First, I think Adam Serwer has really crystallized the basic problem with how con
servatives (and a fair number of over-polite liberals) talk about race.
It seems really weird to give Goldwater all this credit for not being personally racist while championing a cause supported by racists, and say this is the same thing as Kennedy and Johnson being racist but supporting legislation that advanced the cause of black rights. This is part and parcel of thinking of racism in quasi-religious terms, a stain on the soul rather than a matter of actual behavior, and it’s part of why the American conversation on race remains so counterproductive.
When I said a few days ago, “But if we can’t say it’s racist to oppose the de-institutionalization of racism, then we’re pretty much saying that you’re only racist if you wear a white hood,” this is what I meant. If racism is a “stain on the soul,” then almost nobody can be accused of being a racist, because we can’t reliably look into people’s souls. But a racist is as a racist does, and someone who thinks that outlawing racism is not within the powers of a government that enabled and encouraged racism for 400 years does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Second, sane libertarians realize how ridiculous Rand Paul’s views are. Julian Sanchez writes:
Rules for utopia can deal with individual crimes—the mugger and the killer and the vandal—but they stumble in the face of societywide injustice. They tell us the state shouldn’t sanction the brutal enslavement or humiliating legal subordination of a people; they have less to say about what to do once we have. They tell us to respect the sanctity of the property rights that would arise as free people tamed the wilderness in John Locke’s state of nature. They have less to say about the sanctity of property built on generations of slave sweat and blood.
Libertarians need to think harder about how our principles should degrade elegantly, how they can guide us through a fallen world where the live political options seldom afford a full escape from injustice.
Very well said. This reminded me that Robert Nozick, who, next to Ayn Rand, is probably the most influential libertarian philosopher, also acknowledged the problem of historical injustice. On page 153 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, in a footnote, he grants that the “principle of rectification” of past injustices might allow for “the sort of considerations about distributive justice and equality that I argue against.” In other words, because society has never been perfectly libertarian, because wealth and power were gained through oppression and theft even by Nozick’s lights, it might be appropriate for the state to go outside the bounds of libertarian theory in order to mitigate the resulting inequalities. Nozick devotes precious little time and attention to the implications of this concession, operating instead in the world of ideal theory. But the caveat is there nevertheless, and the case of the Civil Rights Act is probably exactly what Nozick had in mind.
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