Radley is sad about revelations that Ron Paul–long known as a bit kooky in Texas–had a right-wing news letter back in the day that attacked gays, blacks, and even once praised David Duke. Paul, being a bit of a maverick, won’t grovel before the gods of political correctness and provide much in the way of explanation. Sully also isn’t happy that his new pet is what he’s always been: weird and tolerant of people that are even weirder.
Paul’s candidacy attracted broad support because he unabashedly embraced what the GOP claims to be on fiscal issues—low tax, limited government, pro-federalist—and what the Democrats claim to be on social issues—pro individual freedom and pro-privacy. Paul’s campaign has essentially called both parties on their bullshit, and made them explain the gap between their stated principles and the way they’ve governed. Both sides I think were surprised at how strong he came on. So both sides dismissed him as a nut, and cited the kookiest fringes of libertarianism and dug up the most whacked-out Paul supporters to prove their point. Unfortunately, the quotes pulled from these newsletters will for many only confirm those worst stereotypes of what he represents. The good ideas Paul represents then get sullied by association. The Ann Althouses of the world, for example, are now only more certain that opponents of federal anti-discrimination laws should have to prove that they aren’t racist before being taken seriously.
Well boo hoo. You dance with who brung ya, Radley! You’re not supposed to care about equality, remember?
Socially liberal libertarians like Radley have for years been erecting an imaginary libertarianism where all of the things now secured (or inaugerated) by anti-liberty legislation will somehow persist and thrive without legal protection. Most of these things are not “sell out” issues by liberals who are being inconsistent. They are simply a resolution of conflict in favor of another issue important to liberals, the value of equality. This is why liberals are not betraying any of their principles when they support social programs for the very poor, anti-discrimination laws, sexual harassment laws, prohibitions on private restrictive covenants, and the creation of public schools to give kids a fair shot in life. None of these practices has anything to do with liberty, but liberals believe in a balance of liberty and equality.
In the past, as now, people were concerned primarily with “bread and butter” issues. Who you work with, who you must let into your country club, and how you must classify your employees are real issues for real people. The specific desire to exercise those freedoms to support WASP social leadership (i.e., white racialism) is the reason many Americans, particularly in the South, supported liberty and “states rights” in the past. It wasn’t some spontaneous fluke. It had nothing to do with an abstract libertarian philosophy’s sweeping appeal. They were trying to preserve a specific, existing and sometimes unjust way of life from government interference.
Today libertarians are preaching to a tiny constituency. Most whites have given up the “bread and butter” concerns of yesteryear and accepted the impact of nondiscrimination laws. Most people that care about conservative “liberties” like owning guns and our taxes could care less about abortion or whether some hippy broad can run around topless, even if such may be logically demanded from their appeals to the principles of liberty. Like liberals, conservatives have another important value that they sometimes prioritize above liberty: the preservation of tradition and the social order.
Further, the more fashionable causes on the libertarian side are a disaster and have not caught on beyond the fringe: not too many of us have any direct stake in how the dirtbags of Guantanamo Bay are treated or whether some Mexican drug mule is sentenced to 75 years in the joint for having a donkey-full of cocaine. Even a principled libertarian like Paul had to appeal to a constituency with specific concerns, and the concerns of conservatives in the Eighties and Nineties were things like interference with churches, guns, affirmative action, etc. A “principled” libertarian like Paul, to his credit, didn’t just pick and choose fashionable causes. He embraced the whole kit and kaboodle and that includes all kinds of things that left-leaning libertarians like Radley will find distasteful but more important, and more frustrating to him no doubt, Radley has no real means to restrict these practices or even to condemn them while remaining consistent with his libertarian philosophy. There is absolutely nothing in libertarianism that prevents, forbids, restricts, or even condemns private racism of the kind supported by a David Duke.
Radley is trying to get too much mileage out of libertarianism, and he constantly allows his socially liberal prejudices to fill in the gaps for the numerous areas where libertarianism would allow what our modern world and most of the DC cocktail party circuit considers great evils.
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