as Richard Viguerie says in the film, “what we were missing [were] the social issues.” When the Republican Party began closing the gap between church and state, Goldwater began edging away from the party leadership. In the film we see him saying, “the religious right scares the hell out of me,” and suggesting of Jerry Falwell that “all good Christians should kick him in the ass.” He supported the service of gays in the military and opposed limits on a woman’s right to choose an abortion. For these reasons, one could say — and Walter Cronkite says it in the film — that Goldwater “became a liberal.”
But one would be — and Cronkite is — wrong, unless mere personal dislike of Richard Nixon and tolerance of sexual independence constitute liberalism. Most of “The Conscience of a Conservative” constitutes an appeal to dismantle the federal government. Standing well to the right of Adam Smith, Goldwater writes, “The graduated tax is a confiscatory tax.” He cites a tax rate for earners of $100,000 in 1960 that’s 23 percentage points higher than it really was to help make his point; facts don’t much matter in books like these. He conflates “radical” with “liberal.” He advocates cutting welfare, agriculture subsidies, and laws permitting unionization.
Goldwater also carried his small-government convictions into the arena of civil rights. “Conscience” features numerous dog-whistle appeals to American racists. Pretty much everyone, including Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and Julian Bond, is willing to concede that Goldwater was not personally bigoted. But his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act would speak for itself, even if Goldwater didn’t speak for it: “the Supreme Court decision is not necessarily the law of the land,” he said in 1964, and he (or Bozell) said likewise in 1960, describing Brown v. Board of Education and allied decisions as “abuses of power by the Court.” In italics, Goldwater declares that politics needs to take into account “the essential differences between men.” And the only states he won in 1964, apart from his own, were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, a Deep South bloc that, with the exception of Louisiana in 1956, hadn’t gone Republican since Reconstruction. In a 1974 article trying to explain why liberals love Goldwater, the journalist Roy Reed tried to distinguish Goldwater and George Wallace: Goldwater’s crowd “was not scary in the same way a George Wallace rally is….The difference is in the build of the men at the top….While Wallace is a demagogue, Goldwater is merely a crowd pleaser.” Apparently, whatever race-baiting Goldwater encouraged, it was not sincere: He really just wanted to defend a limited interpretation of the Constitution.
So far, so libertarian; so far, so worthy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s grudging admission that Goldwater put forward a “coherent philosophy.” But the tenth chapter of “The Conscience of a Conservative” repudiates the first nine. Up to the book’s conclusion Goldwater harps on the need to cut government down, but here he declares, let government’s power grow. Why? The title of the chapter is “The Soviet Menace,” but Goldwater does not see the enemy as the Soviet Union, he sees it as an idea: “Communism is an enemy bound to destroy us.” This war on an -ism poses an existential threat tantamount to World War II. “Our goal,” he writes, “must be victory…In addition to keeping the free world free, we must try to make the Communist world free. To these ends, we must always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing.” So important is this strategy of aggression, so pressing is the need for a preemptive military war against an ideology that could be anywhere that, Goldwater says, he’s willing to set aside his libertarian principles: “As a Conservative, I deplore the huge tax levy that is needed to finance the world’s number-one military establishment. But even more do I deplore the prospect of a foreign conquest, which the absence of that establishment would quickly accomplish.”
Someone who truly believes, as Goldwater writes, that “individual liberty depends on decentralized government,” might nevertheless subordinate his principles in time of war. But once you declare war on an idea, you’ve declared endless war: Once you’ve committed yourself to maintain a permanent war footing and a first-strike capacity anywhere at will, you’ve no kind of libertarian principles at all. Goldwater fantasized that the federal state ballooned in power because the Democratic Party “was captured by the Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement.” But it was the secretive, unaccountable, and ever-growing defense establishment that made decision-making less democratic and government more expensive. Considering today’s government, CC Goldwater says, “Anyone who motivates our decisions by fear cannot restore the principles of a country founded in freedom.” And she is surely right. Unfortunately her grandfather laid the foundation for the modern use of that motivation. Liberals don’t recognize it. But it’s all there if you read Goldwater on Goldwater.
36 comments
May 20, 2010 at 8:23 am
Vance
Good piece (but it looks like you pasted it twice).
May 20, 2010 at 8:28 am
eric
Thanks, I think I’ve fixed it.
May 20, 2010 at 8:47 am
kevin
Look, it’s all pretty simple.
The best way to reduce the power and reach of an out-of-control federal government is to make it bigger in size and scope, much less accountable to a civilian population, and armed to the teeth. Why can’t you liberals understand that?
May 20, 2010 at 8:51 am
politicalfootball
There’s a lot of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand in your Goldwater article, so you’ve already acknowledged and rebutted any argument I’d be inclined to make in Goldwater’s defense. And I don’t disagree with this statement:
the difference between this position and “being a racist” may matter to our philosophical colleagues, but it seems to me a distinction without a difference
The policy prescriptions of racists and libertarians really are functionally identical.
But Goldwater’s principles, flawed as they were, really did make a difference in his approach to public policy. The same is true of Rand’s daddy.
I have no idea about Rand himself, but if he has ideological commitments beyond the perpetuation of Republican power (as Goldwater did and Ron Paul does), he could instantly become one of the best Republicans in the Senate.
What little I know of Rand, however, suggests that he’s just a plain old racist. He likes to think that he’d march with Martin Luther King now that that’s no longer possible, but on what public issue has he taken a bold anti-racist stance today?
May 20, 2010 at 10:23 am
kathy a.
quacks like, walks like. it’s a duck.
thanks for the piece about goldwater.
May 20, 2010 at 11:53 am
politicalfootball
Says Josh Marshall:
It’s very hard to know what’s in people’s hearts
This is a standard remark often made by good-hearted liberals trying to engage in conversations across the ideological divide, but you know what? Sometimes it’s really not all that hard.
May 20, 2010 at 12:07 pm
ben
Blood, in most cases, but in mine ichor.
May 20, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Colin
interesting discussion here
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/05/more_on_just_libertarianism.php#more?ref=fpblg
Re distinction/difference, I would suggest that in the kind of politics that involves negotiation, coalition-building, and so forth, people’s bottom lines do matter. I would much rather deal with principled libertarians or Burkeans than with people who really *like* racial hierarchy.
There’s also the craziness question. Southwestern conservatives in the 60s had a certain resentment of Eastern elites, but I don’t remember the conspiracy theories or monetary crankery characteristic of Ron Paul’s followers, much less the hysterical self-pity of the Becks and Limbaughs. In that company Goldwater looks highly sane.
May 20, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Vance
It’s interesting to see Marshall vacillate slightly on this — he says, rightly enough I think, that we don’t know or care what’s in Rand Paul’s heart, but then emphasizes that we want to know his priorities. In one sense, Paul’s priorities are part of his heart. But we do want to be able to predict what he’ll do, meaning we need a theory of his behavior, and “priorities” may just refer to a part of that theory.
May 20, 2010 at 1:19 pm
kathy a.
quack quack quack. courting and hanging out with avowed racists, stating opposition to the civil rights act — until proven otherwise, this is not a person concerned with racial equality. or other kinds of equality.
i do think that goldwater turned around some in his later years, but what he did earlier endured, even past his support for those notions. later-life disavowals unfortunately do not have the impact of earlier pronouncements that help launch a few decades of hatred.
May 20, 2010 at 2:36 pm
AaLD
It’s very hard to know what’s in people’s hearts
Unless they tell you. Isn’t Jesus supposed to have said something like “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks”? Whether or not he actually said it, I think there’s some truth to that.
May 20, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Kathy
Great piece. After reading through the Church committee hearings, I could never summon any enthusiasm for Goldwater. What kind of libertarian believes that the state should have the absolute, unaccountable power to murder a foreign leader?
May 20, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Malaclypse
Given that Stormfront likes both Doctors Paul, does it really matter what is in their hearts?
http://barefootandprogressive.blogspot.com/2010/05/stormfrontorg-was-rooting-for-rand-paul.html
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/28353_Ron_Pauls_Photo-Op_with_Stormfront
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1916838/posts
When you are so far to the right that you creep out Freepers and 2007-era LGF, but Stormfront likes you, it just does not make any frakking difference if you are “really” a racist – you are doing what racists really like, and that should give any sane individual pause.
May 20, 2010 at 4:34 pm
kevin
Bruce Bartlett has a nice piece on this, by the way:
I don’t believe Rand is a racist; I think he is a fool who is suffering from the foolish consistency syndrome that affects all libertarians. They believe that freedom consists of one thing and one thing only–freedom from governmental constraint. Therefore, it is illogical to them that any increase in government power could ever expand freedom. Yet it is clear that African Americans were far from free in 1964 and that the Civil Rights Act greatly expanded their freedom while diminishing that of racists. To defend the rights of racists to discriminate is reprehensible and especially so when it is done by a major party nominee for the U.S. Senate. I believe that Rand should admit that he was wrong as quickly as possible.
May 20, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Ben Alpers
Southwestern conservatives in the 60s had a certain resentment of Eastern elites, but I don’t remember the conspiracy theories or monetary crankery characteristic of Ron Paul’s followers, much less the hysterical self-pity of the Becks and Limbaughs.
Weren’t there a fair number of John Birchers in the Southwest in the early ’60s?
May 20, 2010 at 7:51 pm
andrew
Sometime not too long after the 1964 election, the New York Times printed a long letter George Romney wrote to Goldwater criticizing the Goldwater campaign’s positioning on civil rights, among other things. It’s a really fascinating letter, but I guess it’s not freely accessible.
May 20, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Colin
Ben’s question is good. I *think* I recognize a distinct strain in Goldwater (and my AZ relatives), but I may be romanticizing like everyone else. Any good studies?
May 20, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Colin
I see that Rand Paul has walked back his Maddow and other comments; Ta-Nehisi Coates has been especially good on this (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/making-the-argument/57044/)
May 20, 2010 at 10:22 pm
teofilo
I think one important thing to consider in looking at Goldwater and other Southwestern libertarian conservatives (like my relatives, and probably Colin’s too) is that their specific strain of conservatism, focused heavily on reducing federal-level taxation and spending, as well as regulation, is and always has been extremely unpopular outside of a few small areas. It’s not the same as the pseudo-libertarianism that only really cares about reducing taxes (fairly popular among rich people), the straight-up cynical and opportunistic opposition to regulation whenever it reduces profit margins but only then (very popular among big business), or the more socially focused civil libertarianism and opposition to government interference in people’s private lives (mostly limited to a handful of intellectuals in DC).
The key thing about this economic libertarianism is that the people who subscribe to it are typically quite sincere about it. They’re not just pushing for tax cuts for themselves; they really do want to reduce the size of government, and are willing to go to rather extreme lengths that won’t necessarily be maximally beneficial to them personally to do that. It’s most popular among small businesspeople, farmers, ranchers, and the like in small towns and rural areas in the Southwest. These are the sort of people who pride themselves on being rugged individualists who get by with no help from anybody, especially not the dreaded federal government, and they are firmly committed to the view that no one else really needs to be coddled by the government either. They’re wrong, of course, and rather blinkered in their worldview, but they do believe what they say.
Now, for these economic libertarians, this idea of shrinking the government is the goal of political activism, and it’s a much higher priority than anything else. Indeed, within this group opinions vary widely on other issues, include race, religion, and foreign policy (aside from a general ideological tendency toward fanatical anti-communism that can be seen clearly with Goldwater and tends to severely undercut the coherence of the whole small-government idea). The combination of this wide range of views with the lower importance attached to issues like race is that people like this, regardless of their personal views, are generally going to be inclined to make tactical alliances with other ideological groups to advance their anti-government agenda.
And they have to make such alliances, because as I said before their own ideology is extremely unpopular. So to get regulations repealed they ally with business, to get tax cuts they ally with rich people, and to get spending cuts (the toughest part) they ally with people who have their own reasons to cut specific programs. When it comes to social welfare programs, that generally means racists, a good group to ally with in general if you want to gain some power. Racism has always been much more popular in America than small government ideology.
So while Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act could be (and was) easily justified by opposition to government regulation, I think it’s letting Goldwater off too easy to just leave it at that. I have no doubt that he was not personally in favor of racial discrimination, but I think it’s equally apparent that he really didn’t care that much about the issue either, and was totally willing to align with the racists as a tactical political move. You can see something similar, perhaps, with Ron Paul’s long association with white-supremacist groups. I have no idea if Paul is himself a racist, but he’s obviously willing to ally with racists to advance his wacky economic agenda. It’s a matter of priorities.
Now, I know nothing about Rand Paul, and very little about his dad, so I don’t know how much of the economic libertarianism I outlined above applies to either of them. I think a lot of it does, but on racial issues especially it’s important to note that neither is a Southwestern libertarian conservative. They are instead Southern libertarian conservatives, a much rarer breed (parts of Texas could be considered Southwestern rather than Southern, but Paul’s district is very much not one of them), and on racial issues especially that may make a big difference between them and someone like Goldwater. There are major differences in the salience of different issues in different parts of the country, and that probably does affect the priorities even hard-core ideologues have. In other words, it’s very possible that Rand Paul is just a racist in addition to being an economic libertarian.
This is all just based on my experience with my own relatives and similar people in the rural Southwest, so I can’t vouch for its general applicability. I wasn’t around in the sixties, so I don’t know how much has changed in this mindset since then, but I suspect there’s been less change than you might think. And, of course, if there’s any actual research out there that contradicts anything I say here it’s more likely to be accurate than my impressions.
May 20, 2010 at 11:25 pm
andrew
Turns out Time did a quick summary of the Romney-Goldwater letter.
May 21, 2010 at 1:28 am
erubin
I’ll throw in my endorsement of the Bruce Bartlett piece Kevin posted as reflecting my views. Libertarians are, in general, ideologues who seek a simple, consistent viewpoint instead of asking what is best for society. Opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities Act is merely a byproduct of their effort to form a consistent position.
To frame my viewpoint in another way, it was in your class, Eric, when I learned the subtle psychology of housing discrimination. As you eloquently put it, “White homeowners would put clauses in their deeds banning blacks from buying their houses. They weren’t necessarily overtly racist, but many reasoned that everyone else was racist, and they therefore had to play along to keep even one black family from moving in and lowering property values in the entire neighborhood. In their minds, it wasn’t that they themselves were racist, it was everyone else who was part of the problem.” (Please correct me if I’ve butchered your quote. I remember it was something along those lines.) I believe that is a wonderful highlight of the gray area between those who are “not racist” and those who attend Klan rallies. Racism, like almost everything else, is described by a continuous spectrum, so it is outright foolish to ask whether anyone– Paul and Goldwater especially included— simply “is” or “is not” racist.
teofilo:
Now, I know nothing about Rand Paul, and very little about his dad, so I don’t know how much of the economic libertarianism I outlined above applies to either of them.
As someone who spends far too much time on Digg, I know more about the Pauls than I ever wanted to. I can attest that economic libertarianism is a tremendous part of their platforms; I would argue their economic positions are at least as important to their ideologies as their social positions. I’ve heard accusations that their libertarianism is a front for their racist tendencies, but I tend to shy away from that viewpoint and give them the benefit of the doubt. I simply find it hard to believe that someone would advocate stripping the federal government right down to the Constitution, leaving dozens of hot-button issues for the states to resolve, and abolishing the Federal Reserve all as an excuse to discriminate against dark-skinned people. Echoing what I said above, I think they hold those views simply for the sake of consistency. Perhaps I’m naive. Wouldn’t be the first time.
May 21, 2010 at 2:27 am
kid bitzer
“In their minds, it wasn’t that they themselves were racist, it was everyone else who was part of the problem.” (Please correct me if I’ve butchered your quote. I remember it was something along those lines.”
it’s not exactly what eric said, but it’s what everyone else thinks he said.
May 21, 2010 at 3:33 am
Matt
their specific strain of conservatism, focused heavily on reducing federal-level taxation and spending,
This sort of idea is common in Idaho, too, and much of the west. It’s nonsense, though. People _say_ this, now that they have the dams, the interstate, and all the other things provided by the federal government that make life possible on anything like the scale that exists. And of course they throw a huge fit if anyone considers cutting an air force base in the state or the like. They don’t want federal spending _on others_ but are happy for what they get, even though those states are usually net importers of federal money. Basically it’s a mixture of selfishness and stupidity.
May 21, 2010 at 6:47 am
max
teo: They are instead Southern libertarian conservatives, a much rarer breed (parts of Texas could be considered Southwestern rather than Southern, but Paul’s district is very much not one of them), and on racial issues especially that may make a big difference between them and someone like Goldwater.
Having seen and listened to both flavors over time, I tend to agree with you, Teo, about Rand Paul in particular. Ron Paul is harder: he’s old and just plain weird so it’s difficult to tell what he thinks. I always thought the litmus test should be his patients: does he have black and brown patients or not? If he does then he isn’t a racist, at least operationally. But in either event, the father seems to carry of the autistic, tone-deaf von Mises libertarianism much better than the son.
erubin: I simply find it hard to believe that someone would advocate stripping the federal government right down to the Constitution, leaving dozens of hot-button issues for the states to resolve, and abolishing the Federal Reserve all as an excuse to discriminate against dark-skinned people. Echoing what I said above, I think they hold those views simply for the sake of consistency.
I think, having grown up in Dallas, it’s easy to miss the ‘lunch counters’ issue of discrimination because Dallas desegregated itself. The local CCC said, folks, this is bad for business, so integrate the lunch counters. Houston was sorta similar. That’s the legend, anyways. So private action ended segregation in Dallas (in 1964). In that context it becomes much easier to see the Civil Rights Act as a federal intrusion.
I have finally come to understand that libertarians are like communists in their dedication to ideology. They just don’t care; government has to go. Racism or no racism. Implicitly, racism is not as horrifying & repulsive as the strangling power of the state. They have no permanent allies just enemies. The end.
That’s an easy tale to sell in the South where the truth is avoided, but the fact is, the state governments of the South intrude and strangle on a regular basis. That’s the problem: Southern conservatives also have an ideological commitment … to the hatred of black people. In such an environment, the much smaller libertarian movement would have to give up their commitment to smaller government to fight the Southern conservatives and that ain’t gonna happen.
It is hard, in some respects, when you live there, to see how weird the South (including Kentucky, I imagine) is compared to the rest of the country.
m, culture endures endlessly
May 21, 2010 at 6:57 am
Ken
So important is this strategy of aggression, so pressing is the need for a preemptive military war … that, Goldwater says, he’s willing to set aside his libertarian principles:
There’s a patch for this in modern libertarianism, or at least an argument that I’ve seen made many times. It goes something like, “we can’t all choose to have different levels of national defense, so that’s something that the government legitimately has to do.”
Which kind of makes sense, except it’s not permissible to apply the same logic to other areas. For example, it would seem that we can’t all choose to have different levels of mercury in our water, and so setting rules for polluting should also be a legitimate governmental function; but when I’ve raised this in discussions, the proponents of libertarianism disagree and think the market should be used to punish people who dump waste in the water.
May 21, 2010 at 7:10 am
Ben Alpers
It is worth remembering that a small but significant minority of conservative libertarians, led by Murray Rothbard, departed from Goldwater’s logic on the Cold War and came out against Vietnam and the national security state in the 1960s. Their ideological heirs, including Ron Paul, along with a odd mix of traditionalist paleocons, form today’s anti-war right.
May 21, 2010 at 9:24 am
Sabina's Hat
I’m one of those philosophical colleagues, so take this as you will, but eric’s argument that paul is a racist fails. This is a difference with a distinction. First, as Paul claims, he doesn’t believe in government discrimination, which presumably many racists will. Second, Paul’s claim is that racial discrimination in business practices is a private matter and thus should not be prevented by the government. The difference between him and a racist here is that he claims that as a private matter people shouldn’t discriminate, whereas most racists will claim that they should.
Eric is correct that as a policy matter (at least on the issue of business discrimination), Paul’s view and that of the racist are the same. However, one of the main themes of libertarian thought in general is that many public ills (such as racial discrimination), are best dealt through private means, thus eschewing the desirability of having a government policy at all. In other words, Paul, putatively, also wishes a world without racial discrimination, but thinks that trying to achieve this goal through law will either fail or will have other negative consequences that outweigh the positive of ending racial discrimination.
I think it is fair (and correct) to argue that Paul is incorrect about the feasibility of ending racial discrimination through private means or that he is minimizing the relative harms of racial discrimination (as Bruce Bartlett argues), but that is all that follows. Of course, eric might be correct that Paul really is a racist, but it hasn’t been established here.
There are also other meanings of racist under which Paul would qualify as one as a supporter of racist policies or attitudes. However, then the discussion is more complex due to the equivocal usage of the word.
May 21, 2010 at 10:08 am
zunguzungu
Shorter Sabina’s Hat: “Rand Paul does not actively favor Apartheid or Jim Crow, therefore he is not racist”
May 21, 2010 at 11:10 am
Sabina's Hat
Shorter Zunguzungu: “I don’t bother understanding my opponents.”
More seriously, Paul’s view is an indictment of libertarian thought. It shows that libertarians don’t have an adequate answer to the problem of racial discrimination. If we instead say that the “real” problem is that Paul is a racist, then other libertarians who think they are not racists will not recognize that their worldview is also implicated.
May 21, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Derek
“More seriously, Paul’s view is an indictment of libertarian thought. It shows that libertarians don’t have an adequate answer to the problem of racial discrimination.”
One might argue that liberals don’t have any adequate answers either. I live in one of the top five most populous metropolitan areas (that’s not in the south by the way). It’s a very liberal city–votes >90% Democrat in all elections. We’re roughly 45% black, 40% white, and 15% something else. The city is EXTREMELY segregated, with the noticeable exception of a couple of working class neighborhoods. When schools were integrated, rich white liberals moved their children to private schools (and now special charter schools). White conservatives fled to ‘burbs. The public schools in my neighborhood (one of the working class integrated neighborhoods) are all 90+% black. A large population of our black peoples are in public housing projects. Multiple generations have now grown up in these projects perhaps never working a day in their lives. Never knowing anything but life in the projects. Liberals in the other city regions are virtually paying (via wage taxes and property taxes) for them to stay where they are and shut up.
So perhaps we’ve changed the language we use when we interact with one another, and we all “know” racism is wrong. We also have no problem electing black people to office at both the local and national level. We certainly, however, haven’t fixed the economic separation between the races, and we’ve certainly not changed people’s hearts and minds.
May 21, 2010 at 12:51 pm
Ben Alpers
The difference between liberals (per Derek) and Rand Paul (per Sabina’s Hat) is that liberals worked hard–and successfully–to make it illegal for owners of public accommodations to discriminate against customers on the basis of race. As divided as Detroit is, anybody of any race can go into any restaurant and order a meal (though, admittedly, at the limit case of very expensive restaurants, this may be a bit like the reverse of Anatole France’s famous observation about the magnificent equality of the law).
Rand Paul, on the other hand, would defend the right of restaurateurs and shopowners to discriminate on the basis of race…and would advocate using the power of the state to protect their “property right” to do so.
This seems like a rather significant difference to me, even if liberals have not managed to usher in the world imagined in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
May 21, 2010 at 1:19 pm
AaLD
It’s most popular among small businesspeople, farmers, ranchers, and the like in small towns and rural areas in the Southwest. These are the sort of people who pride themselves on being rugged individualists who get by with no help from anybody, especially not the dreaded federal government
When they’re not busy cashing their farm subsidy checks, and demanding more taxpayer-funded water projects.
May 21, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Sabina's Hat
Derek:
First, I will agree with the premise that the U.S. has not “solved” the problem of racially-based economic inequality or gotten rid of segregation. However, the U.S. has made significant strides in solving the problem of businesses discriminating against people on the basis of race. Moreover, this was achieved through a law that was supported by liberals and civil rights leaders–the Civil Rights Act. Less obviously, affirmative action policies also played a role in achieving this goal. Rand Paul and other libertarian conservatives did not and do not support the actual policies that led to this achievement. The policies that they do or did support (the pre-1964 and Brown v. Board status quo) demonstrably did not achieve this goal.
As for lessening racially-based economic inequality (and economic inequality more generally) I am open to hearing the libertarian alternatives to liberal ideas. There are some, and I think they are worth paying attention to, but in my experience most libertarians don’t view lessening economic inequality as a policy goal worth paying attention to.
May 21, 2010 at 3:17 pm
max
Sabina: There are some, and I think they are worth paying attention to, but in my experience most libertarians don’t view lessening economic inequality as a policy goal worth paying attention to.
My understanding from reading libertarian propaganda (also known ‘libertarian SF’) is that under a libertarian state we’d all be so rich, it wouldn’t matter. Thus the argument is made in contemporary society that the poor are already so rich, what we need to do to help them is cut taxes so they can get rich when actual rich people make the economy go VROOM VROOM.
That thinking runs into reality when you consider how poor the poor were in 1800, 1850, 1900 and 1950 and so on. Standards of living really went up in the era of big government. Not so much in say, 1800-1810 and most of that was due to free land.
m, there’s a complete, worked-out theory that… doesn’t work
May 21, 2010 at 4:19 pm
erubin
It seems the crux of the discussion here is weighing a person’s actions against their intentions. I hear no one questioning whether Rand Paul’s actions are consistent with racist policies, nor do I hear anyone actively accusing him of really disliking black people on a personal level (although there are a few who simply aren’t sure). Since the political leanings of this blog’s audience seems fairly homogeneous, I’m confident we can all agree that Paul is simply on the wrong side of things and leave it at that. The actions vs. intentions philosophical argument could carry on for pages.
May 22, 2010 at 3:35 am
Walt
eric: You didn’t double paste. The CBS version has two complete copies of your article. (I’m mentioning this just in case you have the desire and ability to have them fix it.)