The Trunk

Libertarians and Racism

… I think The Callus is right—at least to the extent that the Libertarians’ race issues go beyond some awful things that Ron Paul may or may not have allowed to be said in his name. I would lay it out a bit differently, though.

Any real-world political ideology should grapple with the problems of the real world. A political ideology that could only function in a fantasy world is … not very useful.

In the United States, we see racial disparities in virtually everything. These disparities persist, even after you control for all of the things you would reasonably control for.

Because systemic racial injustice is a real world problem, any real world political ideology needs to address it. Hoping it will eventually get better is not a solution. Pretending it is already gone away is self-delusion.

The libertarians do not have a credible approach to confront systemic racial injustice.

Ignoring systemic racial injustice is either a mark of an incomplete political ideology, an act of profound willful ignorance, or a decision to prioritize some people’s problems above other people’s problems.

To respond adequately would take more time than this Jew has on Christmas Eve. But here are a few quick thoughts:

1. One ought to be able to conclude something from the libertarian think-tank failure to embrace Ron Paul. That is: there are many, many strands in the libertarian movement. Ron Paul is one of them. One would hardly be fair in attributing failures of the Democratic Party to Al Sharpton or Dan Rostenkowski, right? So maybe people are drawing too much from Paul.

2. Libertarian ideology holds that the government (that is force) should not be used to correct every social wrong. It seems a bit strange to criticize it for failing to adequately address a specific social wrong, then. Your problem is with the overall ideology, I suspect, and not this specific application of it.

3. The earliest American libertarians put their lives on the line as part of the abolitionist movement prior to the Civil War. In the post-slave era, there was no philosopher writer more famous and influential than the libertarian Herbert Spencer, who was vehemently antiracism, at a time when the growing American progressive movement couldn’t have been more racist. Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act because of his ideological opposition to the use of force, nonetheless “had pushed to desegregate the Arizona National Guard and the Senate cafeteria, and had ended segregation in the Phoenix department store owned by his family.” The wonderful Institute for Justice (give to them; I do) regularly fights for the economic rights of poor and minority clients.

Libertarians have fought against systematic racial injustice longer than any other active political ideology. They have consistently opposed any government support of racism, and have worked to change societal norms outside of the political arena. You may not feel that is enough; you may feel that the government should impose itself in personal and business relationships to further cure the problem. That’s a fair debate to have. But in this debate, you may not want to argue over the pedigrees of our respective ideologies. Progressives were ones who lobbied for birth control as a means to limit the quantity of races they didn’t like. Progressives were the ones who used minimum wage laws to keep women out of the workplace. It was the Progressives’ favorite Supreme Court justice who upheld the forced sterilization of the “feebleminded” because he felt that “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” I’d take my ideological ancestors over yours anyway.

4. Seeing as we have been ruled by Democrats and Republicans for decades and there is still tons of awful racism, maybe we can agree that neither of them have had a credible way to fix the problem. And seeing as libertarians are the only people actually serious about criminal justice and education reform, perhaps you’re being a little to hasty in deriding libertarians as wholly unserious about issues of racial disparity. I can promise you that we believe your policies have made things affirmatively worse. We believe, for example, that your party (yours, Squashed!) systematically sends inner-city kids to crummy schools run by crummy unions, prices inner-city kids out of their first jobs by means of the minimum wage, forces them into the drug trade, imprisons them, and leaves them with a mark on their record that makes future success almost certainly unattainable. We think this is atrocious. So atrocious that it’s a little appalling when you lecture us about race.

Source: thecallus