But what are you going to do about it?
Rand Paul, Kentucky’s “Tea Party” nominee for the Senate, is opposed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says why that’s not just a principled libertarian view:
To a degree the argument Paul is making is something like saying that I don’t like rape or murder, I just don’t believe in a police force to prevent it or a judiciary to punish the offenders. The reason we, albeit imperfectly, have equality before the law and in the society at large (in terms of public accommodations and so forth) on racial grounds in the whole of the United States is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case. The reason we don’t have white and colored drinking fountains or pools for whites only
is because of federal legislation that forced that to be the case.
And we know all that because that’s how it played out during the 1950s and 60s. There was activism, there were protests and marches and freedom rides, and they got things going, but they weren’t enough. They faced overwhelming state force, and they would have lost if the federal government hadn’t – slowly and reluctantly under Eisenhower and Kennedy, with more commitment under Johnson – joined in. Libertarianism wouldn’t have worked, at least not nearly as fast.
At 54 years old, and who lived in Alabama in 1963 and 1968, I still vividly recall the civil rights marches and the reactions of the southerners around me–and why federal laws protecting civil rights were so necessary.
So where were the tea-baggers during that time? Granted there were no labeled “tea-party” members back then. But when the vicious dogs were used to attack non-violent marchers in Birmingham, the men who believed like tea-baggers were the ones holding the dogs.
Thank you.
It would be nice if the federal laws hadn’t been necessary, if the movement had been able to do the whole job by means of moral persuasion, but that is not how it played out.
“It would be nice if the federal laws hadn’t been necessary, if the movement had been able to do the whole job by means of moral persuasion, but that is not how it played out.”
Thanks. I just watched Rachel Maddow’s interview with Paul and I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with his argument. I’m still not sure, I can, but I appreciate that it’s being discussed so I can see where I go wrong.
However, the libertarian argument would be that there should not be any laws governing Civil Rights. After all, it was the state police forces enforcing state laws that prevented blacks exercising what blacks claimed were their civil rights. The logic of libertarianism is that there should be three drinking fountains: one for whites only, one for blacks only and one for people who don’t care who else uses it.
Totally with you on this. Libertarians are not racists, but they have an almost mystical idea of private property. Private property is a useful social construct, justifiable on policy grounds. But it has to give way to other policy grounds where they are more compelling. Iwouldn’t abolish private property but nor would I abolish the tax-transfer system or anti-discrimination law. Obviously there are issues of the detail of what taxes should be imposed, what constraints on the use of private property should be imposed to make life fairer for individuals in disadvantaged groups, what projects should be funded from public revenue. All this needs, um, intelligent design and continual fine-tuning. But libertarians are effectively saying that one area of policy – laws recognising title in property – should completely trump the rest. That’s madness.
The logic of libertarianism is that there should be three drinking fountains: one for whites only, one for blacks only and one for people who don’t care who else uses it.
I forgot to say: but it isn’t the duty of the state to provide any of them.
Libertarians are self-contradictory morons, consumed by a pseudo-Lockean mystical notion that private property somehow pre-exists the idea of law – the body of rules which allows a society to define such a thing as ‘private property’, and which requires a state, ipso facto, in order to exist. Most of them, as far as I can tell, are equally consumed by the notion that having a gun is the same as having legitimate title.
Should their plans ever come to fruition, corporations would of course take over the world in short order, using the sacred rights of private property and binding contract to turn their control of economic resources into the effective enslavement of anyone who actually wanted to eat.
Law is a very dangerous, and last resort tool. Some of the discrimination in the south (I am ould enough to remember it) could arguably have justified measures to stop them. Rightly viewed these were extreme measures to deal with a unique and intractable problem. To be used rarely, if ever again.
But the risk, indeed the intoxicating temptation, is to take that success to build more laws, on a range of slights, to try to ‘correct’ issues with society that one group perceives, issues that really are personal matters. Extensive behavior and attitude modification by government, is on the whole, not compatible with a free society. It is the surgeon’s blade, to be used as absolutley minimally as possible.
Jay, the laws are not about attitude modification – that’s pure strawman. The laws are about actions, not attitudes.
And I don’t agree that such laws are dangerous. It’s just not all that difficult to distinguish between private actions and choices, and public ones. We get to choose our own friends on any grounds we like, including sexist racist homophobic xenophobic grounds; we don’t get to choose our customers on those grounds.
Free to choose, the libertarian motto, assumes a level playing field between all parties, which certainly did not exist between blacks and whites in the United States in the era of the Civil Rights Act and unfortunately still does not exist today. Where there is an egregious disequality of power relations, as between blacks and whites in 1964 in the United States, leaving matters up to free choice is to let the stronger party, in this case, whites, prevail.
Law is a two edged blade. At it’s most basic, law is a mechanism where a group of people get to control, through coercion, the behavior of the rest of the population. In many cases the support of the population is so overwhelming (murder, rape etc) that it’s easy to come to some agreement.
Do not forget that what really happened in the civil rights days is that one form of law finally over-rode another. It was not just a social market structure. Racial discrimination was deeply embedded in the legal system, and the removal of that structure was essential to any progress. But it did not happen strictly from some ivory tower. Attempts had been made for the past century to overturn this, but got nowhere. because there was not sufficient political capital to do so. No president since Lincoln had seriously stood up to the state governments, and it finally happened that in the 50s and 60s, the mood of the entire nation had started to change. For the first time there really was sufficient political capital to go against the entrenched legal system.
Destroying a legal system that protected and promoted racism was really the empowering event of the civil rights era.
The trouble with legal ‘solutions’ is that they are entirely dependent on who is in power. While ‘our guys’ (whatever one’s particular definition of our guys might be) may be holding sway now, they won’t always be. Which is why libertarians distrust law in general as a means of accomplishing things.. Without the power to legally protect racism, much of the madness of the deep South could not have been maintained.
[to correct a common misperception alluded to in earlier comments: most libertarians DO NOT like corporate welfare or legal systems protecting large corporations that are supported by both the Repubs and the Dems].
I don’t see a single comment that says a word about corporate welfare. What are you looking at?
It doesn’t matter whether libertarians profess to ‘like’ corporations or not; their model of how the world ought to work would see a drive towards ever-greater accrual of real power by such corporations [even more so than the present order does], because corporations are large, potent, amoral machines for exploiting institutional structures in the name of profit, and the libertarian ‘order’ would remove any countervailing institutional framework to stop them rediscovering the virtues of indenture and monopoly.
The only two other conceivable outcomes, given that libertarians in general, and contrary to what is claimed above, have in fact a fetishization of law, in the sense of the ability to sue somebody, are that power is vested in the hands of judges – who are either elected, and therefore become a de facto government, or unelected, in which case power lies in the hands of the structure that selects them – or, the default option in a society without agreed peaceful means of conflict-resolution, in the hands of people with guns [which I suspect, and many such blog discussions have reinforced my suspicion, is what a lot of libertarians think is the right and proper thing.]
Meanwhile, this: “Without the power to legally protect racism, much of the madness of the deep South could not have been maintained”, is bullshit. Those laws were the clearly-expressed preference of a majority of the regional population, and in particular of those holding local economic power – just the kind of power libertarians love.