Rather than continue extending my previous “Intellectual Terrorism” discussion of the Rand Paul civil-rights controversy, I’ll link some relevant stuff here. James Joyner at Outside the Beltway:
Doug Mataconis, Oliver Willis, and I were engaged in a brief Twitter back-and-forth on this one last night. It’s a tougher question than it sounds, especially to a 20-something liberal.
Exactly so, given that most 20-somethings — liberal, conservative and otherwise — have been force-fed a distorted history of the civil-rights era.
The narrow question that Rand Paul was seeking to argue involves a libertarian critique of government intrusion into the private sector. From a libertarian perspective, it is wrong for government to require private-sector racial discrimination (as was the case under Jim Crow) and equally wrong for government to forbid private-sector racial discrimination (as in the 1964 Civil Rights Act).
Whatever your opinion in that specific context, it cannot be inferred from the libertarian argument that the person making that argument is an advocate of or apologist for racial discrimination.
An example I like to use when explaining this problem is the authentic Chinese restaurant. Owned by Chinese and staffed by Chinese, is this restaurant guilty of harmful “discrimination” because it does not employ Mexican cooks and Swedish waitresses? As absurd as this example may seem, yet it illustrates the fundamental logic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has been used to claim, inter alia, that Hooters is guilty of discrimination because it employees only waitresses, and not male waiters.
Dave Weigel, who spent a lot of time covering the Paulistas when he was at libertarian Reason magazine, is devoting extensive space to the controversy:
I can’t decide whether Paul has benefited or been hurt by the change of focus from the original story — whether his opposition to basically any federal intervention in business practices meant he opposed the Americans With Disabilities Act, opposed FDA regulation of food, etc. Instead, this has become a fairly tired “is candidate a racist or isn’t he?” story — one that Paul thinks he can deflect.
There should be no need to “deflect” an accusation for which no evidence exists, and yet Paul seems almost to be following the George Allen “Apology Tour” roadmap, issuing a statement that Weigel quotes:
I believe we should work to end all racism in American society and staunchly defend the inherent rights of every person. I have clearly stated in prior interviews that I abhor racial discrimination and would have worked to end segregation.
This kind of response cedes the premise of the liberal argument, namely that racism and discrimination are so pervasive and harmful as to constitute a persistent danger to the commonweal, thus requiring that everyone of good faith join the crusade to “end all racism in American society.”
From this crusading “anti-racist” mentality stems the kind of Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton idiocy that treats the violent dope-dealing gang-banger as less harmful to the black community than the possibility that state troopers might engage in “profiling” to arrest drug traffickers. Which is worse, that a law-abiding black citizen might incur a greater statistical risk of being pulled over on the Jersey Turnpike, or that scores of black kids are gunned down every year on the streets of Newark?
Of course, I’m not running for Senate — a political campaign is not generally a good place to debate such difficult questions — but I hate to see any conservative yield rhetorical ground unnecessarily. Hell’s bells, to any student of de Maistre, the concept of “inherent rights” is itself suspect. If Rand Paul doesn’t watch his step, he’ll lose Paul Gottfried.
UPDATE: Erick Erickson steps up to clarify the facts, and ends by emphasizing the most important fact:
By the way, Rand Paul is kicking the Democrat’s butt.
Funny how the Left plays the race card whenever Democrats are losing. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
UPDATE II: If Melissa Clouthier already finds this argument “freaking annoying,” just wait. Next, the MSM will start playing the game of asking every Republican whether they agree or disagree with Rand Paul, to make him a litmus test, so that anyone who refuses to condemn Paul will be accused of favoring the repeal of civil rights.
Note that this game is never played against Democrats. The MSM didn’t accuse every Democrat who praised Ted Kennedy of being in favor of drowning campaign aides.
UPDATE III: Ta-Nahesi Coates declares that Rand Paul “is too ignorant to be embarrassed.” Paul is an eye surgeon and his father is an obstetrician, but whenever racial politics is debated, you can be sure that the conservative will be accused of ignorance.
Sic semper hoc. Liberals believe that their own politics implies both moral and intellectual superiority, and thus the opponents of liberalism are always stupid and evil. And they have repeated this so often for so long, some people actually believe it.
Andrew Sullivan is inspired to offer an extremely limited defense of Rand Paul, which is about as helpful as you might expect.
UPDATE IV: Donald Douglas weighs in with an arguable assertion: “No doubt, racial equality wasn’t going to happen without the force of federal power.”
Well, (a) we are still a hell of a long way from “racial equality,” as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would be all too happy to inform you, and (b) there is reason to believe that the employment of federal power in this matter has actually harmed the cause of equality.
Thomas Sowell has noted that black Americans made more economic progress in the 25 years before the passage of the Civil Rights Act than they did in the 25 years after its passage. It would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to blame the Civil Rights Act for the world of miseries (e.g., the plague of drugs, crime, fatherlessness, unemployment and educational failure) that have afflicted black Americans since 1964. Nevertheless, we cannot say that federal civil-rights legislation proved to be a magical formula for Progress.
In this context, I’m reminded of my long-ago interview Marilyn Arrington, a leading educator in Atlanta who was in charge of the 1996 Olympic Youth Camp and who had been a SNCC activist during the sit-in era. When I asked her what went wrong in American race relations, Mrs. Arrington’s answer was memorable:
“It seems to me it was around 1965 or ‘66, when Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown and that crowd came in,” she said, referring to militants who captured the leadership of SNCC. “They kicked the white people out of the movement and started talking about ‘black power’ — everything was ‘whitey this’ and ‘whitey that.’ … It was never the same after that.”
The politics of blame, of scapegoating white America, escalated dramatically in the aftermath of passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so that by the time of his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was rejected as too accommodationist by young radicals.
Revolutions have been going off the rails like this ever since Burke entered his famous criticism of the French Revolution. At the time of Burke’s Reflections, Danton was in the forefront of the Revolution. He subsequently supported the purge of the Girondists and advocated dictatorial power for the Committee of Public Safety. And Danton’s radicalism continued unti 1794, when he was sent to the guillotine by his fellow Jacobins, some of whom eventually followed him.
Likewise in Russia, the overthrow of the Czarist regime brought to power the provisional government of Kerensky, subsequently overthrown by the Bolsheviks. Trotsky, whose commanded the Red Army in the Russian civil war, was eventually purged and fled the Soviet Union, only to die at the hands of a Stalinist assassin. Quite nearly the entirety of the original Bolshevik leadership was ultimately executed during Stalin’s purges.
Should we then be surprised that the civil rights revolution went so quickly from “I have a dream” to “Black Power” and “burn, baby, burn”? Or should we be surprised that the self-appointed civil-rights leaders of 2010 are buffoons like Al Sharpton?
No, indeed. Nor is it surprising that any sincere attempt to answer the important question, “Where did we go wrong?” leads to angry accusations of racism. Those who have gained power by playing the race card will deny that we have “gone wrong” at all, even as they decry the problems of black America as evidence of racism — and the pernicious power of racism, of course, is an argument for yet more intervention in the name of civil rights.
Any reasonable, honest and well-informed person must eventually begin to question this pretzel logic. Yet as soon as you begin asking questions, you will be denounced as a racist. Ron Paul isn’t the only one caught in a Catch-22.
